Non-human intelligences: a planetary cognitive ecology

Description

Non-human intelligences: a planetary cognitive ecology

June 18 - July 2, 2026
Courses and workshops

What do we mean by intelligence? The philosopher specializing in gender and technology Toni Navarro will talk about the different forms of cognition beyond the human.
For centuries, Western tradition has tended to identify freedom exclusively with the determinants of human attributes - as reflective consciousness or abstract reasoning -, conceiving it as a strictly mental faculty, separated from the world and the environment. This anthropocentric and dualistic scheme has decisively structured philosophy and modern sciences. Tanmateix, recent research in cognitive biology, comparative neuroscience and artificial intelligence has eroded this restrictive vision: it is a broad defense that cognition can emerge in very diverse ways in heterogeneous material substrates and is manifested as a deeply relational and ecological phenomenon.

This course proposes a philosophical exploration of non-human intelligences based on the analysis of cognitive capacities present in animals, plants and animals, but also in algorithmic models, technical infrastructures and complex systems. Over the course of three sessions, the theoretical foundations, empirical evidence and ethical implications of this conceptual approach will be examined. What does it mean to conceive intelligence as part of a continuum that extends from biology to technology? How is the agency redefined from being an exclusive attribute of the human individual? Who are responsible for our relationship with other species, with technologies and with the planet?

June 18, 2026
Animal, plant and fungal intelligence

The first session will start from the Darwinian intuition according to which the difference between human mental capacities and those of other animals is of degree, and not of type. This evolutionary continuum will allow us to understand cognition as a gradual adaptation, shaped by natural selection and intimately linked to the lands, environments and lifestyles of each species. Through the analysis of paradigmatic cases - in ocells, cephalopods, insects, plants and fungi - the session will show processes of decision-making, learning and communication that can be deployed using profoundly diverse cognitive architectures, irreducible to the human standard.

June 25, 2026
Algorithmic and infrastructural intelligence

Expanding the notion of intelligence to the entire biological domain, the second session will address the possibility of attributing cognition also to algorithmic models and technical systems, placing them within the framework of our evolutionary history and current debates on the symbiosis between humans and machines. It will question the idea according to which artificial intelligence involves the imitation of the human mind, in order to analyze the displacement in models of statistical learning and predictive inference that operate without explicit semantic representation or conscious understanding. This will allow us to think about AI not as a poor copy of human intelligence, but as a form of synthetic cognition integrated into computational, energy and logistical infrastructures that operate on a global scale.

July 2, 2026
Material and planetary intelligence

The third session will expand on the field of analysis and question the traditional boundaries between matter, life and cognition. Starting from a conception that understands intelligence as an emergent property of material complexity, self-organizing processes will be explored as those that sustain the dynamic balance of terrestrial ecosystems. In this framework, astrobiology and the sciences of the Terra system allow us to approach life and intelligence as planetary phenomena, in dialogue with contemporary formulations of the Gaia hypothesis. The session will propose a multi-scalar vision of intelligence that forces us to rethink the human position within a planetary cognitive ecology.

ParticipantsToni Navarro