does.” Parreno’s piece is an intuitive assembly of our experience of “life” through embodied, perspectival engagement. Our consciousness is electrically (cybernetically) enmeshed, yet we don’t respond as if this human-generated set of elegant simulations had its own intelligence. The artistic use of cybernetic beings also reminds us that consciousness itself is not just “in here.” It is streaming in and out, harmonizing those sensory, scintillating signals. Mind happens well outside the limits of the cranium (and its simulacrum, the “motherboard”). In Mary Catherine Bateson’s paraphrase of her father Gregory’s second-order cybernetics, mind is material “not necessarily defined by a boundary such as an envelope of skin.”°! Parreno pairs the simulations of art with the simulations of mathematics to force the Wiener-like point that any such model is not, by itself, just like life. Models are just that—parts of signaling systems constituting “intelligence” only when their creaturely counterparts engage them in lively meaning making. Contemporary AI has talked itself into a corner by instrumentalizing and particularizing tasks and subroutines, confusing these drills with actual wisdom. The brief cultural history offered here reminds us that views of data as intelligence, digital nets as “neural,” or isolated individuals as units of life, were alien even to Conway’s brute simulation. We can stigmatize the stubborn arrogance of current AI as “right cybernetics,” the path that led to current automated weapons systems, Uber’s ill-disguised hostility to human workers, and the capitalist dreams of Google. Now we must turn back to left cybernetics—theoretical biologists and anthropologists engaged with a trans-species understanding of intelligent systems. Gregory Bateson’s observation that corporations merely simulate “aggregates of parts of persons,” with profit-maximizing decisions cut off from “wider and wiser parts of the mind,” has never been more timely.~” The cybernet