Susan Stepney. Engineering Persuadable Matter: A Comment on Armstrong’s ‘Life, Mind and Matter’. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 14(3):33-42, 2025.
Rachel Armstrong (2024) advocates for a new approach to ‘agential chemistry’, a form of ‘new materialism’ that allows matter to take an active role. Here I comment on some of these ideas through a computational lens: the consequences if agential chemistry can perform computation to advance its own agenda; how it might provide the structure and dynamics needed for computation, and the metadynamics for open ended systems; and how it opens the possibility of a new technological discipline of engineering ‘persuadable’ agential matter.
While searching for an image to use to spice up this post, I came across an interesting Medium piece that forms a nice overview of some of the issues, from a neural AI perspective. And has the pretty image I use above (click to embiggen).