boundless

 

... how we might become aware of real intelligence: that is, the kind that exists everywhere and between everything. It is made evident not by delineating and defining, not by splitting, reducing, isolating and negating, but by building, observing, relating and feeling. Intelligence when we perceive it at play in the world, is not a collection of abstract modes: a concatenation of self-awareness, theory of mind, emotional understanding, creativity, reasoning, problem-solving and planning that we can separate and test under laboratory conditions. These are simply reductive and all-too-human interpretations of a more boundless phenomenon. Rather, intelligence is a stream, even an excess, of all these qualities, more and less, manifesting as something greater, something only recognizable to us at certain times, but imminent in every movement, every gesture, every interaction of the more-than-human world. 

 James Bridle