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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief of Le Random. And we are back today now with our slightly more sporadic Friday episodes as companions to our regular Monday editorials.
And in this episode, we're asking a strange question. It's all about what is intelligence? And do we understand it well enough to build our most powerful technologies around such narrow versions of it?
And I'm joined today by a super interesting thinker on these exact topics, and that's James Bridle. He is an artist and writer and author of the book Ways of Being, which sets out to expand our understanding of intelligence beyond human intelligence. So he looks at animals and ecosystems and the relationships between them.
James is one of the clearest thinkers that I've encountered on these topics, especially on what's genuinely at stake in this AI moment. And it's one of the more skeptical conversations that I've had around AI. So I really appreciate the opportunity to get that perspective.
We talk about the forces that James sees AI unleashing right now on society. So that's the consolidation of power, environmental destruction and then this kind of ontological crisis of uncertainty.
And it's a conversation that challenged my existing beliefs on AI and how I generally see the world. But I think in really good and in the best ways. And I think it will challenge or maybe confirm yours as well. So I really enjoyed this conversation and I can't wait to share it. So let's begin.
So I guess the first question that I had in mind was more about just getting... probably close readers of your work will already know this answer, but more about just establishing your broad thoughts. So feel free to just take this as an opportunity to maybe give a high-level overview of some of your ideas, just maybe for people who aren't super familiar.
And so the first question is about this human tendency to think of intelligence in a very human way, or at the very least to prize or privilege human intelligence over seemingly any other intelligence. And that even has its roots in things like cybernetics and computation. Back with the perceptron and the artificial neuron, the very beginning of AI, it was already thinking about human neurons and how they worked, and it was already centering human intelligence.
And so this tradition is basically baked into the current conception of deep learning. Because, yeah, there's a pretty clear line from cybernetics and connectionism to deep learning. So I guess, in your view, what's missing from centering the human in that way? And what's the issue with thinking about artificial intelligence as a replication of only human intelligence or mostly human intelligence?
James Bridle: The centering of human intelligence as what intelligence is predates even thinking about AI, or really computers, by centuries. Certainly four centuries within the Western tradition. And within both the dominant scientific paradigm and within Judeo-Christian belief, the human has been the top of the pile, right? We're the dominant life form. We are the example of everything.
And so the whole history of really thinking about intelligence has been a history of thinking about what humans do. And it's always been something that, for a long time, we really only ever applied to humans. There was some idea that other creatures could do smart things. But really, when we talk about intelligence, we've always historically been talking about what humans do.
And that, of course, gives us a false sense of superiority, of dominance, and centers a lot of our powers around that belief that we are the supremely intelligent thing on the planet. And it affects how we treat everything else.
Also, it's important to note that historically that wasn't humans in general. That was also mostly European males. So there's always been a hierarchy of intelligences, a false one imposed by those in power. So ideas of intelligence are always related to ideas of power. And whoever has the power thinks they're the most intelligent because they have that power.
It's quite weird seeing that collide with computing, because historically computing didn't really have anything to do with intelligence. Computing was about mathematics and building binary machines that could do certain clever things. Certain pioneers within computer history, particularly Alan Turing, thought a lot about intelligence, and they did think that the machine would be able to do things that humans did in a human-like way. But they never, or they certainly rarely, certainly as I've read or come across, really confused those things to the extent that we seem to be doing today, to think that they were in fact somehow the same thing.
The models of AI, or the idea of AI that we have at present, the way that we're building this thing that we're calling artificial intelligence, is based on quite a neurological model of the brain. It's not even really based on a model of intelligence. It has come to be described in that way. But historically it was really about, is there an interesting way to do novel forms of computation based on the way that we think the brain does computation? Which is connectionism and building these neurons and so on and so forth.
So it feels a bit like there's a bunch of different metaphors and ideas that have collided into the current very loose and hyped way that we talk about this thing that we're calling AI. And one of the deep confusions in that discussion is we keep talking about intelligence as if it is a kind of singular, monolithic thing that you can accurately describe and rate, and that is fundamentally what humans do. And I think that all of those things are bad ideas.
