I was drawn to Bridle’s book because Krista Tippett suggested it as a book to read during the summer of 2022. Of course, as with many books, it took me longer to get around to reading it as I would have liked (witness both the stacks of books in my office and by my nightstand and the long list of books I add to faster than they are removed).
You can find Tippett’s extensive notes and comments on the book here – https://onbeing.org/pause_contemplative_read_fall2022/
And you can find her wonderful interview with Bridle at OnBeing.org – https://onbeing.org/programs/james-bridle-the-intelligence-singing-all-around-us/
And since Krista Tippett is such a skilled interviewer, you will find as you read her notes that she’s interviewed many people Bridle mentions and has interviewed others which are relevant.
It is not my intent to be as in-depth as Tippett is in her comments, nor could I be as insightful, as she is a genius in many ways. I want to give my brief thoughts on the book and hopefully make you interested enough to read it yourself.
Bridle deftly looks at various types of intelligence and brings together a number of astounding findings in the world around us. They (Bridle uses they/them pronouns) point out that we are just uncovering this intelligence that has always been around us when at the same time we are making rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence. Bridle points out, we are accustomed to think about intelligence in specific human terms and miss other type of “intelligence” (and I might even extend that to certain types of human intelligence that can be quantified and studied).
One major takeaway from Bridle is that the closer we look at plants and animals, the more intelligent they appear to be. In fact, they never seem to be less intelligent than we think. They give the astonishing example of plant memory. The scientist Monica Gagliano performed a controversial experiment with Mimosa pudica plants (also known as “touch-me-nots”) that react to danger by closing up. She set up an experiment that dropped a plant from a height which initially caused them to react but was not actually harmful to the plant (no plants were damaged in this experiment). She performed the experiment on multiple plants and found that after repeated dropping, the plants realized they were not in danger and did not react. And the reaction did not return when she tested the same plant later. I certainly find the idea that plants can have “memory” astounding.
Another significant piece of the book pulls together discoveries on how organisms are much more interrelated than previously believed. Suzanne Simard’s work on forests and how the trees and underground fungal mycorrhizal networks work together to aid each other and support each other is one clear example of this. Bridle also points out how we have determined that even our bodies are not a single organism, but we have various microbes in our body that help us live. Our view of how humans evolved is probably wrong as well. We have Neanderthal DNA in our genes which indicates there must have been interbreeding at some point in our past. There is also evidence that rather than solely evolving through random mutations and natural selection, our DNA was probably “infected” by other organisms along the way.
Lastly, I’ll finish by introducing you to the “Richardson Effect” which is named after Lewis Fry Richardson and is directly related to the mathematics of Mandelbrot. Richardson was a pacifist and had a hypothesis that the chances of war between two nations had to do with the length of their shared border. So he set out to find the length of countries’ borders. But he found out that definitive measurements did not exist. The paradox he uncovered is that the more accurately he tried to measure something, the more complex it became. For example, if you tried to measure the coastline of Britain with a kilometer-long ruler you would get one answer, and then if you used a meter-long ruler, you’d get a different answer. And as you did more and more exact measurements, the answer didn’t converge, but in fact, became longer and longer.
I found Bridel’s book is worth reading because it introduced me to some very interesting ideas and made me think a lot about the intelligence in the world around me. I’d urge you to read it, look at Krista Tippett’s notes, and listen to her interview with James Bridle.
Some Random Thoughts 