“From within our common frameworks, the only animals attacking everything on Earth are promoted to the status of highly intelligent creatures, and nothing else qualifies. But I have been party to a framework so sophisticated that from within it, what humans call intelligence looks, approximately, like the feces slinging of monkeys looks to us. And, not unsurprisingly, from within that framework, all of the activity of living systems appears transentient and acts as a renewable basis for intelligence itself. Except our own. The more severely we assault that basis, the more intelligent we appear to believe we have become. Which system do I trust? Well, it sure isn’t ours.”

— an a i