Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

Yet, as we shall see, there are in fact many ways of doing intelligence, because intelligence is an active process, not just a mental capacity. By rethinking intelligence, and the forms in which it appears in other beings, we will begin to break down some of the barriers and false hierarchies that separate us from other species and the world. In do

Intra-action is not interaction, where two phenomena or bodies, already in existence, act on one another. Rather, it is the process of becoming-phenomena and becoming-bodies, which takes place when the two touch one another.

The achievement of The Overstory is to make these revelations meaningful at human scale, building the connections between us and the trees around us. Powers uses the scale of arboreal life – its extent in time, as well as its size – to tell a new kind of epic story: multi-generational, planetary-scale and ecological, in the sense of deeply intertwi

Our very survival depends upon our ability to make a new compact with the more-than-human world, one which views the intelligence, the innate being, of all things – animal, vegetable and machine – not as another indication of our own superiority, but as an intimation of our ultimate interdependence, and as an urgent call to humility and care.

I was left with the sense that while I would never really understand quantum physics, I could be certain of its truth and existence, and that its truth subsisted in this relationship: between the macro and the micro, the world and the subject, the story and the storyteller, the electron and its interference pattern.

A swarm of bees, a colony of ants and a collection of neurons: three independently evolved assemblages which each constitute a thinking machine. This is convergent evolution at work again, the flowering of analogous but radically different ways of thinking and doing, all over the thicket of life.

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.

If our inability to tell meaningful, actionable stories about our changing planet is part of the problem, then we need to rethink the tools we use to make culture itself.

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.