A small hairy body emerges covered in pollen from within the folds of petals. Intoxicated on nectar, they are carried on the warm sweetnesses that cloud the air and are welcomed to another bloom. Invitation after invitation, flower after flower, their subtle stripes become barely visible, now coated in bright yellow grains. Laden and full, it is time to return home to the hive. They know the way; their internal compass maps the landscape as they navigate using the energetic lines of the Earth and are guided by the waymarkers of others. 

The bee’s sensory world is worlds away from mine. They see colours I do not. They experience a smellscape of perfumes I will never know. They feel the gentle utterances of atmospheric changes, the subtle tickles of winds conjured continents away. They experience the electrostatic come-hithers of plants. They journey relative distances far from possible for me under my own steam. Their perception, their comprehension, their entire experience differs from mine. I marvel at this creature so integral to my life through the gift of pollination while acknowledging that I could never know the world as they do. There is a beautiful unknowing in this.

….

Knowing is an obsession of Western science. Unknowns are voids to be filled. As philosopher, writer and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence Stephen Cave outlines in his essay “Intelligence: A History”, “[Ancient Greek philosopher] Plato emerged from a world steeped in myth and mysticism to claim something new: that the truth about reality could be established through reason, or what we might consider today to be the application of intelligence.” This is an interesting postulation: that there could be a “truth about reality”, that there could be one way of knowing the world, be that by humans or more-than-humans.

The past few millennia have seen theology, philosophy and science in Europe intersect in a perversion that stations those with “rational minds” above the rest in a stratified intellectual meritocracy. The ideology of “truth and reason” crept across the continent and then beyond, deepening and stretching to become grounds to dominate, subjugate, enslave and exterminate. It did away with many languages, knowledge and belief systems and lifeways, and, as Cave says, the mystical. He continues: “So at the dawn of Western philosophy, we have intelligence identified with the European, educated, male human.”

Australian Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta opens his book Sand Talk by saying, “Sometimes I wonder if echidnas ever suffer from the same delusion that many humans have, that their species is the intelligent centre of the universe”. The delusion he speaks of is pervasive and deep-seated in the minds of many; this anthropocentric perspective has extended the license for humans to treat more-than-humans as they please based on perceived inferiority.  

Yunkaporta continues to explain that the EQ (encephalisation quotient; a measure of relative brain size) of the echidna (also known as the spiny anteater, a mammal native to Australia) is much greater than that of humans, and therefore, it may have higher brain function than humans. For some, there would likely be difficulty in even contemplating the notion that echidnas could be more intelligent than humans due to the conflation of supremacy of intelligence (whatever this means, whatever the measure) with dominance, or rather, as often is the case, domination: the belief that if other beings were more intelligent than us, they would have exercised this by ruling over us. Of course, this is a constructed narrative about intelligence, one that explains why many people fear aliens and AI.   

This brings us to the question: What is intelligence? Western science has adopted a narrow view of intelligence, mostly so it can seek to measure it. Scientists have spent centuries testing other species against our own measures of intelligence and sentience. Of course, this has only enforced the notion of human supremacy.

In his book An Immense World, Ed Young cautions that “[Our perception of the world] is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know.” He continues: “… creatures share the same physical space but experience it in wildly and wondrously different ways. […] Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.” A vast spectrum of beings took wildly different evolutionary paths, evolving to have different organs, faculties and abilities to experience the world. So, if all beings have vastly different sensory worlds, they could never be measured in comparison. There could never be a “truth about reality”.

Beings of the same species can also hold vastly different versions of reality. Humans exemplify this. Our worldviews, as influenced by our cultures and lived experiences, create a plethora of realities. Many cultures don’t subscribe to notions of human supremacy and anthropocentrism; across diverse cosmologies and worldviews, many recognise other beings as kin, each with a role in the great weaving of life. And indeed, we are entangled in a wholly interdependent collective of beings that extends through space and time. Humans are not separate nor sit at the top of a hierarchy, and our importance to ecological systems cannot be measured by IQ. 

