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

"You probably won't be reading this book once."

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

"Bridle asserts, is recognising that people live in an 'entangled' and 'more than human' world...Everything is messier than it seems...Other intelligences have developed from a common evolutionary base, and they overlap in ways that science is just beginning to discern...Mortal intelligence is not only limited by its capacity, but by its type: people are bipedal primates who see and hear better than they smell and touch."

"Bridle offers a heady and often astonishing survey of recent discoveries from the 'more-than-human' world, where science is only beginning to glimpse the myriad forms that nonhuman intelligence can take ..."

"A human-centric notion of intelligence takes the backseat in this fascinating survey from artist Bridle...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..."