Bioneers: Jeremy Narby

This past weekend I went to the Bioneers Conference in Marin County. I might get to a few comments about affluent white hippies later, but in the mean time, I'll post some notes from the speakers and try to boil down their main points to just a few sentences.



The first speaker I saw was Jeremy Narby. He’s a slow talking anthropologist who aims to hold the scientific community in the same high esteem as he holds shamanistic communities around the world. Narby got his Ph.D at Stanford--mattafact he was in the same program as my dear friend Marcia Ochoa. He has lived in the Amazon for the last 15 years and has spent a good deal of time communing with the vegetable mind, sucking on tobacco paste with shamans. The basic gist of his talk was that nature, the source of life on the planet and everything that supports life in the world, is intelligent. He asserts that intelligence, intentional behavior and the capacity to know, may be a property of all forms of nature and may be fundamental to life itself. He talked about recent experiments with slime molds that can solve mazes and bees that can abstract that particular patterns result in reward, and stilt palms which walk about imperceptibly slowly foraging for sunlight, all possess a capacity to know and intend.

This area of study has caused some consternation in the scientific community; it’s been called an “awkward growth of knowledge.” It’s awkward because it requires humans to rethink our notion of intelligence, and step down from our privileged position as the only species who possesses it. We’ve got this silly idea that nature is everything in the world except humans and that humans are the only species that possess intelligence. Thus it’s conceptually difficult for us to even conceive of sentience beyond ourselves. Narby contends that it’s not nature that lacks intelligence, but our concepts.