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

by James Bridle

Overview

Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos.

What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings— beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence. But rather than a friend or companion, AI increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us.

At the same time, we’re only just becoming aware of the other intelligences that have been with us all along, even if we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others—the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us—are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we’ve built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics to live better and more equitably with one another and the nonhuman world?

The artist and maverick thinker James Bridle draws on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange, and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being that make up the world, and that are essential for our survival.

Includes illustrations

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374601119
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	676,480
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

James Bridle is a writer and an artist. Their writing on art, politics, culture, and technology has appeared in magazines and newspapers including The Guardian, The Observer, Wired, The Atlantic, the New Statesman, frieze, Domus, and ICON. New Dark Age, their book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published in 2018 and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2019, they wrote and presented New Ways of Seeing, a four-part series for BBC Radio 4. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions including the V&A, Whitechapel Gallery, the Barbican, Hayward Gallery, and the Serpentine and have been exhibited worldwide and on the internet.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Introduction: More Than Human 1

1 Thinking Otherwise 21

2 Wood Wide Webs 59

3 The Thicket of Life 84

4 Seeing Like a Planet 113

5 Talking to Strangers 140

6 Non-Binary Machines 174

7 Getting Random 216

8 Solidarity 250

9 The Internet of Animals 282

Conclusion: Down on the Metal Farm 308

Notes 313

Bibliography 349

Acknowledgements 353

Index 355

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2022

A human-centric notion of intelligence takes the backseat in this fascinating survey from artist Bridle (New Dark Age). Intelligence, he writes, “is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes.” To that end, he notes that plants have the “ability... to remember” and self-driving cars exhibit knowledge with their neural networks and learning patterns. Indeed, one of the author’s key insights is the way momentous advances in technology can lead to a better understanding of the “more-than-human world.” In a prime example, the rise of the internet and the corresponding notion of network theory made possible the discovery of how such networks operate “in the real world,” namely in the symbiotic relationships that connect fungi and plant roots in the forest. Bridle makes a solid case for his argument that “everything is intelligent” and that all life on Earth is interconnected, and his notion that intelligence is “one among many ways of being in the world” is well reasoned and convincing. This enlightening account will give readers a new perspective on their place in the world. Agent: Antony Topping, Greene & Heaton (U.K.). (June)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2022-03-30
How intelligence works beyond the human world and why it matters.

Bridle, an artist and philosopher with a keen interest in the impact of technology on contemporary life, explores the ways in which a broader and more accurate understanding of rationality must force us to reevaluate assumptions about the preeminence of humanity. In his survey of the intelligence of plants, animals, and artificial intelligence, he synthesizes an impressive range of contemporary scientific research while also drawing on Indigenous and non-Western ways of knowing that have long recognized the significance of nonhuman modes of thinking. Bridle champions a philosophical reorientation that would dislodge anthropocentrism in favor of an ethic of relationality, which encourages a responsibility to the teeming subjectivity of our environments. This is an accessible but also technically precise book, and it makes a remarkably compelling case for the universality of reason, the benefits to be reaped by acknowledging it, and the urgent need to do so given the reality of looming ecological collapse. “By expanding our definition of intelligence, and the chorus of minds which manifest it,” writes the author, “we might allow our own intelligence to flower into new forms and new emergent ways of being and relating. The admittance of general, universal, active intelligence is a necessary part of our vital re-entanglement with the more-than-human world.” Among the most revelatory of the chapters are those in which Bridle describes the intelligence of animals such as octopuses, baboons, and bees—and, even more startlingly, of various plants, whose sophisticated communication networks and mnemonic abilities have just begun to be fathomed by scientists. (For further reading on plant intelligence and connection, check out Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.) Intriguingly, Bridle also argues for the personhood of AI technologies and points to distributed computer networks as models for a more relational, egalitarian politics.

A provocative, profoundly insightful consideration of forms of reason and their relevance to our shared future.

