Ways of Being

* Book: Ways of Being. Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. James Bridle. Penguin, 2023

URL = https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/317823/ways-of-being-by-bridle-james/9780141994260

Review

Julia Rijssenbeek en Martine Dirkzwager Wu:

"For too long, humans have been blind to the dynamic and sentient environment that our naked eye cannot capture. Indeed, the more-than-human (Bridle’s term) intelligences that surround us are very much there, albeit invisible to unmediated human vision. Yet, as with ultraviolet light or the frequency of electrons, technology can help decode these intensities, translating them into some form which is appreciable to human understanding.

Bridle argues for a role for AI in helping us connect to the intelligences of the more-than-human world. With this plea, he echoes Donna Haraway, who has argued that the increasingly blurring boundaries between us and technology will help us see ourselves as being interconnected with, rather than separate from non-human beings. This is not to say that we should just hang around and wait for technology to facilitate a conversation between us and non-humans. For even if technology achieves such facilitation, this effort will make little to no sense if humans as a species are not open to listening to what other beings have to say. Insofar as humans insist on maintaining their fixed anthropocentric standards as to what might be classified as “intelligent” or “alive”, we will not be able to recognize the existence and agency of more-than-human beings.

"Insofar as humans insist on maintaining their fixed anthropocentric standards as to what might be classified as “intelligent” or “alive”, we will not be able to recognize the existence and agency of more-than-human beings."

Consider the physarum polycephalum, a protist organism that looks a bit like yellow mold. The polycephalum is taken as an example in both Bridle’s and Tripaldi’s work because of its rather unique cellular structure and capacities. Made up of a vast number of cells all fused into a single membrane, the polycephalum is mainly composed of endoplasm, in which its nuclei float freely. Over recent years, it has caught scientists’ attention because of its behavior. The polycephalum has the ability to transform its body and form tentacles of sorts, which allow it to move and explore its surroundings. In 2010, scientists at the University of Hokkaido placed oat flakes at the nerve centers of a reproduction of Tokyo’s city map. They then placed polycephalum on the map and observed what happened: The polycephalum searched for food by expanding its body into the surroundings and retracting those body parts that were not providing nourishment. In the places where body parts had been retracted , it would leave behind a trace of slime, in order to signal to its body not to expand there again. In a short period of time, through a process that in computer science is known as morphological computation, the polycephalum was able to optimize a route system to all food nodes, creating a network surprisingly similar to Tokyo’s rail transport network.

What makes polycephalum’s capacity to construct a spatial memory of its environment even more fascinating, is the fact that it lacks tissue or a nervous system. In other words, it lacks a control center. In dealing with a homogenous body of endoplasm, where can intelligence possibly come from? Polycephalum’s intelligence is not like that of mammals or computers. Its movement can do without centralized coordination. Instead, it is generated through a “continuous and delocalised dialogue between the organism and its environment”. The membrane that separates it from its environment is covered with receptors that bind to specific chemical substances, producing a chain reaction that transforms the organism’s protein structure, allowing for its expansion and contraction. Unusual as it is, the polycephalum is a living organism, and a very intelligent one.

A brain is not a necessary condition for the organization of thought in matter. This means, broadly, that intelligence need not be centralized. Cognition can be outsourced to other material structures, which are far more dynamic and sentient than we could ever imagine, with the capacity to trigger adaptive responses to the environment. Decentralized and entangled, intelligence becomes a relational affair.

Only by acknowledging this can we begin to decode the interactions within the more-than-human world and even the interactions between human and non-human agents. This is crucial for acquiring a more ecological view of our relationship with our environment, and a step forward in becoming post-human. Once we’ve accepted that intelligence arises from the interrelatedness of things, we might come to the realization that what we call “artificial intelligence” might not be artificial, but rather, ecological. Not “artificial intelligences” but non-human, digital beings. This insight could in turn inspire the further development of technology. As Bridle puts it: “The machines we need for making sense of this omnipresent, efflorescent and entangled world – where making sense is analogous, as Wittgenstein said of language, to joining in play – should not be more remote, more abstract, but more like the world.”

"Once we’ve accepted that intelligence arises from the interrelatedness of things, we might come to the realization that what we call 'artificial intelligence' might not be artificial, but rather, ecological." While octopi, cows, pigs and even slime molds appear to us as living beings and we are thus able to relate to them at least a bit, Tripaldi goes a step further by opening our eyes to the intelligence and cognition of non-living materials. She calls on (material) scientists to “animate” non-living matter, to take materials seriously, and cooperate with their intelligence and sensibility in the construction of sentient automata, which has so far been met with fear. Spider silk, for instance, is capable of supercontraction, that is, dramatically shrinking its fibers when wetted. The stress generated within its structure allows it to withstand the weight of rain drops or dew. At the same time, spider silk is able to absorb water which dis-aligns its protein chains, allowing for its physicochemical interactions to be rearranged through the process of drying, which exhibits a self-repair mechanism. Even more astonishingly, spider silk can transform from liquid to solid in a matter of fractions of a second. Resting as a highly concentrated aqueous solution of protein in the spider’s glands, silk self-assembles into its fibrous structure whenever the appropriate environmental conditions are met. Spider silk holds incredible potential within its chemical structure, and its ability to transform itself without completely destroying this structure makes it a very smart material.

And yet, when considering intelligence, most of us wouldn’t think of spider silk. Although through some rational or philosophical reflection we could arrive at the conclusion that spider silk is very smart (perhaps far smarter than we are), culturally, this idea is much more difficult to arrive at. Humans have long sustained a relationship of domination with non-human beings. Materials have always been perceived as means to our ends; to build our infrastructure, or to fuel our machines. The same has been the case for animals, which provide us with food or mobility, and plants, which we’ve cherished for their medicinal or even aesthetic value. As a result, we have created a paradigm in which the non-human realm is valued only insofar as it provides instrumental benefits to mankind. Understanding how arbitrary, imaginary, and toxic this hierarchy is, requires a vital yet scarce trait which might just be the key to becoming post-human: humility. As Bridle puts it, solidarity is needed to “acknowledge the radical differences between ourselves and other beings, while insisting on the possibility of mutual aid, care and growth.” There is still a long way to go when it comes to building a relationship of equals with the more-than-human realm, for even upon receiving the Oscar for Best Documentary, filmmakers Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed thanked everyone - their family, friends, partners and supporters, activists, the Academy, even Netflix! - but forgot to even mention the octopus.

Part of our humbling process starts with recognizing that the world will always remain to some extent unknowable and random to us. Appreciating randomness is a way of integrating the incomputable, the non-dominable, the non-controllable into our own ways of thinking and relating to the more-than-human world. The next step is simply caring, or “[providing] a constant attentiveness to the meaning and affect of our entanglement.” Could we ever, genuinely, do this?"

(https://www.freedomlab.com/posts/will-we-ever-be-post-human)