First #5: Ways of Being
First #5: Ways of Being
Animal and plant intelligence in an interconnected world
Rethinking how we perceive animal and plant intelligence to inspire a more-than-human approach to design
📚 You can buy any book in this newsletter from my store on Bookshop.org
What is intelligence? We often associate this attribute with what is within us — the things we learn or know. In Ways of Being, James Bridle takes us on a meandering journey to excavate the meaning of intelligence. In doing so, they reveal fascinating insights that overturn long-established tropes of what intelligence means and where humans have mistakenly located it.
“The definition of intelligence which is framed, endorsed and ultimately constructed in machines is a profit-seeking, extractive one. This framing is then repeated in our books and films, in the news media and the public imagination — in science fiction tales of robot overlords and all-powerful, irresistible algorithms — until it comes to dominate our thinking and understanding. We seem incapable of imagining intelligence any other way — meaning we are doomed not only to live with this imagining, but to replicate and embody it, to the detriment of ourselves and the planet.” — Ways of Being, pg. 9
Ways of Being invites us to revise our understanding of ecology, leading us towards what Bridle calls “ecological thought”, where human, plant and animal intelligence are recognised as interdependent and entangled entities, causing us to rethink the role that designed technological systems occupy within our multi-species, more-than-human world.1
Intelligence — between, not within
Who would have believed there is so much value in slime!
James Bridle’s writing teaches us to pay attention to what at first seems like an insignificant organism. Slime mold, or Physarum polycephalum to give its full scientific name, was the subject of a groundbreaking research study in 2007. Researchers arranged oat flakes, a food source for this single-cell organism, in its petri dish. The arrangement echoes the distribution of major cities around Tokyo. Over 26 hours, the researchers observed as the slime cells began to form tunnels towards each oat flake. As hours passed and more nutrients were absorbed from the oat flakes, the slimes strengthened paths to the tunnels which provided nutrition most efficiently. To the researchers’ surprise, the tunnel routes were almost visually identical to the existing rail network — in essence, a biological validation of the existing rail network design.
“An ecology of technology is concerned with the interrelationships between technology and the world, its meaning and materiality, its impact and uses, beyond the everyday, deterministic fact of its own existence.” — Ways of Being, pg. 14
We are only beginning to grasp how trees and plants exist, not as isolated organisms, but as part of interconnected mycorrhizial networks. Mycorrhizal fungi facilitate the exchange of nutrients, carbon or infochemicals, and can form a networked defence against pathogens or herbivores. These studies have revolutionised our understanding of biology and continue to inform research into adaptiveness and resilience. So why should we, as technologists, care about this?
It is no wonder that when we examine the processes behind large-scale digital technologies — from AI labour exploitation to the economic inequalities hardwired into corporate business models — they repeat and enact extractive hierarchies that are foundational to human-centred thinking.
Ways of Being draws our attention to incredible lessons we can find in the tiniest organisms — if we only care to look. We are taught to reconsider how we recognise intelligence in animals — the classic example being the mirror test, which is used to determine whether animals as varied as apes, elephants or dolphins possess self-awareness.
Humans have internalised the idea that intelligence is within us — the things that we know — and seek out animals and other organisms that exhibit these behaviours. We build computerised systems modelled on this belief, that make calculations from data that are abstracted representations of the world around us, little realising that a distributed, adaptive and embodied intelligence exists in plant, fungal and slime organisms.
“We are accustomed, largely by scientific practice, to taking things apart, separating them into their component attributes, fixing them for study, and piece by piece reducing their collective agency until they have none at all. But this is the opposite of ecology, which seeks to find connections between all things and resolve them into greater, interconnected systems.” — Ways of Being, pg. 125
Think about the implications of what these cognitive shifts mean. Human-centred design suddenly feels incorrectly calibrated for tackling large-scale industrial or technological design. Plants, animals and fungi are closely entangled, exchanging nutrients and signals, reacting to an ever-changing world. So how could this reality inform the design of complex technological systems?
Computing reimagined
In 1949, the economist Bill Phillips built a machine as an economics teaching aid, using water to visualise how money flowed in the British economy. MONIAC machines were in use at the LSE until 1992. If you want, you can still go and see one for free. It’s on the third floor of the Science Museum in London.
At almost 2 metres tall, MONIAC is a complex assemblage of tubes, tanks and valves. The operator could open and close taps to direct the water flow. Gravity and pulleys manage how water flows in and out of each tank. So why should a 75 year old glorified water pump hold any lessons in our advanced AI-powered technological age?
Ways of Being reminds us of this lost age of analogue computing. Even though we sneer at the word when compared to its shinier digital alternatives, MONIAC embodies a computational cul-de-sac that we have lost sight of in the race towards digitisation. It is a lost avenue that has included unconventional computing, liquid computing, and cybernetics.
“We tend to think about the world as a place which can be known and therefore controlled and dominated. We do this, computationally, through the acquisition and processing of data, through the building of ever larger databases and ever more powerful computers.” — Ways of Being, pg. 186
The principles governing the design of MONIAC remain far more advanced compared to those with which we work today. While our digital computer systems perform complex calculations, their principal flaw is that they can only do so on data that are representations of what exists in the world. In contrast, a machine like MONIAC embodies an approach to computerised problem-solving that models ecosystems through the use of tangible elements — the legibility of water with immediate feedback that can be perceived from operator intervention — making the management of ebbs, flows and blockages a much more realistic concept compared to the digital abstractions of the data we model in advanced computer systems today.
Our capability for building bigger systems and amassing more data has expanded. MONIAC in contrast represents, in all of its analogue glory, a capability to directly make sense of an ecosystem, rather than computed results derived from data that are representative of an ecosystem.
