Simon Moreno’s Reviews > Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence > Status Update

"We humans live in such a narrow slice of time and space that we are incapable of thinking of or thinking at the pace and scale of the world. The changes we have wrought in it and the changes we will have to make to survive them"

"Not only are we the products of multiple entangled ancestors spanning vast range of the evolutionary field. We are not even individuals at all. Rather we are walking assemblages, riotos communities of multi-species inside and outside of our very cells"

"Intelligence is not something which exists just in the head. Literally in the case of the octopus who does intelligence with its whole body intelligence is one among many ways of being in the world. It is an interface to it. It makes the world manifest intelligence then is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized in all the multiple forms that it takes."

"This bears repeating intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does. It is active, interpersonal, and generative, and it manifest when we think and act."

"Rather, if we truly do appreciate what non-human intelligence might consist of, and thus transform our understanding of our own abilities and those of others, we need to stop thinking about intelligence as something defined by human experience. Instead, we must from the outset think about intelligence as something more than human."