Peter Bauman: Your book, Ways of Being, in a lot of ways is an expression of a posthumanist philosophy. So as opposed to a transhumanist posthumanism, as in thinking beyond the human being at the center of what we were talking about at the very beginning of that.
And I guess I'm curious how that can be... Maybe this isn't a direct question, but it's something that we can just sort of tease out throughout the conversation. Whether that is manifesting itself in these current technologies, how we can think about that in different ways.
But you obviously are critical of a lot of AI, and especially the financialization and corporatization of AI. And so in The Guardian you've written critical essays about AI, and then I think you've also written some other essays that are a lot more optimistic, like in what you've written for WePresent.
So I'm just thinking about how you think about this apparent tension that you have between AI as this corporate extractive machinery, and that mostly probably seems to be amplifying injustices and inequalities and things like that, but also this genuine kind of interest in it being new and to some degree exciting, like maybe lots of dangerous things are, and has some promise and has a lot of different potential. So how do you think about that sort of cognitive dissonance, or how do you think about those two things at once?
James Bridle: Well, first of all, to talk a bit about what I'm talking about in Ways of Being. I mean, Ways of Being isn't really a book about AI or technology per se. It largely came out of a very strong feeling that it is completely bizarre that we are talking so much about intelligence with so little thought as to what we mean when we're talking about it. As I said before, in the first part, we thought about intelligence for so long as what humans do. And now we're making these kind of bad models of what humans do, or I should say very narrow versions of what humans do, in machines, and calling that intelligence.
And that's a reduction of a reduction, right? Because first of all, there's so much more to think about about what intelligence is than what humans do. And so mostly what I'm doing in Ways of Being is I'm trying to expand that notion of intelligence to include other beings and other ways of thinking far, far more broadly. To say that if you want to talk seriously about intelligence, if you want to talk about what's possible, if we're talking about intelligence, then you have to think about something much broader than a very narrow version of what humans do already.
So it's the kind of slight sadness at the idea that we're calling this thing intelligence, a kind of narrowing, what feels like an incredible narrowing of the conversation about what's actually possible by doing so.
And that's mostly what I'm doing in Ways of Being. I'm simply pointing at all these other interesting ways of thinking, which in turn open up entire conversations about politics and society and the ways in which the world could be different if we didn't have these reductive views about not just human intelligence, but about human relationships to other beings, to the planet, to other people, to other cultures, to everything kind of around us.
“And that's a reduction of a reduction, right? Because first of all, there's so much more to think about about what intelligence is than what humans do.” — James Bridle 9:25
Because of my background and my interests, I lay quite a lot of that at the door of technology in various ways. Or rather not at the door of technology itself, but at the way in which we're building it and the power systems that exist around that building and the way it's being shaped by those power systems.
And I think that probably goes some way to explaining this potential confusion about optimism or pessimism that I feel towards AI or technologies. I don't really feel optimism or pessimism about those things in particular.
You mentioned two articles that I wrote, one in The Guardian called The Stupidity of AI and the other one I wrote for WeTransfer, which is called The End of Creativity. Both those were titles that were given to me, not necessarily the ones that I would have chosen. Essentially, one is responding to AI boosterism and one is responding to doomerism.
And I respond to the boosterism by saying this is completely ridiculous, to suggest that there's some kind of magic machine that is going to do all these things. Which not only is not going to do all these things, but is also going to do an immense amount of damage while it's doing it, because of the way it's being constructed. Both in terms of the power systems that have the power within to choose how it's created and how it's developed and how it's rolled out to the general public and how it manifests in the world, but also because of the narrow ideas of what constitutes intelligence that underlie it.
So those are fundamental problems with this thing that we're calling AI. And again, we should probably maybe take a step back in a second and talk about what we talk about when we talk about AI.
And then the second one, The End of Creativity, is responding a bit to this idea that it's all over for us essentially, now that the machines are here and they're doing all this wonderful stuff. Like, what is the point of writing poetry? What is the point of drawing? Which is also ridiculous, because just because an AI can do something doesn't mean that we can't do it.
I'm excited always about the possibility of new tools and new things to play with. But again, I always ask who has the power within that relationship. Just because we are free to make art and do all these wonderful things, there's no end to creativity. There might certainly be an end to getting paid for doing those things. And I think that is something that we should probably pay a little bit of attention to.
But as I said, maybe we should just step back and be clear about what we're talking about when we talk about AI. Because I think that's always an important starting point, because it exists on this sort of vast spectrum where whatever we do, we can't shake the image of giant robots out of our heads, right?
We've had decades, I mean almost centuries now, of fiction which has given us an idea of machinic intelligence, superintelligence, which again has always been modeled on the human pretty much exclusively. There's some weird fiction out there that doesn't. But mostly it's this kind of human-type superintelligence. And it's Terminator and it's Skynet and it's Karel Čapek's robots. And maybe it's like the angels in the Bible too, like the alien intelligences. We have all these models for what something like that is, right?
And then we have what we actually have, which is statistical machines running on very large computers. And those things are not the same thing. And they get bundled together, and it's really hard to talk clearly about things when we're always holding both those things in our heads at once.
And again, I include that in my own work, because I am both often rebutting the claims made for contemporary AI software, because it's simply not the thing that it claims to be or that is claimed for it. And yet at the same time, I'm always excited about some of these ideas. Particularly the idea that if there are other forms of intelligence around, if machine intelligence is something interesting, then the intelligences that already exist all around us, the intelligence of animals, plants, ecosystems, should be even more interesting to us, because they actually have always had and will continue to have far more impact on our actual lived lives than these hyped machines will do.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that's super interesting and a lot to respond to, I guess.
So one thing that I think is interesting is to talk about how computation has the potential for more interesting intelligences that are more based on ecosystems, or ecologies, than maybe the human brain. That could be some kind of way to simplify two different approaches, although it's obviously not perfect. And so the brain being more of a narrow intelligence, a narrow way to think about intelligence, and ecological thinking to be much more inclusive about what intelligence is or can be.
It seems like computation has certainly previously had a lot of challenges reaching to that point. But I wonder if something like... and maybe this is a way for you to push back on my boomerism... but I wonder if something like the current rise that we're seeing in things like agentic AI and the ability of agents, does that have the potential to capture more of a non-human intelligence in a computational way? So that agents and intelligent agents can maybe work in a more ecological way, or can work in a way that is more like swarms or animals than necessarily a direct correlation with the human brain, even though it's still based obviously on deep learning, neural net architecture.
But it's the agentic form that it's currently taking. Undeniably, I think that's rising in at least popularity at the moment. So do you think that has potential to broaden the scope of computational intelligence from something that's just neural network or brain based to something that's more ecological?
James Bridle: I mean, what I mean when I talk about ecological intelligence is largely what happens when radically different forms of intelligence meet in the world. In a world that we share, in a world that we all are struggling to kind of flourish in and to get along with and to perhaps leave better than we found it, and certainly to survive through the next decades and centuries ahead, which are going to be really, really tough. That's the reality of kind of what's happening.
And so for me, an ecological intelligence is when you get a solidarity and a meaningful action for mutual flourishing on this plane of kind of common existence between many, many beings.
The thing that drives that, that makes it interesting, is there's two things that are really, really important for me to make that happen. One of which is this kind of mutual respect for the notion of multiple intelligences. The understanding that everything that lives, that everything is alive, put it quite simply, that everything is alive trying to do its thing within this world to the best of its abilities. And that the ecosystems, biospheres and the entirety of the planet exists when those things are working as best as possible in support of one another, right?
And also crucially to that is that they meet with some form of mutual respect and some kind of balance of powers between them, essentially. And we know that the current violence being visited upon the Earth is because human beings have considered themselves to have all of this power, and they've treated the rest of the world as though it is not merely unsentient, unintelligent, unaware, but also a tool for our own use and extraction.
So is that happening within agents? The first part is that I don't know. I don't know how radically different in intelligence, multiple radically different intelligences coming to work here... You see this happening really interestingly. I've written quite a lot about citizens' assemblies, for example, right? Citizens' assemblies are these forms of governance that are being set up all around the world where you bring together people from all walks of life to work together on common democratic societal problems.
And what's interesting about citizens' assemblies is that they seem to produce more interesting answers to problems than are produced by narrow domain experts. So instead of having a little appointed committee of people to work on something who will know about this thing, what you do is you bring as broad a range of people as possible from all kinds of backgrounds, who may not know anything about this to start with, but bring these different ways of thinking together. And the more of them you can bring together, right, the more interesting things happen, because you get this total flux of different kind of vectors of thinking within that space.
On first sight you think, well, getting a bunch of agents together to all work together, that might maybe produce something if they are kind of diverse.
And the second thing, is there really a meaningful equality going on here? Who made those agents? How much does the user understand what they're doing? Are you merely delegating power? Because really what it sounds like is having a bunch of servants. And I'm not sure that's anything like what I'm talking about as ecological intelligence.
It may be possible to set that up in some way. I don't really know. There have been experiments again long before AI. And the thing is, I don't think AI is particularly a special case in this, which is why I'm always a little bit skeptical of saying, but this is going to fix it. Because nothing in particular is going to fix it or do it. But there's really interesting experiments happening all over.
You have artificial life long before you had artificial intelligence, that produced all kinds of weird ecological effects, happening usually through a huge diversity again. And I think this idea of diversity is incredibly key. Because it feels at the moment like there's a lot of very, very similar things happening, in terms of how these software systems are being made, who's making them, how they're being disseminated. It feels like a very top-down process from a very narrow set of ideas, concepts and powerful bodies of various kinds that are promulgating this.
And that's not going to produce the kind of diversities that I'm talking about when I talk about ecological intelligence. One could imagine a world in which not just loads of people are using loads of agents, but loads of people are coming up with things like agents, or things that are radically different, in order to put all of these different possibilities of technology and intelligence together. But that's not the system that we live in at present. And so I'm highly skeptical that the system that we live in at present is going to produce something like that.
Peter Bauman: Again, I feel like there's this tension, and I think we should all be feeling it or exploring it, between how do we think about our relationship with this other intelligence? Because to a certain extent we do see these deep learning systems as some kind of other intelligence. And how do we think about our relationship to them as less top-down, like manager, servants or worse relationship?
James Bridle: I'm not sure we should. Just to be clear again, because it's not just us and the software that's in this relationship, right? It's part of a much larger system of relationships. So we can say, oh, I'll treat this piece of software as a servant, or I will treat it as a friend, or I will treat it as a fount of all knowledge. But we also have to ask, where does that knowledge come from? What actually changes? Am I the most important thing in this relationship? Am I a user of this tool, or am I co-creating something with it? How does that work in a system where I have very little agency in how that thing even came to be?
We should be acknowledging that we don't have agency in its creation, and that it was created by these extractive corporations with intentions that are probably not aligned with our own in many ways. And that's not the end. That alongside a critical reading of what actually it is that we're dealing with. What is the system that we're interacting with? It's not just the fact that it's great. It's also the fact that it is, in most of the cases we're talking about, a large language model or whatever. It is a particular thing and it has its own capabilities, and it has very powerful aspects too. It is also just what it is, and not some sort of genie, I guess, which just... It always feels like it's, as I say, edging into these discussions.
But if you have a particular example of a use or a software or something, perhaps that would be useful to sort of ground it.
Peter Bauman: So there's a line of thinking with people who I think mostly engage with AI through things like Claude and Claude Code, and models like Opus 4 and 4.5 and now 4.6, that feel like something. I don't know, maybe that particular software has changed, or at least they all seem to be using that particular model and software.
And there's this idea of something called a symbiont, which I sent you the link with the questions, but I understand if...
James Bridle: I read the question. So I'm not familiar with symbionts. I'm familiar with Claude Code and all those kinds of things.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. So symbionts, there's not a direct relation to Claude Code at all, but I'm just sort of adding that.
But the idea of symbionts itself, it's kind of thought about as a third way to engage with AI. So instead of it being maybe doomer or boomer, instead of the boomer side, using it as a servant or a slave, kind of thinking about what can emerge from the interaction between biological and synthetic systems. So again, it's not phrased in a way that's related to Claude Code at all.
But I do think that there's an example called Web and Wob, where it's this sort of ASCII characters that are the result of this, that have sort of emerged or whatever. They say that they weren't created or coded. They are described more as emerged, and they are thought of by the creator of Web and Wob as being some kind of synthetic being.
So I guess... I mean, they are synthetic. They're pieces of software. Where do we draw the line between ascribing beingness to these things? Because I guess maybe what the symbiont crowd thinks is that it's gotten to... Maybe it wasn't a year ago or two years ago, but maybe now it's getting at least into the fuzzier gray area. Do you think that that's even possible, or do you think it will always be kind of silicon software that we're dealing with here?
James Bridle: I think all things are possible, but I don't think our contemporary computation is producing anything that can meaningfully or usefully be talked about in terms of consciousness. I think that's a wild and possibly dangerous mistake.
I am someone who ascribes consciousness to mountains and to oceans and to blades of grass. I fundamentally believe that consciousness is a vast universal field that underlies all living things. And so I have no problem with the idea of machines being conscious. I am excited by the fact that ultimately all things on this planet come out of the Earth, and therefore they all come out of this universal field that underlies it. So I'm not averse to speaking about things in this way.
However, I don't believe that it is meaningful or useful or helpful to talk about a thing that has been constructed out of a bunch of numbers, essentially a bunch of statistical relationships in a machine, as being really the same thing. Talk about it in terms of maybe what needs it's meeting, how it allows for certain relationships to occur. That to me is always way more interesting. If whatever you or they are saying is being created here is allowing for some kind of relationship or possibility to occur that didn't happen before, then that's something novel and interesting in the world.
But I think it's fundamentally mistaken to try and claim something like something emergent as something being conscious, in the way that I think actually has deep meaning in the world and is really important to conjure in the present moment.
I don't really understand how we can be so obsessed with this possibility, or with the sort of dancing of animated sprites on a computer screen and the illusion of speech. And speech is a very powerful illusion. Anything that speaks to us in language, we automatically ascribe intelligence to it, because that's how our brains work. And yet be so unconscious of so many of the other relationships that are actually present around us in the world.
For me, AI is interesting to the extent that it allows these new relationships to emerge. A bunch of those come out of the doing of things. But there's so much production that occurs. I've tried a bunch of AI coding recently and it was initially super exciting. You're like, woo, this is like being on a motorbike. Suddenly I can go really fast and do all this kind of stuff. But I quickly realized I had very little idea what was going on. And it was very frustrating, because I wasn't learning anything. I wasn't creating any new relationships for myself. I was creating more stuff, right? But it was fundamentally not changing me in any interesting way, which is our only real measure of stuff with this talk of any forms of new software or kind of things.
What I am fundamentally interested in is how it changes us, and then how we change the world in response. I get frustrated when that conversation just revolves around the software itself rather than all the effects that it's producing in the world, which seem to be incredibly more interesting, if that makes any sense at all.
Peter Bauman: No, it does. And I think that symbiont crowd would agree that the way that it's changing, or the way that they're seeing their relationship with computation changing, is also impacting how they see other forms of intelligences. I mean, in that same movement there's a lot of talk about intelligence of forests and mountains. And so I do think it is opening up, at least in a small way in that group, at least how other people are talking about, and to what other things people are ascribing intelligence.
And this is something I've talked to people like Lawrence Lek about, if you're familiar, the artist. And he takes pretty seriously the idea that we should empathize with AI, and that basically that's kind of where this is all sort of heading, he predicts or projects. And so that we should already start to be thinking about those kinds of ideas.
“What I am fundamentally interested in is how it changes us, and then how we change the world in response.” — James Bridle 30:36
And they also, again, like you were saying, that shouldn't detract from our ability to empathize with nature or animals or other humans. They can all be put into our ability to empathize with one thing. If anything, it probably promotes empathizing with other things rather than limits our ability to empathize with other things. What do you think about that?
James Bridle: But yeah, I mean, it's my hope continually that this sort of engagement does do that. And I think maybe for some individual levels it does. But that's not what I actually see happening at a larger level, right? That's absolutely not what is happening.
And I think for any technology, as I think my friend Tobias Revell always says, if we keep saying a thing is going to do a thing, we have to ask why isn't it doing that thing?
And what is actually happening now is that it seems that the mass adoption of these technologies is actually driving quite a serious epidemic of psychosis in society. That it is actually separating us from reality in deep and meaningful ways. Whether that's people getting into relationships with simulated chatbots, which are really not prepared to even have a discussion about consciousness, that really is just quite simple machines that fool our brains into having emotional relationships with them, which are damaging. Or whether it's kind of larger, the collapse of consensus reality that's produced by the availability of AI generated imagery. Which is not interesting because it's AI. It's just another technological capability, right? It's just software. But this is what this software is actually doing in the world right now.
And I think more broadly it is not producing more empathy. And I do think that is fundamentally based on its deep disconnection from the world.
And so while I think it is possible, and I hope so, and to some degree it's the trajectory I've been on, that thinking about these things does open your mind up to think more broadly about other things, and about the impact, or whether it's intelligence or something else more broadly, it does do that. But you have to do the thinking to do that, right?
It's like with the Claude Code, with the vibe coding example. I wasn't thinking, right? I was just typing instructions into a thing. And the other thing was doing what passed for thinking within that relationship. So it just wasn't a relationship that for me was producing that kind of thinking.
There's a real disjunction there, once again, between what is being claimed for these things and what's actually happening. And I think it's worth spending quite a lot of time with that disjunction and really trying to understand why it's coming about. Both in terms of our own kind of neuro-susceptibility to persuasion, the fact that things that sing and dance are inherently attractive to us and persuasive, and also to the larger power systems that we're embedded in that are trying to persuade us that this is the right thing to do, or these are important things to be paying attention to. And then much, much bigger ethical questions than that, over what it is valuable to give our attention to in the present moment, which is really what I'm mostly interested in doing.
I confess I don't find this as compelling as it seems to be, either within a lot of creative practice or within the world at large. It's not answering any of the questions that I have personally, or that I think matter really deeply in the world at the present moment. And I think it's probably best just to state that very clearly.
Peter Bauman: How would you summarize those questions? Or what are those questions?
James Bridle: For me, generally, our current ability to do democracy and community together in a way that gets stuff done, and the very, very real and looming ecological crisis that is here and that is coming for all of us right now.
And in my own practice, which is really all I can meaningfully speak about, I found no good use for these tools in addressing those things. And if they can't address those things, really, and if in fact they very obviously seem to be making them harder to address in the present moment, very specifically in the sense that, as I just said, the things that are actually being affected by the, let's say, three main effects of AI that we can really identify right now. And when I say that, I am speaking very specifically about the reality of the technology and the cultural hype around it. And I don't mean hype offensively. It just is a very... we're talking about it, right?
The three main effects of that are consolidation of power within certain elites, the environmental damage of immense compute, right? And there's all kinds of arguments we have about how much damage it's doing or whatever. We can talk about that. But the fact is we're building all these vast data centers which require more electricity, and they're putting gas into them. That is what is happening.
And the third thing is this deep ontological uncertainty that we're all in about what is alive, what is real, what matters. The kind of breaking consensus reality that it's fueling.
Those are three very real effects that I see happening of these things. And they feel like direct attacks on the things that I'm actually concerned about on a broader scale. So it's pretty hard not to try and put those things together. And I've tried over and over again.
In my own work, I've used AI in artworks and as an object in my writings, as a thing to think with, in ways that have been very productive. But they've almost always told me to stop and go, okay, that's not the way to do it, right? And that's, for me, a valuable outcome of creative practice.