More-than-human-design
The lessons we take from Ways of Being reverberate and cause us to overturn how we view the world, and by extension, the role of technology within it.
“Our machines should be non-binary, decentralized and unknowing.” — Ways of Being, pg. 208
Ways of Being asks us to imagine a technological world built using adaptive intelligence, in communication with the more-than-human world. What would a technological world look like if its machine intelligence were embodied and adaptive, rather than centralised, abstracted and reliant on a calculative gaze that can only compute abstracted representations of the world?
What would a technological world look like if we could apply non-binary thinking to overturn concepts of how we instruct computers? Take for example the ways in which we code. English as a language is so deeply woven into the fabric of computational coding language, we forget that English speakers are outnumbered by the combined populations of those who speak Mandarin and Hindi.
Breaking binaries allows us to challenge conceptual assumptions in system design and imagine how computational environments could be differently realised. قلقلب (’qalb’), or Heart, is a complete Arabic interpreter and programming language by Ramsey Nasser that does exactly this. The linguistic properties of a language determine how you can express your will. IF-ELSE loops are deeply ingrained in many coding languages. Language is the limit of what we can describe to a machine. But what if we could express our will directly in Arabic or any other language? Could new cadences or ways of expression beckon that are beyond those expressible in English?
Another lesson coming from Ways of Being is that we have fixed our gaze in the wrong places, with an incorrect perception of where intelligence exists and how it is communicated. Intelligence is not transmitted top-down, in a hierarchy emerging only from humans, but rather it is embodied and is in dialogue between entities.
“... acknowledging the existence of nonhuman worlds, and subsequently the existence of a shared world, helps us navigate the twin hazards that we face in thinking about the more-than-human world: anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism.
The former is the danger of thinking ourselves to be at the centre of everything; the latter is the danger that, in trying to access non-human experience, we simply mould it into a poor shadow of our own.” — Ways of Being, pg. 70
Human-centred design is centralised and extractive, while a more-than-human design approach is decentralised and entangled. We realise that instead of the Earth being a repository of resources awaiting our exploitation, these materials are part of a complex assemblage that acts, reacts and adapts — so the addition of technological artefacts must be introduced without upsetting these relations.
Ways of Being is equal parts disconcerting and exciting. After a lifetime of being trained to know-it-all, capture the world in data, and subject it to computational control; it feels like the next phase of technological design — a more-than-human design — is one that embraces the uncertainty of a non-binary, decentralised and imprecise world. The next phase of design takes inspiration from the dialogue existing between animal, plant and fungal entities with whom we share our existence on this little rock called Earth.
My small attempt to introduce this expansive concept has barely made a dent. In a continuing tradition of this newsletter, I will return to this subject in two weeks. Look out for Fifteenth #5: On more-than-human design, on Monday 15th April!
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle. Published in 2022 by Penguin, 384 pages.
More from James Bridle
James Bridle works prolifically across prose, audio and visual arts. Dive into their world at JamesBridle.com. My introduction to their work came through the Drone Shadow series (particularly numbers 006, 007 and 008), and the New Ways of Seeing radio mini-series.
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso, 2019, 304 pages)
New Ways of Seeing (from BBC Sounds, 2019, 4 episodes, 30 mins each)
Transcripts are available for New Ways of Seeing and An Ecological Technology — a conversation with James Bridle
Explore further
On Substack
I draw huge amounts of inspiration and pleasure from reading Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s newsletter. In this edition, item 4 “plants see with entire bodies” echoes the themes I am exploring this month.
Listen
Resources
Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of Bristol, who are doing research across physics, chemistry and biology media to design new computational techniques, architectures and prototypes
Watch
If you can’t get to London’s Science Museum, you can still see a demonstration of a MONIAC from this following video.
I came across the next video in the Six Things newsletter, which perfectly encapsulates the observations about embodied and socially transmitted intelligence.
Read
A Rant About “Technology” by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation, 2005)
Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design by Atsushi Tero, Ryo Kobayashi, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, et al. (from Science, vol. 327, issue 5964, 2010)
Slime mold validates efficiency of Tokyo rail network by Katherine Harmon (Scientific American, 2010)
Slime Mold Grows Network Just Like Tokyo Rail System by Laura Sanders (WIRED, 2010)
A brief history of liquid computers by Andrew Adamatzky (from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 374, issue 1774, 2019)
‘Wood wide web'—the underground network of microbes that connects trees—mapped for first time by Gabriel Popkin (Science, 2019)
Can the wood-wide web really help trees talk to each other? by Josh Gabbatis (BBC Science Focus, 2020)
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (AK Press, 2020, 192 pages)
Integrating Living Organisms in Devices to Implement Care-based Interactions by Jasmine Lu and Pedro Lopes (UIST ‘22: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, October 2022, Article No. 28, pages 1–13)
Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez (Valiz, 2023, 336 pages)
An animal myself by Erica Berry (Aeon, 2024)
The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism edited by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 212 pages), in particular, “Good Technology is Messy” by Jason Edward Lewis, pages 21-27.
The phrase “more-than-human” will crop up many times in this review. An unwieldy phrase, it is widely used in academic literature, particularly in ecology and geology. The idea repositions humans as part of a multi-species world, as opposed to being at the top of a pyramid. A more-than-human ecology encourages us to think about how we (humans) exist in dialogue with, instead of having dominance over, animals, plants, and other non-living entities. Applying this idea to design, instead of a human-centred approach — which by its extractive nature has been responsible for systems and industries that damage the environment, animal and plant life — a more-than-human approach asks us to consider the entangled existence of all entities and asks us to view the world as an interconnected assembly of beings rather than an inanimate source of minerals and resources awaiting extraction for our comfort or enrichment. As we apply more-than-human thinking further, it begins to have implications across multiple disciplines and disrupts the foundation of human-centred design.