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Autore principale: Bishop, Graham L.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08927
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author Bishop, Graham L.
author_facet Bishop, Graham L.
contents Current bioacoustic AI systems achieve impressive cross-species performance by processing animal communication through transformer architectures, foundation model paradigms, and other computational approaches. However, these approaches overlook a fundamental question: what happens when one form of recursive cognition--AI systems with their attention mechanisms, iterative processing, and feedback loops--encounters the recursive communicative processes of other species? Drawing on philosopher Yuk Hui's work on recursivity and contingency, I argue that AI systems are not neutral pattern detectors but recursive cognitive agents whose own information processing may systematically obscure or distort other species' communicative structures. This creates a double contingency problem: each species' communication emerges through contingent ecological and evolutionary conditions, while AI systems process these signals through their own contingent architectural and training conditions. I propose that addressing this challenge requires reconceptualizing bioacoustic AI from universal pattern recognition toward diplomatic encounter between different forms of recursive cognition, with implications for model design, evaluation frameworks, and research methodologies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_08927
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Double Contingency Problem: AI Recursion and the Limits of Interspecies Understanding
Bishop, Graham L.
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Current bioacoustic AI systems achieve impressive cross-species performance by processing animal communication through transformer architectures, foundation model paradigms, and other computational approaches. However, these approaches overlook a fundamental question: what happens when one form of recursive cognition--AI systems with their attention mechanisms, iterative processing, and feedback loops--encounters the recursive communicative processes of other species? Drawing on philosopher Yuk Hui's work on recursivity and contingency, I argue that AI systems are not neutral pattern detectors but recursive cognitive agents whose own information processing may systematically obscure or distort other species' communicative structures. This creates a double contingency problem: each species' communication emerges through contingent ecological and evolutionary conditions, while AI systems process these signals through their own contingent architectural and training conditions. I propose that addressing this challenge requires reconceptualizing bioacoustic AI from universal pattern recognition toward diplomatic encounter between different forms of recursive cognition, with implications for model design, evaluation frameworks, and research methodologies.
title The Double Contingency Problem: AI Recursion and the Limits of Interspecies Understanding
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08927