The first step towards an interspecies future, Mr. Bridle argues, is showing more appreciation for other forms of intelligence...To some extent, this is already happening, starting with cephalopods...Through films and other initiatives many people now know that octopuses have an advanced and strange intelligence...Human beings’ last common ancestor with the octopus lived 600m years ago, compared with 16m years for the chimpanzee...Yet the octopus eye resembles the human kind. If similar eyes can evolve through separate routes, so might intelligences...The next step, Mr. Bridle asserts, is recognising that people live in an 'entangled' and 'more than human' world...Everything is messier than it seems...Other intelligences have developed from a common evolutionary base, and they overlap in ways that science is just beginning to discern...Mortal intelligence is not only limited by its capacity, but by its type: people are bipedal primates who see and hear better than they smell and touch..

Bridle offers a heady and often astonishing survey of recent discoveries from the 'more-than-human' world, where science is only beginning to glimpse the myriad forms that nonhuman intelligence can take.

If you plan on reading James Bridle’s Ways of Being — and I cannot recommend highly enough that you do — you might consider forming a support group first. The ideas in this book are so big, so fascinating and yes, so foreign, you are going to need people to talk to about them. Have your people on speed dial, ready to go. And make sure you set aside a good amount of time for reading. You probably won’t be reading this book once. You’ll want to read it several times. This book is going to stretch you.

With habitual insouciance, the writer blurs the distinction between individual and species.

Bridle, an artist and philosopher with a keen interest in the impact of technology on contemporary life, explores the ways in which a broader and more accurate understanding of rationality must force us to reevaluate assumptions about the preeminence of humanity...Bridle champions a philosophical reorientation that would dislodge anthropocentrism in favor of an ethic of relationality, which encourages a responsibility to the teeming subjectivity of our environments...This is an accessible but also technically precise book, and it makes a remarkably compelling case for the universality of reason, the benefits to be reaped by acknowledging it, and the urgent need to do so given the reality of looming ecological collapse...Among the most revelatory of the chapters are those in which Bridle describes the intelligence of animals such as octopuses, baboons, and bees—and, even more startlingly, of various plants, whose sophisticated communication networks and mnemonic abilities have just begun to be fathomed by scientists...A provocative, profoundly insightful consideration of forms of reason and their relevance to our shared future..

A human-centric notion of intelligence takes the backseat in this fascinating survey from artist Bridle...Intelligence, he writes, 'is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes'...To that end, he notes that plants have the 'ability... to remember' and self-driving cars exhibit knowledge with their neural networks and learning patterns...Bridle makes a solid case for his argument that 'everything is intelligent' and that all life on Earth is interconnected, and his notion that intelligence is 'one among many ways of being in the world' is well reasoned and convincing...This enlightening account will give readers a new perspective on their place in the world..