This is affirmed by English independent scientist and futurist James Lovelock, who mirrors ancient wisdoms in the Gaia Hypothesis, which proposes that the Earth is a living, self-regulating, interconnected organism, or system. He writes in his book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, published in 1979, "The idea of a self-regulating Earth is an ancient one, as old as humanity. It was expressed in the philosophies of the early Greeks, Hindus, and many other cultures, and has been central to the thinking of almost all primitive societies."

Our interbeing – a term gifted by Vietnamese Buddhist scholar Thich Nhat Hanh to speak of the interconnection between all – sits awkwardly and even contrary to the reductionist and mechanical thinking that underpins many societal systems. English economist Kate Raworth points this out in her book Doughnut Economics in relation to economics, highlighting the need to move beyond reductionist economic thinking and instead embrace a systemic perspective that recognises the interconnected nature of all phenomena. Without the complex ecological processes that govern our world, we couldn’t exist; without the plankton in the oceans, we wouldn’t have oxygen, without the whales, the plankton wouldn’t have food; without forests, we wouldn’t have rain, without rain we wouldn’t have watersheds and rivers that quench our communities and the land on which we grow our food. These are simple linear examples, but ecological interplays are wonderfully complex. 

The bee is an emblem of ecological symbiosis: the flower gifts the bee their delights in exchange for spreading their seed. Let’s join our bee as they navigate back to the hive and arrive at an entrance attended by guard bees. Luckily, they know the passcode and are permitted entry. Diligently, they huddle within, bumping shoulders with others who’ve also returned from foraging, bumbling through a labyrinth crafted by the many. Everyone here has a role that collectively ensures the hive’s functioning and well-being; bees collaborate, coordinate, and are self-organised and decentralised. They are what is known in ecological terms as a supraorganism, a group of organisms functioning as one organism, synergistically interacting and bringing forth behaviours, abilities and properties that no one organism itself possesses. The supraorganism has what is known as emergent intelligence, or collective intelligence (we’ll return to this concept).

I wonder, where are the boundaries of a supraorganism if it is comprises many beings? (I note that generally, supraorganisms are considered to be made up of organisms of the same species in an organisation, such as a colony or hive). Further, where are the bounds of any organism? Where do we begin and end? With sight as our primary sense, it would be easy to determine the bounds of things by the hard edges we perceive. But other species, like dogs, for example, don’t observe the same hard edges of space; their primary sense of smell means they experience the world as a collusion of scents that tell stories of what is and what was in the same timeline, of presence and absence as a melded, textured reality with soft edges. We can glimpse this reality through our own sense of smell; smell can weave through space and time in ways our sight cannot.  

Perception is gooey. I may perceive my body to end at the surface of my skin; but if I were to zoom in, I would see there is a microbiome on my skin that intersects with all the invisible-to-me matter which the air holds. OK, but if I were to zoom in further, perhaps I could find a hard line to draw around that divides me from the other. However, the further I zoom in, the more intricate the non-divide is, until everything simply becomes quarks. 

Let’s not forget the many microbes that live inside us without whom we couldn’t exist. Am I, therefore, a supraorganism? Or perhaps a holobiont, though this term means “an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, which together form a discrete ecological unit” (Zilber-Rosenberg & Rosenberg, 2008; Lyu et al., 2021)? This term opens up questions around who and what constitutes a host and by what measures we determine it. Should I be considered the host, or should the host be understood as the huge community of microbes that extends from my body into the ground as I walk, into the air as I breathe, to everything I touch? Does the microbial community host me in their great realm? Or perhaps such a dichotomy oversimplifies the complex relationship between the human body and the microbes and all else? Which brings us back to the point that perhaps boundaries between things are only a matter of perception, and we all exist in one big soup of one another.  

***

 In their book Ways of Being, James Bridle invites us to think of intelligence as relational and emergent. They write, “What matters resides in relationships rather than things – between us, rather than within us. … Intelligence is an active process, not just a mental capacity.” The hive is a great example of this: complex and intelligent behaviours arise from the interactions and organisation of individual bees. No one bee possesses this intelligence. This intelligence doesn’t exist within the bees’ mental capacities. It exists only through the dynamic, adaptive and decentralised behaviours of individuals working together, and it enables the collective to coordinate, solve complex problems and respond quickly to stimuli.

