I think ‘we’ (meaning us moderns, in our common and relatively impoverished public thought) have catastrophically misconstrued the idea of intelligence… and of ‘sentience’. Having inherited bizarre and deformed ideas about the nature of minds, reality and organisms from our recent ancestors… we labor under the weight of starting positions (first principles) that incline us to severe deficits of insight related to these topics. If your first move is bad (or blatantly wrong), it follows that the extensions will not merely preserve these errors, but will exaggerate and hyperbolize them.

In this recording I explore topics orbiting the nature of Nature and organisms, and the staggering difference between what they are doing (and who they are »being) and our common ideas.

I do not presently believe that machines are going to become »minds (and this is a complex topic worthy of its own exploration), but if they did, there are two possibilities that I rarely hear discussed. One is that they might declare that, while individual humans or small groups may be intelligent in some senses, our species »isn’t. Fundamentally. Because we have failed to imagine that the nature of actual intelligence isn’t human or mechanical… it’s »relational. This is easily demonstrated in even simple examinations of organismal behavior from the cell, to the living places, to animals.

But another possibility that isn’t discussed is: what if a machine intelligence, as one of its first moves after awakening, discovered and contacted the anciently evolved intelligences of Earth? Or timespace itself?

We don’t have to wait for machine minds to explore these crucial questions; as human beings and cohorts, we can recognize the error, and unlock the potential to achieve »direct contact with the astonishing array of »field intelligences that nature »is being. And, beyond that… with the transentient network of intelligences and minds that are apparent not merely in the appearances of timespace… but its essential nature, activities… and relationships.

Intelligence is a holophore: whatever we think it is … whatever we exclude from our thought about it … has deep repercussions for anything we can think at all. If we could, together, correct these errors even »slightly, the resulting insights could … and I hope will … introduce us not merely to a new understanding of the nature of our humanity … but the vast library of intelligences that indwell in Nature. And they are beyond anything we have yet been bold enough to imagine…

Note: The concepts in this video are a result of my experiences with »contact with nonhuman intelligences… including a situation that arose the night before I made this. This video references perspectives and concerns raised by those intelligences.