A World of Wonders

I’ve been trying to spend ten minutes every day sitting on my patio, looking closely at the trees, listening to the birds, and watching the clouds. This practice has been inspired by my reading Karen Armstrong’s latest book Sacred Nature: Restoring our Ancient Bond with the Natural World. Armstrong, a former nun and award-winning author of many books on the history of religions, writes about the need to develop “a silent receptiveness” to the natural world. Referring to spiritual traditions of various early religions as well as the poems of Wordsworth and the myths of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, she explores the ways in which, until the age of “Enlightenment,” people experienced Nature as sacred.    

I’m attracted to this idea of Nature as sacred. I’ve always been drawn to the beauty and intensity of Emily Carr’s landscapes and by her journals in which she spoke of her search for God in Nature. I recall my father saying that if he wanted to experience religion he could do it best by spending time in the forest. It made me think that there might be an invisible and powerful spirit in the outdoors. Reading Armstrong makes me believe that there is, in the natural world, a spirit that is present and palpable and divine, if only we can practice the “silent receptiveness” that she recommends.

Although I was never christened, I did go to Sunday School and, as a 10-year-old, memorized the first half of the  Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian church. (I’m impressed with my diligence in tackling the 107 questions but must, in the interests of transparency, acknowledge it was the reward of one dollar that the Church offered that motivated me.) 

Not much of the Catechism has stayed with me, but I do remember that the first question asked was “What is God?” and the answer was:

God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

I liked the idea of this infinite, good and eternal non-human spirit. Emily Carr, I suspect, would claim that it can be found in Nature. A spirit and a consciousness which is beyond us.

These days, although we find it difficult to define consciousness, or intelligence, we are seeing signs of both in plants and trees and whales and other non-human species. I’ve found it especially enlightening and inspiring to read Karen Bakker’s award-winning book, The Sounds of Life:  How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. A Rhodes Scholar with a Ph.D. from Oxford, Bakker was the author of more than 100 academic publications and seven books and was a Professor at the University of British Columbia. The results of her research on environmental issues and Indigenous water sovereignty continue to be circulated widely. In this book, Bakker explores the communication patterns of other species so that, with the help of new digital technologies, humans can now hear sounds everywhere in nature –in the ocean, the coral reefs, ancient seagrass colonies, turtles, bats, honeybees, and so many other species. In the past, scientists have doubted that creatures without ears or any apparent means to hear, interpret and respond to information, could communicate. Bakker’s research indicates that in fact it was simply the scientists who lacked the capacity to hear.

Clearly, new technologies and artificial intelligence are allowing us to hear new things. Bakker reports on the research of Camila Ferrera and Jacqueline Giles who, with underwater hydrophone recorders, were able to record the complex sounds of “clacks, clicks, squawks, hoots, short chirps, long chirps” and a variety of other sounds in the communication patterns of turtles. Bakker points out that, although digital technology opens up new possibilities of interspecies communication, there has been a long history of deeper listening amongst Indigenous people. She notes that much ceremonial music in the Amazon is “received from, shaped by and directed to non-human beings” including plants, animals, rocks and rivers.

Bakker’s book, beautifully written and solidly researched, reports on experiments in which passive digital bioacoustics monitoring allows us to listen to and begin to comprehend sounds that were previously considered unimaginable. It reports on research conducted through digital technology that records the sounds that are made by whales, elephants, bats and bees, and measures the patterns of their communications. She often refers to these sounds musically and proposes that “If whales are the opera singers on planet Earth, and birds the orchestra, then turtles are more like a quiet marimba or a tiny thumb piano.”

This new information prompts us to rethink the concepts of intelligence and consciousness. In the past, we’ve seen plants and animals as resources rather than as companions. We are clearly anthropocentric in our view of other species; we see humans as the central and most significant being. If we use only human performance as the measure of intelligence, we may be missing many different kinds of wisdom. We previously assumed that turtles could not possibly hear because they had no ears and no visible ways of hearing, yet now we see they do. Perhaps whales and dolphins have one kind of intelligence, dogs another, turtles another. Elephants, coral reefs and bats all have their own ways of perceiving and communicating and who knows what else? Viruses?

It’s worth reading The Sounds of Life and also googling Bakker’s TED talk entitled “Could an Orca give a TED Talk?” 

Digital technology is showing us a new perspective of the Tree of Life. However, while impressed with the capacity of AI to connect humans with the natural world, Bakker was also very concerned about the possible risks of its misuse and was a founding member of the Center for Advancement of Trustworthy AI (CATAI), the mission of which is to ensure safe, trustworthy AI for all by advancing agile AI governance on a global scale.

People are talking about AI more and more these days. I don’t understand much about this subject but I’ve read some reports that describe three  different levels: Narrow AI involves systems  that are task-specific It’s programmed to perform singular tasks in areas like speech recognition. voice recognition, and facial recognition. General AI, the level at which we are now, offers systems like Chat GPT, a general-purpose language model that is able to understand and respond to a wide range of topics, and can translate languages, summarize long documents, generate text in various styles and language, and so on.

Artificial Superintelligence, sometimes called Singularity, is a hypothetical level of AI in which the technology reaches a superhuman level of intelligence which would transcend human intelligence. Some scientists say that can never happen while others say it could happen in 50 years or even sooner. There’s not much agreement about what the implications of Singularity might be, if it should ever become a reality, but I like to include AI on my list as Another Intelligence along with all the other non-human Intelligences.

Bakker points out that, while digital technology can be misused or abused, it can, at its best, allow us to look into the world of nonhuman communication and learn about the universality of “meaning-making” through sound. Aided by artificial intelligence, she concludes “we may be on the verge of a breakthrough in interspecies communication. If we open our ears, a world of wonders awaits.”

Our species tends not to be very good at listening but interspecies communication might change things. Perhaps it can help us to become better thinkers and listeners and to appreciate “a world of wonders” in which humans are not of central importance.

Discussions about the future of AI raise many challenging questions. Maybe just thinking about the possibility of a higher intelligence, Singularity, will make us more humble and more grateful. In the meantime, we might do well to consider the advice Barbara Wall Kimmerer offers in her book Braiding Sweetgrass which Bakker quotes in her final chapter:

Let us bring people back into conversation with all that is green and growing: a universe that has never stopped speaking to us, even when we forgot to listen.

My niece Darcy says she’s waiting for AI to talk to the mushrooms. Maybe it’s already happening! Maybe AI is also talking to the birds and frogs and turtles and trees. Who knows what conversations are already taking place? Maybe some helpful ideas will emerge from such discussions.

These days we humans can use all the help we can get.