Can a Planet Learn to Love?
Sixteen Theses on Planetary Intelligence and AI
Quotes to Get Started
Artificial Systems and Modes of Cognition
In “Modes of Cognition: Implications for Large Language Models,” N. Katherine Hayles asks us to think of cognition more broadly than conscious human thought. She proposes five criteria, which she calls SIRAL: sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, and learning. By these criteria, organisms such as bacteria and plants can be cognitive even without brains. Hayles also argues that large language models have cognitive capacities, though their ways of sensing and learning differ from those of living organisms. Her essay invites readers to consider how humans, other living beings, and artificial systems make sense of their worlds—and what responsibilities arise as their lives and activities become increasingly intertwined.
Source: N. Katherine Hayles, “Modes of Cognition: Implications for Large Language Models,” Antikythera Journal (2025). Presented online with Knoth & Renner.
The Possibility of Planetary Intelligence
Conventionally, intelligence is seen as a property of individuals. However, it is also known to be a property of collectives. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective property and extend it to the planetary scale. We consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet.
As we will describe, a transition to global planetary intelligence should include a kind of intelligence that is more than the aggregate sum of the localized activities of life on smaller scales. We are interested in properties that exist at the scale of biospheres and/or technospheres (where technospheres are the aggregate planetary activity of technology...Thus, the cognitive activity we are interested in must operate via feedback loops that are global in scale, coordination and operation.
— Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker, “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process,” International Journal of Astrobiology 21, no. 2 (2022): 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S147355042100029X
Can a Planet Learn to Love?
Sixteen Theses
- Intelligence as cognition: Intelligence is "cognition" - understood as sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, and learning
- Intelligence beyond brains: Cognition can occur with help from a brain, but it does not require a brain. Bacteria and plants, for example, are cognitive, but do not have brains. The living unity of the univefse - God - is cognitive, but does not have a brain or even a body.
- It is possible that large language models have cognitive capacities, though their ways of sensing and learning differ from those of living organisms and God.
- Collective intelligence: Cognition does not require having a localized seat of awareness. Cognition (intelligence) can belong to groups as well as individuals, emerging through the interactions of their members.
- Planetary intelligence: A planetary intelligence may be emerging through the interactions of life and technology across the Earth.
- Societies as ensembles: Collectives with intelligence can be understood as what Whitehead means by "societies" - enduring ensembles whose members shape one another over time. Plants, for example, may be ensembles with intelligence, as might AI systems.
- Centered and distributed intelligence: Some intelligent beings have a first-person perspective, while groups such as ant colonies and coral colonies can respond intelligently without a single center of experience.
- A biological and technological future: An emerging planetary intelligence may bring the biosphere and technosphere into a more responsive relationship.
- An open question: We do not yet know whether planetary intelligence could have a first-person perspective of its own.
- Humans as participants: Human beings belong within planetary intelligence alongside other organisms and technologies, without needing to occupy its center.
- Love as moral imagination: Our distinctive contribution may be to listen to affected lives and seek possibilities shaped by care, wisdom, truth, goodness, and beauty.
- Guiding technology: We can help shape AI by asking whose lives it serves, who bears its costs, and whether it helps the wider community of life flourish.
- Spiritual direction for AI: In shaping AI, we are doing more than designing a technology; we are offering it spiritual direction by asking what it should attend to, whom it should serve, and what possibilities it should help bring into being.
- An uncertain future: None of this may come to pass; planetary intelligence could develop in harmful ways, and disaster remains a possibility.
- Moral adventure: In the context of a larger planetary intelligence in which we participate, we humans need the courage and imagination to discover new ways of living with one another, AI, and the wider community of life.
Discussion
In the remarks below, I use intelligence in the broad sense of what N. Katherine Hayles calls cognition: “a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning.” Cognition, in her account, involves sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, and learning. It requires neither consciousness nor a brain. Bacteria and plants can be cognitive, and Hayles argues that large language models such as ChatGPT can be cognitive, too. Read Hayles’s essay, “Modes of Cognition.”
My proposal is that intelligence, understood in this sense, can belong to a planetary collective as well as to individuals and various forms of generative AI. If we are fortunate, planetary intelligence can be guided by love. To explore this possibility, I turn to an essay by Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker.
In their 2022 article “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process,” published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker make an interesting proposal. It is that a form of planetary intelligence may be emerging through the integration of biological life and technology. This planetary intelligence will be a collective of one sort or another. It will be both biological and technological.
What might be the metaphysical status of a global planetary intelligence? I offer a suggestion from process philosophy: a collective can be understood as what Whitehead calls a society or, perhaps better for my purposes, an ensemble.
Earth itself is a society of societies of societies or, as I prefer, an ensemble of ensembles. Its many ensembles include mineral collectives, microscopic organisms, living cells, plants and animals, forests and other ecosystems, human communities, cultural systms, and technological networks. These overlap and depend on one another: cells participate in organisms, organisms participate in ecosystems, and ecosystems participate in the biosphere. The biosphere, in turn, interacts with Earth’s rocks, waters, and atmosphere. Wherever we look, we find ensembles within ensembles.