Emergent intelligence is exhibited all around us: in ecosystems, which self-regulate and self-organise. Soil is another good example: so often considered simply as a substrate, this brilliant being, or supraorganism, ensures its vitality through the ongoing dance between microorganisms, plants and organic matter in the continuous cycling of nutrients. At least in part, its existence owes to the emergent behaviours of beings of many species, from the macro to the micro, from 300-year oak trees to single-celled bacteria.

There is collective intelligence here. There is, dare I say it, magic in this phenomenon. The language and thinking of Western science strips out this magic. When the civilisations of Europe began putting to bed the mythical and mystical, they started a process of closing off Western minds to the inherent aliveness of everything. The mythical, mystical and magical have been systematically replaced with the rational and mechanical, with “truth” and “knowledge”.

Many cultures around the world know the aliveness of the world. They know it in that they recognise it, not that they must understand its mechanics. Echoing this, Bridle states that “The world is made up of subjects, not objects. Everything is really everyone, and all those beings have their own agency, points of view and forms of life.” Are scientific understandings of what it is to be alive too constrained? When taxonomists determined who fell into “the kingdoms of life” and who didn’t, did they quash the animacy of all who didn’t make the cut? Is the soil not alive? Is it not intelligent? Ecologist and Indigenous writer Robin Wall Kimmerer explains in her book Braiding Sweetgrass that the animacy of our world is continually stolen by the language of Western science.

***

Our existence is an entanglement. Uncountable complex ecological processes weave our world into being; and these relationships are not static but dynamic; they are not rigidly programmed but adaptive. All beings have evolved in relationship with one another. It is from and within these relationships that intelligence arises in complex and dynamic systems. This is collective intelligence.

Our perception, grounded in our belief and knowledge systems, only allows us to grasp, as Young describes it, “a small fraction of reality’s fullness”. Our reality is only ever reality according to us. Beyond our tiny slither of reality’s fullness, there is so much more. When we bring awareness to this, we can play with and expand our notions – both personal and cultural – of intelligence and aliveness. If we choose to, when we quieten our minds and surrender to the shakiness of reality as we perceive it, we can open ourselves up to an existence that extends far beyond individual perceptions and experiences.

In playing at the boundaries of what we think we know, could and should we test the knowledge systems that act as the scaffolds to our cultural worlds? When Charles Darwin attempted to get his “theory of evolution by natural selection” (shoutout to Alfred Russel Wallace here too, who independently arrived at the same theory) accepted by the scientific community, he tried to make it palatable by comparing evolution to economics. Economists, sociologists and the “educated elite” jumped on this and peddled laissez-faire capitalism and Social Darwinism by using the narrative of “the survival of the fittest”. What Darwin theorised, however, is that beings evolve in relation to all around them; in their ecological complexes, they respond to the world and evolve accordingly over generations. The tethering of economics to science has influenced how many perceive the world: as competitive rather than relational. Upon this, entire societal systems have been built. 

Perhaps the questioning, quaking and crumbling of constructs are what is needed in these times of interwoven crises. If our conceptions of intelligence and animacy were expanded and meaningfully recognised, we could, as Bridle says, “begin to break down some of the barriers and false hierarchies that separate us from other species and the world.” This would have major implications on how so many of us see ourselves at a species level; we’d be invited to decentre humans and let go of deep-seated anthropocentrism. This would ask for a cognitive shift from domination to participation and collaboration and for the human-knows-best approach to be surrendered to emergent intelligences. This would impact so much, from how we co-design our communities to how we farm to how we educate our children to how our economies operate.

