Ways of Being

Beyond Human Intelligence

by James Bridle

352 pages

English language

Published May 18, 2022 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-0-374-60111-9

(7 reviews)

What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans, or shared with other beings--beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in "artificial" intelligence. But as it approaches, it also gets weirder: rather than a friend or helpmate, AI increasingly appears as something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us.

At the same time, we're only just becoming aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, even if we've failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others--the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we've built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and …

Artist and maverick thinker James Bridle drawn on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy, to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being which are becoming evident in the present, and which are essential for our survival.

3 editions

sechstelgeviert reviewed Ways of Being by James Bridle

Reading the book feels like a child taking you by the hand to drag you to all of the awe-inspiring things they found in the garden this afternoon

4 stars

It contains so many interesting anecdotes about and insights into the world around us from vastly different perspectives that I'm sure I'll flip it open every once in a while, just to read up on how exactly that experiment with the fern that was able to hear was set up again…

I'm not sure how many of the details will stick, and at times the points were made as stories more than with stringent logic, but it's an inspiring book nonetheless that more than once made me feel deeply entangled with the world around me, and excited about taking the insight seriously.

Thomas reviewed Ways of Being by James Bridle

Not sure on this one

3 stars

I found this book quite hard to read for some reason. Some interesting stories and some grand ideas.

loppear reviewed Ways of Being by James Bridle

Yes.

5 stars

Where I am right now, after an overlapping decades-long journey through computability, animal and ecological intelligence, finding human humility after capitalism's techno-categorizing-hubris. Seeking an answer to how technology, how participation in understanding, should adapt to a collaborative-multiple-perspective de-centering of humanity and our binary truths. This sticks to a deep middle, the claims Bridle makes for "opening up to the more-than-human world" are broad, pointed in good directions, and avoid anger or hopelessness while staying critical. My recommendations for adjacent reading would be Frans de Waal's "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are", Emma Marris' "Wild Souls", Richard Power's "The Overstory", and a lot of Ursula K LeGuin, but the bibliography has a whole stack of new reading lined up for me too.