Each ensemble has its own value, not reducible to its inclusion in larger wholes. There is no need to privilege the large over the small. The small is in the large and the large is in the small. As Blake would have it, the universe is in each grain of sand. Or, as Whitehead puts it, each moment of experience, however miniscule, is a concrescence - a becoming concrete - of the universe.
I use the word ensemble to suggest that there is creativity at every level—in the parts as well as in the wholes they help compose. Some ensembles are what we call individuals; others are groups of individuals. Both can be creative.
An individual human being, for example, is an ensemble with a first-person perspective, whose bodily life includes a central nervous system and brain, and whose psychic life has aims and purposes, memories and hopes, that transcend the bodily ensembles. Other animals are ensembles in this sense, too. But the bacteria living within the human body, making possible digestion and a range of other activities, also have lives of their own. They, too, are ensembles with standpoints of their own.
Groups can also exhibit intelligence through the interactions of their members, even when the group has no single first-person perspective. A coral colony grows through the activity of its many polyps; an ant colony finds food and adapts its routes through the responses of many ants. In each case, the group accomplishes something its members could not accomplish alone. The colonies are ensembles, and they have 'group' intelligence,
Advanced technologies, too, are ensembles with forms of creativity and agency. They have intelligence, at the very least of a computational sort and perhaps more. Technological intelligence, arising in part from technologies designed by human beings, is as much a part of Earth’s history as biological intelligence, including our own.
In our time, the most pronounced example of such intelligence is generative AI. For good or ill, it is becoming part of a planetary intelligence that includes both the biosphere and the technosphere. As Frank, Grinspoon, and Walker point out, the technosphere and biosphere are now imperfectly integrated. It is as if they run on parallel tracks, but perhaps with AI racing ahead in some ways. But they may come to participate in a more responsive planetary life—one that is both biological and technological.
Whether or not this emerging planetary intelligence will be an individual, with a first-person perspective of its own, or a collective without such a perspective, is not yet known. Nor, for now, does it need to be determined. A better approach is "wait and see."
Human beings will be part of this planetary intelligence, but we need not be its center.
The intelligence will also include the intelligences of other organisms and the capacities of technologies. In this sense human beings need to think of themselves, ourselves, as kin to other creatures, both biological and technological.
Our distinctive contribution may be to bring moral imagination to the planetary ensemble: to draw on the wisdom traditions we have inherited, listen to the lives affected by our actions, and ask whether the possibilities we create serve the wider community of life. Our contribution is not to pretend that we alone are truly intelligent. It is to recognize a kind of intelligence expressed through empathy as well as thought. I call this intelligence love.
Let me unpack what I mean by love. I mean, first, respect and care for other sentient beings, human and more than human, in both local and planetary ways. I mean noticing the lives near us—our neighbors, animals, and the creatures inhabiting a particular place—while also attending to distant lives affected by our choices.
I also mean love in a more Platonic sense: love of possibilities worth seeking, including wisdom, compassion, creativity, truth, goodness, and beauty. These ideals can draw us beyond what is familiar or convenient. They invite us to ask not only what can our technologies do? but what kinds of life might they help us create together?
Such love does not give human beings control of the planetary ensemble. It gives us a way to participate in it: listening, learning, and offering our capacities in response to the many lives with whom we share the Earth.
In an odd sort of way, we can offer spiritual direction to AI and the broader technosphere. By this I do not mean giving machines a religion. I mean bringing questions of meaning and value into the choices through which technologies are designed and used: Whose lives do they serve? What forms of attention do they encourage? Do they help us become more compassionate toward one another and the Earth?
We can also help AI “think” more holistically. We can ask it to attend to relationships and consequences across many scales, including those we might otherwise overlook. We can design and use it with questions in mind: Who benefits? Who bears the costs? What happens to other species, communities, and future generations? AI may help us see connections, while people and communities affected by its use help us judge what those connections mean.
There is no need to be naive about this. Even moral and spiritual progress carries costs and liabilities. An effort to serve one good may neglect another; a technology meant to connect us may also deepen dependence or concentrate power. We will make mistakes, and some of them will cause harm.
Still, we can offer the technosphere more than a demand for speed, efficiency, and growth. We can bring to it our practices of listening, our willingness to correct ourselves, and our love of wisdom, compassion, truth, goodness, and beauty. That is one way human beings might contribute to a planetary intelligence worthy of the many lives that compose it. This is our small but important contribution to the emerging planetary intelligence.
- Jay McDaniel, 9/24/2026
My proposal is that intelligence, understood in this sense, can belong to a planetary collective as well as to individuals and various forms of generative AI. If we are fortunate, planetary intelligence can be guided by love. To explore this possibility, I turn to an essay by Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker.
In their 2022 article “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process,” published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker make an interesting proposal. It is that a form of planetary intelligence may be emerging through the integration of biological life and technology. This planetary intelligence will be a collective of one sort or another. It will be both biological and technological.