Kirkus Reviews

"The ideas in this book are so big, so fascinating and yes, so foreign, you are going to need people to talk to about them . . . This book is going to stretch you . . . Bridle has created a new way of thinking about our world, about being . . . Please read this important book. Read it twice. Talk about it. Tell everyone you know.” —Brenna Maloney, The Washington Post

"Spanning millenniums, continents and academic disciplines, the scope of Bridle’s curiosity and comprehension is immense, and the possibilities of how other intelligences might augment or complement our own are exhilarating to consider . . . There is something hopeful and even heartening in their faith that our current disastrous course might be shifted not only by new policies and technologies but also—and more fundamentally—by the power of new ideas." —Stefan Merrill Block, New York Times Book Review

"Bridle is a clear, artful writer and a sweeping thinker . . . [A] hopeful book, almost an antidote. It imagines technology not as something separate and menacing, but as part of a grand unfolding—an 'efflorescence', to use Bridle's word—along an evolutionary continuum of human and 'more-than-human' ways of being in the world." —Peter Christie, Post Magazine

“In making clear the patience, imagination and humility required to better know and protect other forms of intelligence on Earth, [Bridle] has made an admirable contribution to the dawning interspecies age.”
—The Economist

"[A] fascinating survey . . . Bridle makes a solid case for his argument that 'everything is intelligent' and that all life on Earth is interconnected, and his notion that intelligence is 'one among many ways of being in the world' is well reasoned and convincing. This enlightening account will give readers a new perspective on their place in the world."
—Publishers Weekly

“An accessible but also technologically precise book . . . [Ways of Being] makes a remarkably compelling case for the universality of reason, the benefits to be reaped by acknowledging it, and the urgent need to do so given the reality of looming ecological collapse . . . A provocative, profoundly insightful consideration of forms of reason and their relevance to our shared future.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“There's a new breed of thinkers—people who've grown up through the collapse of an old order and are looking at the first shoots of a very different future. James Bridle is right at the front of this thinking. His writing weaves cultural threads that aren't usually seen together, and the resulting tapestry is iridescently original, deeply disorientating and yet somehow radically hopeful. The only futures that are viable will probably feel like that. This is a pretty amazing book, worth reading and rereading.”
—Brian Eno

“James Bridle encourages you to widen the boundaries of your understanding, to contemplate the innate intelligence that animates the life force of octopuses and honeybees as well as apes and elephants. We humans are not alone in having a sense of community, a sense of fun, a sense of wonder and awe at the beauty of nature. Be prepared to re-evaluate your relationship with the amazing life forms with whom we share the planet. Fascinating, innovative and thought-provoking, I thoroughly recommend Ways of Being.”
—Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace

"James Bridle’s wonderful book will make you feel and think the power of knowing how like all other lifeforms we are. There is nothing more important."
—Timothy Morton, author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World

"James Bridle’s brilliant Ways of Being shows the importance of listening to one another and our surroundings, and creating new forms of community."
—Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London

"A profound and elegant exploration of nonhuman intelligence that unfurls a wider, more expansive notion of thought itself. Bridle’s view of the mind, embedded in a more thoughtful world, is a revelation."
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

From the Publisher

There’s joy in self-described “satellite nerd” James Bridle’s British-accented voice as he narrates this audiobook about consciousness and the search for planetary intelligence. For example, he excitedly recalls the moment when he first felt certainty about quantum physics. Even when he’s not being so enthusiastic, listeners might be fascinated to learn that slime mold can solve the logistical problems of routing trains or traveling salespeople. Bridle shows his curiosity as he ponders the mirror test —whether a creature reacts to seeing its reflection—or the proper environment in which to create thriving artificial intelligence. Bridle’s questioning is peppered with anecdotes that highlight aspects of consciousness—human and otherwise. How can listeners not perk up their ears when he describes a bird who used its own name with varying inflections to communicate? J.A.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile

There’s joy in self-described “satellite nerd” James Bridle’s British-accented voice as he narrates this audiobook about consciousness and the search for planetary intelligence. For example, he excitedly recalls the moment when he first felt certainty about quantum physics. Even when he’s not being so enthusiastic, listeners might be fascinated to learn that slime mold can solve the logistical problems of routing trains or traveling salespeople. Bridle shows his curiosity as he ponders the mirror test —whether a creature reacts to seeing its reflection—or the proper environment in which to create thriving artificial intelligence. Bridle’s questioning is peppered with anecdotes that highlight aspects of consciousness—human and otherwise. How can listeners not perk up their ears when he describes a bird who used its own name with varying inflections to communicate? J.A.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile