“Both scientific and popular thought tend towards the conclusion that there are ultimately single answers to single questions. What is intelligence? Who possesses it? Where do they fit into our rigid structures and hierarchies of thought and dominion? Perhaps – whisper it – this just isn’t how the world works. The closer we examine and the more forcefully we interrogate and attempt to classify the world, the more complex and unclassifiable it becomes. Taxonomy after taxonomy breaks down and falls apart. In part this is a result of our own innate limitations, the possibly insuperable problem of our own umwelt and human ways-of-being. But it is also a problem of entanglement: the fact that in the more-than-human world, everything is hitched to everything else, and there are no hierarchies: no ‘higher’ or ‘lower’; none more, or less, evolved. Everything is intelligent. Now what?”

—James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (2022)