Echoes of the Nonhuman: Mimicry, Embodiment, and Becoming
Echoes of the Nonhuman: Mimicry, Embodiment, and Becoming examines mimicry as a speculative practice of empathy and care across humans, nonhumans, and machines. Beginning with a playful honking exchange with geese, the talk traces how imperfect echoes can spark connection without collapsing difference. Drawing on philosophy, animal consciousness research, and posthumanist theory, it considers octopuses, AI, and digital mediation as cases where meaning slips and misrecognition shapes relation. Rather than seeking certainty, mimicry is framed as “absurdity as offering”—a gesture of witnessing that acknowledges unknowability, resists translation, and points toward becoming with.
Talk given at Tufts Arts and Society: Dialogues, 2025
A goose moves. I mimic. I ask a machine to mimic me mimicking a goose. If my spine unspooled and latched onto a different rhythm, could my muscles remember an act never committed to flesh? Or will I always remain unfinished— a distortion of the animal I observe, and the machine that reflects me?
In Simulacra Goose, I move. The goose moves. AI moves. We mimic, misinterpret—and in that something emerges: a changed echo.
It began in the Fenway Gardens, where I mimicked the geese, honking—something vaguely goose-like—until they honked back. Mimicry sparked a shared moment between two species shaped by the same city. Maybe it wasn’t understanding—just shared absurdity: two species unsure of meaning, but aware something was trying to happen. Maybe that was the point: absurdity as offering. I’m exploring mimicry as an imperfect practice of empathy—witnessing that resists sameness, stretching our ability to notice across difference, and generating connection in a world that often misreads and misunderstands.
This isn’t a search for certainty—it’s an invitation to stay inside the questions.
Understanding is slippery. Even across human cultures, meaning frays. A gesture can be misread, even by those close to us.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said: If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. Not because the lion lacks language, but because his words are rooted in a lifeworld entirely unlike ours (Wittgenstein 1953).
The same is true—maybe more so—with the octopus. Its neurons are distributed across its limbs. Its arms can taste, decide, and respond independently of its brain (Godfrey-Smith 2016; Scientific American 2008). We will never know what it feels like to experience the world in this way (Godfrey-Smith 2016).
So, we must approach with caution. Not to decode or define, but to witness—without collapsing their way of being into ours. So when we ask AI to translate whale song, or octopus color shifts, or goose honks— Are we listening—or reshaping them to fit us?
I try not to project meaning onto the octopus— I sit beside it, in the murky waters of mutual unknowability. Maybe we can’t fully understand each other. But it sees me. Witnessing– noticing– is a starting point.
AI is an uninvited guest in the archive of embodiment. In its mistranslations, it reflects the patterns we’ve trained it on— our values, our expectations.
John Searle asks: If someone can match symbols from one language to symbols from another, do they actually understand the language (Searle 1980)?
AI works the same way. It may sound right—but that doesn’t mean it understands (Searle 1980). Fluent mimicry is not comprehension. But sometimes, mimicry makes us feel seen.
I use mimicry to understand the world around me—its rhythms, intentions, and logic. And I’m interested in how AI– something that already is entangled in so many of our systems– mimics me in return. What decisions does it make, and what does it ignore—and why? When the system echoes me back, what does that reveal about the data that trained it, and the structures that govern it?
In a lot of ways, I mimic to understand. And in that mirrored gesture, I find the questions worth asking.
I know what it feels like to be misread. As someone on the autism spectrum, I’ve learned to understand others from the bottom up— reading the shift of an eyebrow, the pauses between words. I am often filtered through frameworks that were never built for me. I don’t see more—just differently.
Maybe that’s why my digital trace– even algorithmic– sometimes feels more accurate than how I’m perceived in person. Our digital performances and mediated modes of being are reshaping empathy—sometimes expanding, sometimes distorting.
But with intention, maybe the digital becomes a place to stretch our ways of caring. a place to learn how to become with: not just each other, but the tools we create and the beings we affect (Haraway 2008).
And for me, that intention isn’t abstract—it’s how I navigate a world not built for me.
But I know what these systems are built on: extraction, exclusion, the flattening of difference. I don’t trust them to tell the truth—but sometimes, they’re the only tools I have. So I use them not to find answers, but to ask better questions.
Some days I don’t know if I’m translating the world or just echoing it. I watch geese and machines because their logic feels clearer than human intention.
But machines don’t just reflect—they shape. AI isn’t just around us—it’s beneath us. Already embedded in infrastructure, it reroutes traffic, generates captions, follows us. It’s difficult– nearly impossible– to opt out. So instead of running, I ask: how can we meet it with curiosity, caution, and care?
Like all our technology, AI begins with the earth—extraction, exploitation, combustion (Crawford 2021). These systems run on invisible labor and uneven harm (Crawford 2021). If this sounds like a facile formula, it’s not because the system is.
Care lives in contradiction—shaped by systems and hierarchies. Mimicry isn’t neutral. And we’re all entangled in imperfect systems. Even failed attempts at understanding reshape us.
Even if I don’t fully understand them— the geese in Fenway, the people around me— I still shape their world. To be in relation is to carry responsibility. Even temporary entanglement leaves a trace.
We owe something to the ones we brush against. If AI-generated whale song changes how whales respond, when is it still mimicry? If we only grant standing to what mimics us— what does that say about our compassion (Singer 1975)?
Donna Haraway reminds us: we become with. We become through relation (Haraway 2008).
I wasn’t trying to become a goose—though I’m still curious how that might work. I was trying to be heard—and somehow, I was. They didn’t answer because I was convincing, but because I was there. Mimicry might not be the goal. But it might be the first gesture. A speculative act. A form of care.
Through mimicry, we build bridges— not because we can replicate another perfectly, but because trying reminds us we’re not alone. The goose doesn’t need to understand me. But something matters in the effort. In the misreading, the failed translation. the echo that reaches back.
Not to become the same, but to become with.
References
Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Scientific American. “The Mind of an Octopus.” Scientific American, May 1, 2008. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/.
Searle, John. “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980): 417–457.
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: New York Review, 1975.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1953.
Scientific American. “The Mind of an Octopus.” Scientific American, May 1, 2008. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/.
