Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

Instead of resolving into order and clarity, ever-closer examination reveals only more, and more splendid, detail and variation.

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.

Right action, in other words, depends not on the pre-existence of right knowledge – a map of the streets or a hierarchy of virtue – but on context, thoughtfulness and care.

‘Life and Reality’, wrote the Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts, ‘are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.’

In this case, art follows life.

‘The Wood Wide Web’.

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.

intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does; it is active, interpersonal and generative, and it manifests when we think and act.

This hierarchical conception of the world has endured 2,000 years, and – despite objections from atheists, biologists and evolutionary theorists alike – remains intact in the popular Western imagination today. It placed Homo sapiens at the top of the ladder, above animals; and plants near the bottom, just above rocks. Medieval Christianity added fu