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What Counts as Intelligence? Notes from Our First Session

We began today (Oct 28) with a seemingly simple question:

What is intelligence?

The answers came quickly: the ability to think, to reflect, to learn. Processing and retaining information. Pattern recognition. Learning from empirical evidence. Problem-solving. Memory. Agency. Self-awareness. Emotional intelligence. Even artificial intelligence came up—that strange mirror we hold up to ourselves, trying to figure out what makes us “us.”

Someone said “mind.” Someone else said “desire versus self-awareness,” which sparked the thought of whether you need to be conscious of your desires to be intelligent, or whether desire itself is a form of intelligence.

What struck me was how much of what we named assumes a human model. A brain. A nervous system. Individual consciousness. Language. The ability to measure and be measured (someone mentioned IQ, and we paused on that—intelligence as something quantifiable, testable, rankable).

But then the conversation shifted when I asked: What if intelligence doesn’t look like this at all?

The Hierarchies We Don’t See

In small groups, I asked students to think about forms of knowledge (or intelligence or experience) that get dismissed because they don’t fit Western frameworks. The examples that emerged were striking:

Oral traditions preserve and transmit knowledge across generations through storytelling and embodied practice—but they get labeled “folklore” instead of “knowledge systems.” Writing, apparently, makes knowledge more legitimate. The medium determines the status.

Experiential knowledge—the kind built over generations through practice and observation—gets dismissed when researchers arrive demanding “data” and “studies.” “We’ve done this for generations and it works” doesn’t count the same way as knowledge produced through specific scientific protocols, even when it’s equally accurate.

I raised the question of household care work as intelligence—the complex, adaptive, multi-tasking labor that gets devalued because it’s associated with women and the domestic sphere. Someone talked about regional intelligence—how certain ways of knowing get marked as provincial, unsophisticated, tied to place rather than universal.

I called into thought thinking about children, too. About how their ways of knowing and learning get dismissed as “not yet fully developed” rather than recognized as legitimately different.

The pattern became clear: there’s a hierarchy. At the top maybe: Western, written, scientific, rational, individual, male, urban, measurable. Everything else gets pushed to the margins—mystical, traditional, folkloric, emotional, collective, feminine, regional, immeasurable.

Plants at the Bottom of the Hierarchy

If oral traditions get dismissed because they’re not written, plants are even further down the hierarchy—they don’t have language at all. Or have they? They communicate through chemicals, through slow growth patterns, through means we can barely perceive because they operate on timescales that aren’t human.

For decades, botanists who talked about plant “behavior” or plant “intelligence” risked their careers. It wasn’t considered real science. It sounded mystical, unserious, like you were anthropomorphizing—projecting human qualities onto non-human beings.

This is whatt Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters is going to confront us with: What if the problem isn’t that scientists were anthropomorphizing plants? What if the problem is that our frameworks for understanding intelligence were too narrow to hold what plants—and other forms of life—actually are?

Pea seedlings can hear water flowing underground and grow toward it. Tomato plants being eaten by caterpillars can fill their leaves with chemicals so bitter the caterpillars start eating each other instead. Plants remember. They make decisions. They communicate with each other through vast underground networks.

These aren’t metaphors. This is what plants do.

And scientists are now stuck. They can’t use their normal language—”the plant decides,” “the plant communicates”—because that sounds anthropomorphic. But passive language—”the plant is affected by,” “a chemical process occurs”—doesn’t capture what’s actually happening either.

They need new language. New concepts. New frameworks.

Which means admitting their old frameworks were limited all along.

The Translation Move

It happens all the time: a researcher encounters a concept from another tradition and says, “Oh, what you call X is really just what we call Y in psychology/biology/philosophy.” As if the (often) “Western” or “civilized” or “educated” term is the truth and the other term is just a confused or poetic version of it.

It’s a power move. It assumes one framework is universal and all others are local. It assumes one way of knowing is objective and all others are cultural. It assumes that if we can translate something into “Western” terms, we’ve understood it—when really, we might have just flattened it into something our frameworks can hold.

This is exactly what’s been happening with plants. For centuries, we’ve insisted they must fit into our categories: alive but not conscious, responsive but not intelligent, reactive but not agentic.

And now those categories are breaking.

What Else Have We Been Wrong About?

This is why I think The Light Eaters matters beyond botany. It’s a case study in what happens when your frameworks can’t hold what you’re encountering.

If we’ve been wrong about plant intelligence—not because plants weren’t intelligent, but because our definition of intelligence was too narrow—what else have we been wrong about?

What other forms of intelligence have we dismissed? What other ways of knowing have we marginalized? Whose voices have we failed to hear because we don’t have the language to listen?

The question isn’t just about plants. It’s about the hierarchies we construct and defend, often without realizing it. It’s about who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, intelligence, consciousness, agency.

It’s about power masquerading as objectivity.

A Provocation for the Weeks Ahead

As you read The Light Eaters over the next six weeks, I want you to sit with this discomfort:

What if everything you think you know about intelligence is based on a framework that was designed to exclude certain forms of knowing?

Not to discard your knowledge—but to recognize its limits. To see how your frameworks shape what you can and cannot see.

Pay attention to the moments when the book makes you defensive. When you want to say “but that’s not really intelligence” or “but that’s just a chemical process” or “but they don’t have consciousness like we do.”

Those moments of resistance? That’s where the thinking starts.

And here’s the second provocation, the one that connects to everything we discussed today:

How might recognizing plant intelligence change how you think about other forms of knowledge that get dismissed as “not really” intelligent, scientific, or authoritative?

If we can recognize that plants have been intelligent all along and we just couldn’t see it, what else have we failed to see? What other hierarchies might need to collapse?

Until November

We won’t meet again until November 25th. Six weeks to live with this book. Six weeks to let it unsettle you.

Don’t rush it. Don’t try to “master” it or take notes for a test. Just read it like you’d read something that might genuinely change how you see the world.


Next session: November 25, 10am-2pm Question: “What in this book made you most uncomfortable? What assumption about intelligence, communication, or agency did it disturb?”


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (28. Oktober 2025). What Counts as Intelligence? Notes from Our First Session. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 20. April 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/1520c


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