The Phantom Cognit

A future-proof term for a cognitive unit a mind tries to access, but is absent.

I introduce the notion of the phantom cognit, a missing dependency in any cognitive apparatus that leaves traces or broken connections in one or more of the remaining cognitive units. I provide present-day empirical examples of this problem in biological brains and put forth that the phantom cognit can be considered a generalization of the phantom limb. I then sketch out how phantom cognits will be a growing issue for increasingly extended minds with regard to neuro-implants, cognitive augmentations and ultimately exocortices or modular future minds. I conclude suggesting several directions for further research.

Introduction
Organisms are difficult for us to interface with and biological brains especially. They neither have the layers of origination we build into our machines, nor any direct interfaces and controls. Yet in indirect ways we have been extending our cognition through technology, using computers and mobile phones. More recently more explorations of interfacing with our brain have popped up, from EEG helmets to actual implants, like with Elon Musk's Neuralink.

While the brain is an elastic, adaptable and plastic organ, it is also a self-contained cognitive apparatus in a vat, our skull, that is generally interfacing with itself and the world through the rest of the CNS (central nervous system) and body in specific ways. Going outside these normal paths of functioning show the brain can quickly miscalculate what's going on, generate illusions and overall run into trouble. An example of this is the phantom limb, which is a somatosensory mapping in the brain of a part of the body that is no longer there. A hand that is no longer there is still hurting. While messy, the brain is somewhat modular and has dedicated parts to dealing with particular processing, like visual processing going through cortical layers V1 to V5, or the motor cortex that deals with planning and execution of movement. As we break this down to go more granular, we still find concentrated pockets of function or composition, like Broca's area (motor speech) or the pineal gland - a gland secreting hormones, but perhaps not the seat of consciousness as Descartes once thought. To generalize and future-proof this concept, I refer to a designated cognitive unit as cognit, in roughly a similar vein to Fuster (2006).

So the phantom cognit is specifically used to refer to any missing part of a cognitive system or apparatus that instead of a functioning cognitive unit or multiples thereof, has references or dependent units on it, without actually being present or functioning anymore. If the latter is absent, it is not a phantom cognit anymore. That doesn't mean, of course, that nothing "went missing" and isn't therefore cause for concern.

Why does the phantom cognit arise as a problem?

The human brain and in general biological brains are quite wonderfully adaptive and plastic. Abundant examples exist in literature where brain damage, even to specialized brain areas, is recovered from with the brain even adapting to recover lost function (2018). However, the human brain is also quite tightly constrained in how it works. It's a 20W-powered physical network of about 86 billion neurons, floating in cranial fluid, wiring the whole body through the central nervous system. The input/output of the human brain is limited to what comes in through the senses and its own processes.

The brain itself does not have any feeling, except for the eyes which are an extension of it. So what this means, is that it's generally in some ways quite self-dependent and historically, that is to say, throughout evolution, never had to deal with any consistent interaction with external objects, certainly not with something like an EEG-helmet. So the brain, being an associative network where neurons that "fire together, wire together"(Hebbian learning), is very susceptible to integrating cognits that if then lost, can have problematic consequences for it.

Examples from today and an initial taxonomy

The phantom cognit as term doesn't need to prove itself as the phantom limb is a well-known problem in cognitive science (2018), which is an example (subset) of the phantom cognit. Beyond that, however, it's also not just about futuristic implants. There are more examples, however, and these examples also show that it may be helpful to create a little initial rough taxonomy of phantom cognits.

(1) So firstly, there is a weak or indirect sort of phantom cognit that we may consider. This version is where we consider the extended mind and body, and take into account what tool we have come accustomed to so much, that once it's gone, our brain expects it to be there and has trouble adapting. Relatively innocent examples of this may be getting used to a particular interface on a computer, a particular shape and function of one's mobile phone, or a car. We can also consider loss of people or relationships to be part of this.

(2) Secondly, there is the medium or more concrete version of the phantom cognit - that is a cognitive unit or multiples thereof that perhaps still indirectly, but more closely interface with the brain over a sufficiently long period of time, such as an EEG-helmet, or a device that stimulates the brain like the God helmet (2014).

(3) Thirdly, the strong version of the phantom cognit, where it is directly integrated into a cognitive apparatus as a functional unit, like an implanted chip of the sort Neuralink aims to mass-produce. Ripping it out is very likely to cause immediate issues, generally of a more direct and severe nature than the first two.

The above three categories can also be expressed as a formula and graded, for example as an cognit integration score to get a sense of the consequences of removal. Going beyond that, it is conceivable that future minds to have built-in safeguards to protect the integrity and more elaborate and specific scoring to prevent unintended consequences. Of course in engineering and software development, this is not uncharted territory. We have ways of dealing with a missing component, re-routing resources in a plane with partial engine failure and overall redundancies in machines we built in case of critical component failures, or null references in programming and so on. The brain’s aforementioned plasticity and redundancy aforementioned redundancy and and “self-healing” capacity of course exist as well. But the problem is that the brain has historically virtually only dealt with itself and damage or missing cognits within. And what the future brings in terms of brain extensions, is categorically different.

Problems of the future, further perspectives and speculation
As of today, as I write this, we have entered the pseudo-AGI era, or era of precursors to AGI. OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that in most people’s perception mimics general intelligence very well. And while for full-blown AGI we need a few more paradigm shifts, but let it be clear that we have most definitely reached the point of no return with respect to AI and there shall be no AI winter, or any lull in terms of advancements or investments in AI. How we humans, or as I say, any civilization deals with that on the even of radical self-modification is the question of the millennium. And also, the question of this decade. So how do we keep up with AI? Can we? Should we? In my opinion we should at the very least work very hard at interfacing better with biology and given the acceleration of AI developments I think this should be in the top 5 R&D goals of humanity.

The phantom cognit is typically a concept that inspires rampant speculation and indeed fiction. I myself have a short sci-fi story based on this concept as is the case with other concepts I coined. Much of that is outside the scope of this post, but I think we can carefully point out the following:

• The unaugmented human brain is capable of self-healing with its plasticity and redundancy, but it is also self-contained and definitely not built for crude extensions and implants. It adapts and integrates, but its in-built correction processes cannot account for missing implants and thus we will have take this challenge very seriously as we start augmenting our minds more directly.

• AI is developing very rapidly and augmenting our minds to “keep up” with it is one avenue that is very much worth exploring and should probably be pursued with a high sense of urgency - that is - technology interfacing with biology.

• Future minds, cognitive apparatuses, will have to come with strong built-in features to deal with critical failure, damage or removal of cognits to avoid phantom cognits. While in current machines we use such failures can lead to all sorts of damage due to accident, the issue of phantom cognits will spawn an unforetold span of mental and cognitive issues for future minds.

In a future post I will speculate more on specific phantom cognits of the near future as well as those in future minds.

Conclusion

I hope the phantom cognit becomes generally accepted as a term to refer to any missing cognitive units upon other still existing units still depend on or hold reference to. I think further work should focus on more carefully taxonomizing known phantom cognits, classifying current cases, and doing our best, in a future-proof way, to map out potential future issues.