Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

In opposition to the violent and competitive account of life’s emergence given by Darwinian evolution, symbiosis proposes that we are instead the product of cooperation, interaction and mutual dependence. This vision of life is profoundly ecological and relational, and it extends all the way from the sequences of our DNA to the composition of our b

It matters what time we live in. Not which age, but which present time, the time of our awareness.

What we perceive as borders and conflicts – the things which separate us – often turn out not to be artefacts of the exterior world, but immeasurable gaps in our own conceptions, abilities and tools of discernment. We think we are studying the world – but in reality we are merely making evident the limits of our own thinking, which are embodied in

Right action, in other words, depends not on the pre-existence of right knowledge – a map of the streets or a hierarchy of virtue – but on context, thoughtfulness and care.

People don’t work like computers. Our identities, our thoughts, and our beliefs can’t always be sorted easily into two categories. In the world we live in, we set up two distinct categories – man and woman – that everyone must choose between. But that doesn’t actually reflect the full diversity of the human experience.’

Intelligence, when we perceive it at play in the world, is not a collection of abstract modes: a concatenation of self-awareness, theory of mind, emotional understanding, creativity, reasoning, problem-solving and planning that we can separate and test for under laboratory conditions. These are simply reductive and all-too-human interpretations of

Intelligence is one among many ways of being in the world: it is an interface to it; it makes the world manifest.

We often choose to look the wrong way: not merely in the wrong direction, but with the wrong intention. Our intent – the way we choose to look – informs what we see.

The world is a computer made out of crabs, infinitely entangled at every level, and singing, full-throated, the song of its own becoming. The only way forward is together.