Lyotard’s ‘Brain’, and/or the Mathematical Universe

Abstract

This article provides a reading of Jean-François Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable.” It explores the speculative narrative on the fate of human consciousness as the Sun dies in conjunction with a reading of contemporary artificial intelligence and the hypothesis of a mathematical universe. The analysis draws upon Lyotard’s layered concept of the ‘inhuman’, alongside accounts from engineer James Lovelock and physicist Max Tegmark, to interrogate the futures of intelligence and consciousness beyond anthropocentric frameworks. In conclusion, Lyotard’s Fable, benefiting from updated accounts of what he refers to as “all the research in progress” in contemporary science and technology, retains valuable insights; pre-inscribing an inevitable disinheritance of the Human, and/or the Brain’s mathematical array. Lyotard’s Fable potentially reveals itself an expression of an already existing mathematical function.