Sally Adee in Noema:
We seem to be entering a new era of cries du coeur to gather more life, including plants, under the umbrella of intelligence. Bookstores these days are heaving with volumes with titles like “The Revolutionary Genius of Plants,” “Planta Sapiens” and “The Light Eaters.”
Their authors are not even at the vanguard anymore. Some boldly go even further, finding behavior they label intelligent in fungi, bacteria, slime molds and paramecia. Even the cells that constitute our bodies are now standing at the velvet ropes, backed by frontier scientists waving evidence of behavior that might qualify as the hallmarks of intelligence if it were observed in an animal.
What on Earth is going on? Should we consider everything to be intelligent now?
There’s some evidence that the question is exactly backward. A small but growing number of philosophers, physicists and developmental biologists say that, instead of continually admitting new creatures into the category of intelligence, the new findings are evidence that there is something catastrophically wrong with the way we understand intelligence itself. And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living thing on Earth.
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