Planetary Sapience

Discussion

Antikythera:

"As computation evolves into planetary infrastructure–scientific, cultural, geopolitical–perhaps its most decisive impact will be not in what it does as a tool, but as an epistemological technology: what it discloses to sapient intelligence about how the world works. This in turn alters how intelligence remakes its worlds, including the ongoing artificialization of intelligence, life, sensation, and ecosystems.

What is the philosophical school of thought most appropriate to this reality? There are moments in history when ideas of what may be possible are ahead of what is technically feasible, but there are other moments when technological affordances outpace our language to orient them.

Perhaps, instead of only projecting timeless wisdom, the work of speculative philosophy is to compose new interpretations of new realities, and to do so through direct exploratory encounters with the technologies that disclose those realities to us. Ultimately, we may ask, what is planetary computation for, and toward what futures might it be oriented and in turn orient the future of complex life and intelligence?

What (can) planetary computation can ... , but also, with great optimism, what it is for?

Planetary sapience is defined as the long and arguably accelerating evolutionary process by which the Earth folds itself into myriad intelligent forms –biological and now also mineral– through which it comes to grasp essential and even existential realities about itself, from its own age to its climatic metabolisms and processes. Humanity is an expression of planetary sapience but not its sole medium.

That evolution has been fraught in ways we are only now coming to terms with. Sapience evolved through the violent evolutionary history of human biological and technological intelligence. The paradoxes are severe.

Today planetary sapience “wakes up” to the realization that the consequences of its own emergence (such as anthropogenic climate change) are what puts its own continuance in jeopardy. Complex abstract technological intelligence grasps its own evolution but wakes up in a house of fire, burning largely because of its awakening and enlightenment.

How must it reorient itself so that its long term viability is more ensured? What is the role of planetary computation in diagnosing, modeling and addressing those futures?

In our lifetimes, computational technologies have been the primary means by which planetary sapience conceives of and instrumentalizes itself. It has become both the medium through which complex intelligence thinks and how it acts.

For a speculative philosophy of technology, this suggests that the purpose of planetary computation may reside as much in what it discloses to intelligence itself, including through the artificialization of intelligence, as in what it does as a mere tool, albeit one with earth-shaking significance."

(email, September 2024)