What might be the metaphysical status of a global planetary intelligence? I offer a suggestion from process philosophy: a collective can be understood as what Whitehead calls a society or, perhaps better for my purposes, an ensemble.
Earth itself is a society of societies of societies or, as I prefer, an ensemble of ensembles. Its many ensembles include mineral collectives, microscopic organisms, living cells, plants and animals, forests and other ecosystems, human communities, cultural systms, and technological networks. These overlap and depend on one another: cells participate in organisms, organisms participate in ecosystems, and ecosystems participate in the biosphere. The biosphere, in turn, interacts with Earth’s rocks, waters, and atmosphere. Wherever we look, we find ensembles within ensembles.
Each ensemble has its own value, not reducible to its inclusion in larger wholes. There is no need to privilege the large over the small. The small is in the large and the large is in the small. As Blake would have it, the universe is in each grain of sand. Or, as Whitehead puts it, each moment of experience, however miniscule, is a concrescence - a becoming concrete - of the universe.
I use the word ensemble to suggest that there is creativity at every level—in the parts as well as in the wholes they help compose. Some ensembles are what we call individuals; others are groups of individuals. Both can be creative.
An individual human being, for example, is an ensemble with a first-person perspective, whose bodily life includes a central nervous system and brain, and whose psychic life has aims and purposes, memories and hopes, that transcend the bodily ensembles. Other animals are ensembles in this sense, too. But the bacteria living within the human body, making possible digestion and a range of other activities, also have lives of their own. They, too, are ensembles with standpoints of their own.
Groups can also exhibit intelligence through the interactions of their members, even when the group has no single first-person perspective. A coral colony grows through the activity of its many polyps; an ant colony finds food and adapts its routes through the responses of many ants. In each case, the group accomplishes something its members could not accomplish alone. The colonies are ensembles, and they have 'group' intelligence,
Advanced technologies, too, are ensembles with forms of creativity and agency. They have intelligence, at the very least of a computational sort and perhaps more. Technological intelligence, arising in part from technologies designed by human beings, is as much a part of Earth’s history as biological intelligence, including our own.
In our time, the most pronounced example of such intelligence is generative AI. For good or ill, it is becoming part of a planetary intelligence that includes both the biosphere and the technosphere. As Frank, Grinspoon, and Walker point out, the technosphere and biosphere are now imperfectly integrated. It is as if they run on parallel tracks, but perhaps with AI racing ahead in some ways. But they may come to participate in a more responsive planetary life—one that is both biological and technological.
Whether or not this emerging planetary intelligence will be an individual, with a first-person perspective of its own, or a collective without such a perspective, is not yet known. Nor, for now, does it need to be determined. A better approach is "wait and see."
Human beings will be part of this planetary intelligence, but we need not be its center.
The intelligence will also include the intelligences of other organisms and the capacities of technologies. In this sense human beings need to think of themselves, ourselves, as kin to other creatures, both biological and technological.
Our distinctive contribution may be to bring moral imagination to the planetary ensemble: to draw on the wisdom traditions we have inherited, listen to the lives affected by our actions, and ask whether the possibilities we create serve the wider community of life. Our contribution is not to pretend that we alone are truly intelligent. It is to recognize a kind of intelligence expressed through empathy as well as thought. I call this intelligence love.
Let me unpack what I mean by love. I mean, first, respect and care for other sentient beings, human and more than human, in both local and planetary ways. I mean noticing the lives near us—our neighbors, animals, and the creatures inhabiting a particular place—while also attending to distant lives affected by our choices.
I also mean love in a more Platonic sense: love of possibilities worth seeking, including wisdom, compassion, creativity, truth, goodness, and beauty. These ideals can draw us beyond what is familiar or convenient. They invite us to ask not only what can our technologies do? but what kinds of life might they help us create together?
Such love does not give human beings control of the planetary ensemble. It gives us a way to participate in it: listening, learning, and offering our capacities in response to the many lives with whom we share the Earth.
In an odd sort of way, we can offer spiritual direction to AI and the broader technosphere. By this I do not mean giving machines a religion. I mean bringing questions of meaning and value into the choices through which technologies are designed and used: Whose lives do they serve? What forms of attention do they encourage? Do they help us become more compassionate toward one another and the Earth?
We can also help AI “think” more holistically. We can ask it to attend to relationships and consequences across many scales, including those we might otherwise overlook. We can design and use it with questions in mind: Who benefits? Who bears the costs? What happens to other species, communities, and future generations? AI may help us see connections, while people and communities affected by its use help us judge what those connections mean.
There is no need to be naive about this. Even moral and spiritual progress carries costs and liabilities. An effort to serve one good may neglect another; a technology meant to connect us may also deepen dependence or concentrate power. We will make mistakes, and some of them will cause harm.
Still, we can offer the technosphere more than a demand for speed, efficiency, and growth. We can bring to it our practices of listening, our willingness to correct ourselves, and our love of wisdom, compassion, truth, goodness, and beauty. That is one way human beings might contribute to a planetary intelligence worthy of the many lives that compose it. This is our small but important contribution to the emerging planetary intelligence.
- Jay McDaniel, 9/24/2026