Although we have no accurate word or category for ‘the intelligence embodied as a living world’, this question is thoroughly worth a deep and attentive exploration. It seems likely that one of perhaps four possibilities generally obtains. Either nature a: forms a unified body local to Earth, and this body is self-aware (and transentient), or b: it functionally forms a unity, but there is no cohesive awareness amongst or beyond the participants, or c: it’s a bit of both, but the unity is somehow inhibited rather than amplified. Finally, that d: the question is for some reason irrelevant or malformed.

It is my perspective and experience that the tree of organisms on Earth comprise a unity, and that myriad forms of life perform unique functions that contribute to the powers of the unity in a way not entirely dissimilar to how the differentiated stem cells that comprise our own bodies each uniquely and crucially contribute to our own.

So it is also my perspective that we are immersed in, causing, and participating directly in an unimaginably advanced nonhuman intelligence.

I do not believe nature’s fierce profundity, beauty, intelligence and power are accidents, and I think humans are intelligent for an incredibly obvious reason: their context is a field of biocognitive superfunction (transentience).

This line of thought has many interesting side branches; for example, the possibility that our own unique adaptations could represent an almost trivial subset of those of the living context in which we arise, and that ours may be specifically purposed to act as an intelligent link within the broader context. I am particularly intrigued when I realize that we are uniquely evolutionarily endowed to interact with streams of raw intelligence in nature, perhaps because it is an aspect of our own role within the unity.

In any case, we have long formally overlooked the astonishingly advanced intelligence within which we emerge; we actually do not believe in it. This failure could prove deadly, and may also be a symptom of the serious malfunction of our own capacities for intelligence and recognition.

Before we get too excited about burning everything down so that we can make more buildings and machines, we might want to have a thought about the scale and power of an instance of mind that encompasses the entire biomass and environments of a living planet and knows the entire history from its inception here as a single lifetime.

In fact, I would like to propose that we re-establish direct contact with that intelligence. Not for the sake of religions or fairy tales. In order to rescue our future from unimpeachable catastrophe; and, if we are as smart as we suppose, perhaps to transform the meaning of our checkered past as well. I harbor the rarely spoken certainty that not only could such an intelligence aid us in guiding our development, it could accelerate it into unimagined domains of natural, relational and technological prodigy.