On Being with Christa Tippett is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation,

funding research and catalyzing conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder.

Discover the latest findings on neuroscience, cosmology, and the origins of life at Templeton.org.

These are some of the words and ideas that are brought into conversation with each other in James Bridal's writing,

and that drew me into conversation with them.

The notion of the broad commonwealth of life that we are inextricably entangled with and suffused by.

The paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become.

The interplay between intelligence and consciousness and are belonging to the natural world at a cellular level.

The way words we use all the time have kept this interplay alive in us even as civilization forgot.

And an animating entry point to all of this for James Bridal is our lives with technology and what artificial intelligence can and cannot do.

You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an in-live-ending opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now.

You might not think of intelligence the same way again, or the truth of mythology, or the letters of the alphabet, or what it means to be human.

And you will smile next time you access the place where your digital life is stored and realize what it says about us that we named it the cloud.

I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on Beying.

James Bridal is an artist and technologist and author of the fascinating new book, Ways of Beying, Animals, Plants, Machines, the search for a planetary intelligence.

They live on the Greek island of Regina and spoke to me for math and.

There was some serendipity in me reading your book and getting to really delve into it the way I did.

I mean, obviously I read a lot for my work, but I was getting ready to go on essentially kind of a spatical for 10 weeks.

And I guess the galley is the copy I have of your book that is completely marked up as a galley's copy.

And it was sitting there and I was kind of picking up books saying, let's see what's come in that I might take with me as a big read this summer.

And I was heading to Patmos to the island of Patmos.

I loved it.

...