Ways of Being

What Hacker News says

1. ianstormtaylorJan 2024
   This is really interesting research. It’s fascinating to hear about how these experiments are designed in the first place.

   If anyone is interested in this topic, I highly, highly recommend the book “Ways of Being” by James Bridle. [0]

   It covers such a diverse range of ideas about intelligence, including neural network–style intelligences, that I think pretty much everyone would find something of interest.

   One of the takeaways is that these intelligence-seeking experiments have been poorly designed for so long, that they tend to reveal way more about the humans running the experiment than the animals being researched. And part of that is due to how uncomfortable we are with admitting that animals have completely different (not better or worse) ways of being and thinking than us.

   It makes you aware of the limitations of our hierarchy-and-comparison-based concepts. For example, even a simple phrase from this article:

   > Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.

   The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count, and surely if they did count it wouldn’t be by speaking out loud like we do. Saying that their faculties are equivalent to 1-year olds only really serves to diminish them. Not that I’m blaming the author, it’s just so easy to accidentally slip into these very limited ways of thinking.

   [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58772732

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2. laughingman2Aug 2023
   Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

   by James Bridle. James pulls an brilliant move of using various examples in technology as a tool to help us rethink our place in nature & reconnect with the (beyond human) world.

   He weaves a fascinating tale with myriads of threads such as Cybernetics, Neural Nets, Internet, Random Numbers, Analog computers, Slime molds, Sortition vs Voting, Mycelium, Mysticism in animals, Turing machines, Personhood of non-humans etc.

   A nice summary to whet your appetite, https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/07/more-than-human/#umwelt

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3. manicennuiAug 2023
   I'm reading "Ways of Being" by James Bridle. It is about intelligence and specifically animal and plant intelligence. I'm learning a lot of science that I either never knew or was taught incorrectly in high school. Very thought provoking.
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4. manicennuiNov 2023
   It will almost certainly be used make customer service worse as well. In "Ways of Being" James Bridle provides other examples of how corporations are going to use "AI" to exacerbate the problems they already cause in pursuit of profit.
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5. p-e-wFeb 2023
   > After 250 years of humanity (well, some of humanity…) confidently atop the great pyramid of being, we in the west are becoming more aware that we might, perhaps, have company.

   What a load of crap. Just because cephalopods exhibit behavioral traits that can be classified as intelligence if one defines "intelligence" in a suitable way, doesn't mean that cephalopod intelligence is in any way comparable to human intelligence.

   Let me know when a giant squid writes a poem, or a honeybee colony develops a theory of thought. Until then, I'm going to flat out dismiss such statements as pseudoscience with some faux-spirituality sprinkled on top of it.

   > "More-than-human doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Bridle writes in Ways of Being. “Not only are we the products of multiple entangled ancestors, spanning vast ranges of the evolutionary field; we are not even individuals at all.” [Emphasis added]

   Case in point. Grand claims made without any justification matching their scope, and indeed without elaborating on what exactly those claims even mean. Concluding that individuality in a human sense doesn't exist because of biological endosymbionts is textbook "not even wrong" bollocks.

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