‘Ways of Being’: Humans aren’t the smartest among earth’s diverse intelligences
The ways we judge other creatures’ abilities, from putting apes and elephants in front of mirrors to see if they recognize themselves to giving them tools to open doors or find food. It turns out that most of these methods are deeply flawed.
MARC BEKOFF: One of the most original, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking books I’ve seen in a while is called Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle, and I’m thrilled he could answer a few questions about his landmark book…
MB: Why did you write Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines?
JB: The definition of intelligence we have used for so long—that is, “what humans do”—is woefully insufficient and largely incorrect, particularly when conceptualized and deployed by powerful and rapacious corporations, whose profit motives and lack of care for humanity and the rest of the planet are woven into the code they write. However, in revealing to us that other, non-human kinds of intelligence are possible, AI opens the door to a re-evaluation and re-imagining of what intelligence is—something more-than-human, and something that doesn’t just happen in our heads, but is a quality of our relations with one another, perhaps even an emergent quality of life itself…
MB: What are some of the topics you weave into your book, and what are some of your major messages?
JB: I realized quite early on in researching and writing the book that “intelligence” as we usually think of it is not always a useful way of framing how we should relate to one another and the world, but it’s important to understand how we’ve always done that. The history of how we evaluate the abilities of others is key here, so I look at the ways we judge other creatures’ abilities, from putting apes and elephants in front of mirrors to see if they recognize themselves to giving them tools to open doors or find food. It turns out that most of these methods are deeply flawed — indeed, the abilities they supposedly test for vary widely across human cultures too — but they are revealing.
For example, gibbons were long considered to be less intelligent than other apes because, in experiments, they refused to use sticks to pick up food or lift cups under which snacks were hidden. But it was eventually realized that gibbons simply see and experience the world differently because they mostly live in the trees: Their long fingers are not adapted to picking things up off the ground, and they pick their tools from above their heads. Gibbons are intelligent in all kinds of ways, but their intelligence differs because it is embodied: It reflects the pattern of their life, and the pattern of their bodies, just as ours does and that of all other beings.
Other intelligences differ in much greater ways. Slime molds, for example—strange, unicellular critters somewhere between fungi and amoebae—can solve complex mathematical problems far quicker and more efficiently than either humans or our most advanced supercomputers. And we don’t really know how they do it, and perhaps we can learn, but we can also recognize this as intelligence and learn from it how to better relate to other beings when we see them as having their own agency, intelligence, and ways of being in the world.
It turns out that most of our categories and processes for recognizing agency and intelligence in other creatures, as well as the hierarchies of species and capabilities we’ve constructed, are fundamentally flawed and damaging to our mutual understanding and ability to flourish. If we recognize this, we can start to do things differently. SOURCE…
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