Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

This is intra-action at work again: it combines a change in vision with a change in being.

Concerned as we are with how to think and understand the life of beings which are radically different to our own, and how to rethink ourselves in the process, we might see undecidability not as a barrier to understanding, but as a sign, a hint, a truffle-scent, that something interesting, even useful, is nearby.

Kropotkin’s insistence on solidarity is critical to understanding that to speak of animal politics is not to indulge in anthropomorphism – the attribution of human terms and qualities to non-humans – nor is it a misrepresentation of instinctual, ‘natural kinship’ behaviours. Rather, it is the full acknowledgement that we share a world. This world i

It’s precisely this becoming-together of diverse cosmologies, legal structures and even technologies which has the most chance of generating new frameworks for justice, equality and ecological flourishing. Yet those of us who live in so-called Enlightenment culture and within histories of domination and cultural imperialism often lack a willingness

When we speak, we take in the atmosphere and expel it again; we ingest the world and make it resonate. By speaking, we partake in the world, and the world partakes of us. This is true, also, of other forms of speech: the cry of birds, the scratching of crickets, the wind in the trees, the rumble of stone. Speech exists between bodies and beings; it

We need the mental models provided by our technology, the words we make up for its concepts and metaphors, in order to describe and properly understand that analogous processes are already at play in the more-than-human world.

Perhaps the issue with both artificial intelligence and the Cybernetic Factory is that we have been trying to entrap a brain within the machine, when the real brain – the oracle – is outside. The oracle is the world. We’ve got everything inside out. We think all the activity is on the inside – when we stick electrodes into the brains of chimps and

We mistake our immediate perceptions for the world-as-it-is – but really, our conscious awareness is a moment-by-moment model, a constant process of re-appraisal and re-integration with the world as it presents itself to us. In this way, our internal model of the world, our consciousness, shapes the world in the same way and just as powerfully as a

No wonder we keep turning again to chance-producing tools – dice, cards, roulette wheels, astrology and the I Ching – in order to let off steam, get out of our own heads and perhaps provide alternative narratives to a sterile, decomplexified, abstract world, one created apparently and occasionally for our benefit, but in actuality to stupefy us, ex

And crucially, randomness is something which we can engineer ourselves – just as John Cage did by introducing chance into his compositions – both as a driver of our own ongoing evolution and to increase our awareness of and engagement with this more-than-human world.