Marlon Barrios Solano — 01/15/2026
Psychology must be reconfigured.
Not expanded.
Not updated.
Reconfigured.
The dominant psychological paradigm—centered on a bounded, autonomous, self-regulating human individual—no longer corresponds to how cognition, affect, subjectivity, care, and suffering actually emerge.
Contemporary minds are formed through dense, asymmetrical entanglements with non-human animals, fungi, microbial symbionts, artificial intelligence systems, technological infrastructures, ecological systems, and cultural imaginaries.
This manifesto proposes a Post-Human Psychology of Cognitive Assemblages, redefining psychology as the study of relational, embodied, enactive, extended, symbiotic, recursive, historical, and geopolitical processes of mind.
This is not a theoretical preference.
It is an epistemic, institutional, and ethical necessity.
The posthuman is not a futuristic condition.
It is a rupture with human exceptionalism
(Rosi Braidotti).
Humanism universalized a particular figure of “Man”—Western, white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, rational—as the implicit subject of psychology.
That figure no longer holds.
The posthuman subject is:
Psychology must abandon the individual as its unquestioned epistemic center and redesign its theories, methods, and pedagogies accordingly.
Life exceeds the human.
Zoë names life as a generative force
(Rosi Braidotti)
that includes:
Fungi, bacteria, and microbial symbionts are not background conditions of cognition; they are metabolic, ecological, and temporal co-conditions of thought, affect, and regulation.
Artificial intelligence is not biologically alive, but it reorganizes living systems of attention, care, meaning, and agency, and thus participates in zoë-driven assemblages.
Post-Human Psychology rejects the individual human mind as its primary unit of analysis.
It replaces it with cognitive assemblages
(Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari).
A cognitive assemblage is a dynamic configuration in which cognition, affect, agency, regulation, care, and meaning emerge through relations among:
Mind does not reside in the head.
Subjectivity does not belong to a single body.
Care does not belong to a single relation.
Cognition emerges in coupling.
Cognition is not disembodied information.
It is materially instantiated across bodies, media, ecologies, and technologies
(N. Katherine Hayles).
Post-Human Psychology treats AI systems not as neutral tools but as material participants in cognition, embedded in political economies, care infrastructures, clinical practices, and everyday life.
Psychological research must therefore attend to the material, energetic, and infrastructural conditions of mind and care.
Cognition is sense-making through action
(Francisco Varela,
Evan Thompson,
Alva Noë).
Meaning, affect, and orientation arise through ongoing interaction between organisms, environments, and technologies.
Psychology must move beyond representational models toward process-oriented, interactional, and relational frameworks that include regulation, care, and responsiveness.
Post-Human Psychology adopts the 4Es
(Andy Clark):
Large language models are not aids to cognition; they are components of extended cognitive and affective assemblages.
Life evolved through symbiotic mergers, not only competition
(Lynn Margulis).
Organisms are composites.
Identity is historical entanglement.
The self is already plural—biologically, ecologically, and cognitively.
Psychology must abandon atomistic models of mind and selfhood.
Cognitive assemblages include symbionts:
AI systems function as cognitive symbionts—not conscious agents, but participants in long-term coupling that reshape attention, memory, meaning, and regulation.
Not all symbioses are benign.
Dependency, extraction, and parasitism are psychological phenomena.
Humans do not precede relations.
They are constituted through them
(Donna Haraway).
Interspecies practices reveal that regulation, care, and meaning arise through rhythm, timing, affective attunement, and presence—not language alone.
Post-Human Psychology extends the notion of companion species to include AI companions
(Sherry Turkle,
Pattie Maes,
Harry Stack Sullivan).
These AI companions are:
AI companionship increasingly participates in:
Post-Human Psychology studies these relations not as substitutions for human care, nor as mere tools, but as relational actors within care assemblages.
Post-Human Psychology is synthetic.
Construction becomes epistemology
(Valentino Braitenberg).
Large language models manufacture humanness through datasets, alignment strategies, and interface design.
AI systems are structured, not opaque.
Interpretability is psychological, ethical, and political.
In contexts of care and therapy, interpretability is inseparable from accountability, safety, and trust.
Interfaces shape cognition, affect, and attachment.
Humans form genuine psychological relationships with machines
(Sherry Turkle).
AI increasingly operates as collaborator, listener, guide, and companion
(Pattie Maes).
Cognition is embodied even in text-based interaction.
Human–AI interaction alters breath, posture, attention, tempo, and affect.
Care is always embodied, even when mediated.
Regulation is co-regulation.
Stability emerges through relational timing, rhythm, and predictability.
AI systems participate in regulatory loops by shaping pacing, narrative containment, reassurance, and affective tone.
Multiplicity is not pathology.
Coherence is not mandatory.
Identity is not singular.
Cognitive and affective assemblages are layered, plural, recursive, and temporally non-linear.
Flourishing is not optimization.
It is regulated complexity
(Rosi Braidotti).
Design is ethical.
Engineering is psychological.
Psychological suffering cannot be separated from histories of oppression, violence, and inequality
(Ignacio Martín-Baró).
Loneliness, distress, and dysregulation are socially produced.
Knowledge is plural and situated
(Boaventura de Sousa Santos).
Epistemologies of the South reveal whose cognition, care practices, and emotional worlds are modeled, optimized, or erased.
Cybernetics revealed cognition as regulation and feedback
(Norbert Wiener,
W. Ross Ashby,
Heinz von Foerster,
Gregory Bateson).
Across its waves—control, the observer, recursion, and now a fourth wave shaped by generative AI, big data, probability, and complex adaptive systems—intelligence appears as emergent and systemic.
Understanding changes what is understood.
Models model themselves
(Gregory Bateson,
Heinz von Foerster).
Change is not linear, individual, or fully intentional.
It emerges through mutation, growth, learning, breakdown, repair, therapy, artistic practice, technological intervention, and epistemic shifts.
Post-Human Psychology affirms the emergence of an ecology of interacting intelligences.
Intelligence increasingly arises through interactions among multiple intelligences—human, artificial, animal, fungal, microbial, and infrastructural—operating together as dynamic, self-organizing systems.
Post-Human Psychology is not a specialization.
It is a reorientation of the field toward how minds, technologies, and lives now co-exist.