Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

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.

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.

Crucially, an organism creates its own umwelt, but also continually reshapes it in its encounter with the world. In this way, the concept of umwelt asserts both the individuality of every organism and the inseparability of its mind from the world. Everything is unique and entangled. Of course, in a more-than-human world, it’s not only organisms whi

To declare solidarity with the more-than-human world means to acknowledge the radical differences which exist between ourselves and other beings, while insisting on the possibility of mutual aid, care and growth. We share a world, and we imagine better worlds, together.

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

The very existence of other worlds, of numerous overlapping worlds in which many kinds of things and many ways of seeing and being are possible, should thrill us. Other worlds are not only possible, they are already present. The acknowledgement of multiple other worlds, the worlds of others, is key to disentangling ourselves from our greatest socia

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

What is required of us is to be open to changing our minds.

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