We are anthropos, and we have no other means of addressing these worlds than through our own. But if we can consciously bear in mind the fact of our difference, if we can recognize our own limited perspective while not enforcing it upon others, these things need not be a barrier to accessing and acting on the basis of shared interests and

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.

Turing wrote, ‘Machines take me by surprise with great frequency’, usually because he had misunderstood their function, or calculated something wrongly. In such cases, he wondered, was the surprise ‘due to some creative mental act on my part’ – or did it ‘reflect credit on the machine’? Turing felt that this objection was a dead end as it led back

‘Una apis, nulla apis’ – ‘one bee is no bee’.

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

Ecology is not merely the study of where we find ourselves, but of everything which surrounds us and allows us to live.

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

To be unknowing requires such systems to be in constant dialogue with the rest of the world, and to be prepared, as the best science has always been, to revise and rewrite themselves based on their errors.

And this is our problem. We humans live in such a narrow slice of time and space that we are incapable of thinking of, or thinking at, the pace and scale of the world, the changes we have wrought in it, and the changes we will have to make to survive them. Our given minds are insufficient to the task – but we do have tools to hand, technology among