I've built neural networks. I've trained various things. I did hundreds of works with Markov chains back in the day, which certainly don't feel that different to working with LLMs. And I've done the vibe coding stuff and I've built chairs with AI. Really, that's a really direct thing, going, I want this thing to exist in the world. Can this thing help me do it? And really tried to explore ways of doing it, and found it lacking. Meaningfully lacking in the things that I want to make change in the world.
So if others are finding it is useful for answering certain meaningful questions they have about the world, then great, great. But for me it feels like there is a vast, vast disconnect between the sort of claims that are made, either creatively or politically, socially, whatever, for these things, and what the reality of them actually is.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's largely fair. I do wonder to the extent that that's changing with some things. I wonder to the extent that you could say that in maybe 2024 and less so in 2026. But I wonder what's changed. I do think that things like reasoning has changed with some of these models. And I think things like the ability to code that it can... has changed the way that people can manipulate computation in a way that they were not able to do two years ago.
James Bridle: The software's got more powerful. No doubt. Absolutely. And will continue to do so. But what about that change in gear will change the general trajectory of what I just talked about?
Peter Bauman: Yeah. So I think in terms of the consolidation of power, environmental damage, yeah, I wouldn't say that trajectory isn't on track. It is intact.
One thing... so as creative practitioners... sorry to interrupt. So as creative practitioners, as artists, as whatever, does that matter?
James Bridle: Yes, I think the best artists acknowledge that and work in that tension, or at least they have to somehow reconcile that tension in their work.
Peter Bauman: Or, I mean, some artists do do that. People like Hito Steyerl. But I think people that are even maybe nerdier into the nuts and bolts, like people like...
So there's this GLITCH residency that I think is really interesting. It's this sort of art and tech residency that takes place at this chateau in Burgundy once a year for like two weeks. And it's a lot of really nerdy people about art and technology and kind of specifically about AI. That's sort of where that symbiont idea came from. But it's coming from a very left-leaning viewpoint of the world. It literally takes place at a commune in France. And so they're very interested in ideas about environmentalism and about different forms of democracy that work.
But they're at the very least using these tools to help them reach those objectives, as opposed to maybe writing them off or cutting them off. Which, yeah, certainly I'm not saying that you're espousing. But I think they have almost identical goals to you, or certainly quite aligned. But they're still willing to use those tools to the full extent that they can, which is mostly astonishing to me, who's not super technical, to achieve their aims. And a lot of it is through art, but a lot of it is just through regular engineering too. People like Gene Kogan are there, and people that have been in machine learning and art for decades. So I think they're doing some quite interesting things. I think there's a lot of overlap with what you're thinking about.
One thing that's interesting is maybe consciousness. I'm curious, do you have a philosophy of consciousness in mind that incorporates things like mountains and rivers? So I guess what would be the philosophy of computation...
I understand that there's this place called the California Institute of Machine Consciousness, and it's kind of a think tank about... or I don't know what it is. I don't know if a think tank is the right word. But their kind of theory of consciousness is that it's computation. It's fundamentally computational. It's not something that is unique to biology, and it's something that arises when some kind of self-organizing system develops enough mechanisms of perception. Like you can hear, you can see, you can sense enough to where that conglomeration of perception and second-order perception and systems allows for some kind of global coherence.
And so in that theory, machines can do that just as much as biological... Man-made machines could do that just as much as biological machines. And that theory too, I think, thinks of a lot of biology as computation, just down to structural DNA level, things like that.
So that would be that camp's view of computation, and why at least it's conceivable that some of these technologies could eventually reach that level, especially as they become more multimodal and are able to sense and understand the world around them.
Do you reject that completely? And then where does the idea that also the planet, planetary consciousness and mountain consciousness or river and forest, how does that also fit in?
James Bridle: I don't know how the consciousness gets into machines. That's the best way I've put it to myself so far.