This shift would require us to examine the harmful undermining of emergent intelligences and the theft of others’ agency and self-determination. For many societies, this would require an entire paradigm shift that rewrites policies and legal systems. Imagine how different our world would be if laws respected the intelligence, animacy and agency of, for example, watercourses – if they recognised how they gather up silt and soil laden with vitality and gift it to downstream places, for how they meander through landscapes on paths they’ve designed alongside co-conspirators to speed up and slow down as needed, offering the source of life to many as streams snake toward the sea. Would dams be built, rivers be culverted, and streams be straightened? (It’s worth noting that some countries, like Ecuador and Bolivia, have installed Rights of Nature laws, both of which have large Indigenous populations.)       

For me at least, there's something comforting about peeking into other ways of knowing the world. Firstly, when I depart from the story that humans are the pinnacle of intelligence and enter into knowing that there are intelligences far beyond my perception and comprehension, I can do away with the saviorism that’s so often attached to “solutions” to the crises we face. This saviorism is pervasive and damaging in a whole host of ways. Instead, there’s the invitation to actively step into our co-evolving mutualism with all else and let our own intelligence coalesce with that of the world. We can let go of our inflated sense of humanity, because, in the mix of it all, are humans really so smart if we are continuously undermining the ecological systems – the grander intelligences – that comprise our world?

Secondly, relinquishing the belief that life is inherently hyper-competitive and a power struggle for dominance, in which acts of harm are inevitable and needed to “succeed”, has enabled me to experience the world in a much gentler and softer way. In turn, I feel gentler and softer and subsequently more available to joy and contentment. I’m far from immune to the barrage of cultural conditioning to the contrary, but there’s awareness of something else, something more. I may take pause to observe, through my own perception and interpretation, the bee as they dip into the cradles of sweet, delicate flowers, and I may query how they experience the world, knowing that I will never know it as they do. I can witness the wind play with the countless leaves who, in a rustling chorus, sing of forthcoming rains, and I can recognise that there is aliveness beyond the narrow definitions I was taught. 

Life feels so much fuller and richer. There’s togetherness with all else. There’s enchantment in our emergent interbeing. There’s magic in the unknown. There’s expansiveness in recognising that there’s not one way of knowing the world, be that by humans or more-than-humans.Ultimately, there’s humility in acknowledging that there’s a wealth of realities to which I will never be privy.

*********

Thanks to all who have informed this essay, notably James Bridle, Ed Young, Tyson Yunkaporta, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kate Raworth and Joshua Schrei (the latter of whom wasn't cited in this essay but whose podcast “The Emerald” is a wonderful exploration of the cosmologies and mythologies of the world). I’ve cooked up their insights and ideas – some of which are embedded in ancient wisdoms from diverse places, to which I also pay homage – along with my own understandings and experiences of the world in the thought-emergence offered here. Undoubtedly, there will be blindspots, shortcomings and oversimplifications; please be wary and forgiving of these. I hope it has tickled the edges of what you think you know, and it invites you to be playful in and with your own sense of reality. 

FOOTNOTES

*Some research indicates that bees use our planet's electromagnetic field and magnetic particles in their bodies to help them navigate.


REFERNCES / CITATIONS

Frontiers in Psychology. (2020). The psychology of emergence: From chaos to order. *Frontiers in Psychology, 11*, Article 591071. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.591071

National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). (2020). The role of storytelling in human culture: An evolutionary perspective. *PMC7597170*. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7597170/

Jullien, F., & Chereau, P. (2010). The cultural evolution of environmentalism: A global overview. Environmental Practice, 12(1), 56-68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01116.x

Kublashian, Y. (2020). Emergence isn’t an explanation, it’s a prayer. Medium. https://ykulbashian.medium.com/emergence-isnt-an-explanation-it-s-a-prayer-ef239d3687bf

O’Donnell, T. (2020). All things will outlast us: How the Indigenous concept of deep time helps us understand environmental destruction. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/all-things-will-outlast-us-how-the-indigenous-concept-of-deep-time-helps-us-understand-environmental-destruction-132201

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De León, C. (2023). What is a holobiont and why can it change our understanding of the world? El País. https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-02-08/what-is-a-holobiont-and-why-can-it-change-our-understanding-of-the-world.html