I understand consciousness as arising from what I can best describe very poorly as a kind of universal field that underlies everything. Certain scientists might call it the quantum field. We understand that there's a kind of energy field that runs under everything. You can call it quantum particles. You can, with absolutely no change in the language, call it God or love or any other number of things. That seems to be what, as I understand it, consciousness arises from, right? And that we are all just kind of standing waves within that field of consciousness temporarily here. That waveform will collapse again at some point.
And so within that understanding, a mountain is just a wave that stood for longer, much, much longer than we have. And it understands the world, and the properties possible for that wave.
What does the computer do? I don't know. I don't know how the consciousness gets in. It doesn't quite make sense to me. In the same way, it's related to my very strong notion that consciousness is also embodied and time based and material, that it exists as a result of our experiences. It is related to our perceptions, but not merely the sum of them.
When you said that, as the California Institute of Machine Consciousness talks about, you reach some kind of critical level of perception perhaps. I don't know. I don't like hierarchies. I don't think anything that sort of ranks these things is right. That doesn't make sense to me. There's beings that exist on this world with only one or two perceptual channels, and yet they have incredibly rich worlds and lives, right?
“And so within that understanding, a mountain is just a wave that stood for longer, much, much longer than we have. And it understands the world, and the properties possible for that wave.” — James Bridle 46:02
We don't know whether a virus is alive in a meaningful sense. Maybe what it's more helpful to say is that we can't say that it's alive. That what we're talking about are things that are approaching the edge of language. Now that's quite an important thing to understand. When I say the mountain is alive, I don't really mean alive in the sense exactly that you or I are alive, in the biological sense that it breathes and excretes and does those other things that we talk about as living. It's alive in a different sense. So I'm already messing with the language, or the language is messing with us, because the language doesn't afford us the ability to speak of things that are beyond language.
So when I hear that all life is computation or is computation based, I don't buy it, because that's a description of something purely in language. That's very precisely what computation is, right? Computation is a form of language. It's language that you encode into things and it does stuff. It's a kind of active form of language, but it's very specifically something that has to be written down to work, right? So it's downstream of language.
And there is so much of the world, most of the world, most of the universe, that is utterly beyond language, that is beyond our ability to describe it or to make sense of it as the tiny standing waves in the universal flow that we're part of. So there's absolutely no way to know the answers to most of the things that we're talking about.
And to come back to the original point, and I'll stop talking like Alan Watts in a minute, I don't know how consciousness gets into machines in the same way that I'm talking about the world. I'm happy that it might, but I have no experience of it happening. And I think experience is ultimately more convincing to me than language.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I mean, I guess in that case you're limited by only your own experience to make final judgments, if you're going to make judgments on that. But it's also...
Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with you on the level of... there's no distinct line between living and non-living, and even on the very small level. And that sort of fuzziness, I think, should... yeah, it should change the way we think about almost everything. Like you said, it's very weird.
James Bridle: It's very weird that we're supposed to be having a conversation about computer software. We are in part having a conversation about computer software. And yet we are also talking about very, very extreme philosophy. There's something interesting about that. That's also why we're talking about it.
And so I point that out to say that we are trying to talk about kind of 10 things at once, which is hard. It's always hard. But we don't need to make judgments on it. That's just not what we're doing or what we're trying to do.
But it's also why this thing is complex, and why I think it's really important to stress that what ultimately matters is which aspect of these things you choose to pay attention to. Which of them, the infinite possibilities, the infinite resonances of this subject, which are the ones, the aspects that matter to you, and how do they change your life? Right.
Peter Bauman: And I think, like you said earlier, that reflects a lot. That's what you project. What you're interested in is a lot of a projection of yourself. And yeah, I do think that there's so many different angles and routes to think about this kind of thing.
James Bridle: Yeah, we definitely went down some interesting paths today.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, but I do agree. Yeah, well, I mean, we've got to stop at some point or we literally could go on forever. But wow, thank you. Really genuinely, this is great. I really appreciate it.
James Bridle: And yeah, could go on forever. Thank you so much. And yeah, take care.
Peter Bauman: All right. Bye, James. Have a nice afternoon.
James Bridle: Bye.
