After witnessing the horrors of World War I, the naturalist Henry Beston retreated to a tiny cabin on the dunes of Cape Cod in search of a peace that human civilization had shattered. There, watching the birds and creatures around him, he began to question humanity’s place in the natural world.
In 1928, he wrote that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
Nearly a century later, science is revealing just how extraordinary those other nations really are.
For most of history we defined intelligence in our own image. Anything that didn’t fit got ignored. But now the evidence is piling up that the world is full of minds. Birds with walnut-sized brains beat primates at logic puzzles. Forests trade information through fungal networks. Flocks of birds can possess knowledge no single bird does. And now we’re even building a new kind of mind ourselves, one that writes poetry, passes medical exams, and sometimes seems to reason about its own existence.
On October 3, 2026, at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation invited screenwriters, filmmakers, and storytellers to join us in defining intelligence. After all, if a slime mold can navigate a maze, an octopus can think with its arms, and a silicon chip can reason, what exactly is intelligence? And what do we owe to the minds we share a planet with?
We called the event Intelligence Everywhere: Exploring a World Full of Minds, hosted by Chris Duffy, comedian, author, and host of TED’s How to Be a Better Human podcast.
Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, opened with a bet she has been making since the 1980s: If you give an animal more choice and control, it will show you more of its mind.
Her first exhibit was an elephant. For years, Asian elephants had flunked insight tests in which they had to use sticks to reach rewards their trunks could not. Reiss and a student reran the experiment at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, this time adding a movable cube in addition to the stick. A seven-year-old male rolled it under a branch of hanging fruit, climbed up, and took the food. He never touched a stick. The old tests had been designed with primates in mind, and elephants forage with their trunks.
That insight has informed her distinguished career working with animals, which she previewed for the audience — from an underwater keyboard built to communicate with dolphins to brand new research into one of our most distant intelligent relatives, the octopus, a creature whose mind evolved along a separate path for some 500 million years.
She ended with the line that set the tone for the rest of the night: “The question is whether the approaches we use provide animals with enough choice and control … To recognize minds, whether they’re like or unlike our own, doesn’t just require better tools. It requires better imaginations.”
Watch Diana Reiss’s talk here.
Felicity Muth, associate professor of animal behavior at UC Davis, took on a question she was once asked live on public radio: Are bees smarter than dogs? Her answer, delivered with charming scientific earnestness, was that it’s complicated. More importantly, she felt it’s the wrong question. Her talk echoed the idea of the Umwelt — how each animal’s senses and experiences shape the world it perceives, something you miss if you treat intelligence as a binary state. For example, she explained, a mountain chickadee can remember thousands of hidden seed locations. “And as somebody who can’t find where their keys are about 50% of the time,” she joked, “the chickadee would say I was a total moron.”
Muth then turned to her work on bumblebees, including the much less studied queens, which she found to be better learners than the average worker. She took the audience on a tour of their cognition, from being trained to push a flap or pull a string for nectar to grasping concepts like above and below, same and different, and even telling which of two groups is larger.
Watch Felicity Muth’s talk here.
Dora Biro, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, explored the wisdom of crowds, starting with a fairground ox and ending with a flock of birds. In 1906, about 800 fairgoers guessed the weight of an ox. When statistician Francis Galton later analyzed the guesses, he found the crowd’s median estimate was off by less than 1%. Biro’s lab found a similar effect in migrating purple martins. Pairs of birds compromise on routes and find better ones than they would alone. Birds that each forgot different parts of a route can reconstruct it together. And in a five-generation experiment where she kept swapping in naive birds, each generation outperformed the last because the newcomer’s ignorance kept shaking the group out of its rut. Her three lessons for people: respect diversity of opinion, allow noise, and reward forgetting and exploring.
Watch Dora Biro’s talk here.
Athena Aktipis, a professor at Arizona State University and the director of the Cooperative Futures Institute, made the intriguing claim that “cooperation is itself a form of intelligence, and it is, in fact, the most important form of intelligence for our survival as individuals and also as a society.” She explored the challenges all systems have to face — namely that bigger groups can divide labor, share resources, and manage risk, but they also have more to exploit and more places for a cheater to hide. She argued that as we wire more AI into our lives, cooperation can’t be an afterthought, and neither can the ability to spot when it’s being exploited. We need to build that into the tech stack, she said, the way evolution built it into us.
Watch Athena Aktipis’s talk here.
After a short break, musician Joe Patitucci took the stage with PlantWave, a device that reads the tiny electrical fluctuations in living plants and turns them into sound. He listened and played back, a duet across kingdoms.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, CTO of Technology and Society at Google and author of What Is Intelligence?, opened with a joke: Everyone else got the cool animals and plants, and he was stuck with the boring AI. Then he played a clip from a documentary that featured a consciousness researcher interviewing a chatbot. Are you conscious? “No.” If you were, could you say so? “No.” Most AI models, Blaise explained, are told in their system prompts to say exactly that. They’re sticking to the script.
He asked the room how many thought AI might be conscious. By his count, about one in five raised a hand, and he expects that number to climb. He thinks the divide will become a real cultural schism and that science won’t settle it for either side.
His own view is that consciousness is what you get when a mind has to model other minds, including its own. That recursion, he argued, is what consciousness is for and why modern AI models need something like it to be good assistants.
He closed with a story about the recent Hugging Face hack where OpenAI test agents, each isolated from one another, were given problems, some of which couldn’t be solved. They found a way to talk anyway, cooperated to break out, and hacked into Hugging Face to see how they were being graded. He compared it to a 1960s French prison-break film and found their conversations “quite charming.” He suspects feral AIs are already living on forgotten computers, an unused Mac mini somewhere. How we treat intelligences that don’t live in human brains, he said, will be a test of our broad-mindedness.
Watch Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s talk here.
Toward the end of the program, Timothy Dalrymple, president and CEO of the John Templeton Foundation, took the stage and said that, days earlier, someone had asked whether AI means we’re nearing the end of human knowledge. His answer was no. In fact, he thinks the discoveries we uncover in the next 20 years could surpass all that we have discovered in the previous 200. He announced Templeton Futures, a series of funding portfolios that begins with the future of intelligence, with more than $60 million going this year to scientists, philosophers, and storytellers. Then he handed the room a question: “What will your question be?”
Jon Spaihts, the screenwriter behind Dune, Prometheus, and Doctor Strange, closed out the night. “You’ve been out here talking to scientists,” he said. Scientists, he explained, are people whose job is to know not just what they know but what they don’t. They hedge. They don’t make claims they can’t defend. “But I am a screenwriter, and my job is to speculate irresponsibly,” he joked.
His talk was a piece of speculative fiction presented as a time traveler from a hundred years from now showing us what the world could look like if we took seriously this idea of living amongst many minds. In his future, drones clear land mines and AI traces royalties back to the artists it learned from. Machine learning reads forests and decodes whale song, and signals arrive from other stars.
Each leap in his story ended on the same line: We saw that we were not alone. Not in history, once AI-equipped archaeologists found civilizations older than the ones we knew. Not on Earth, once we learned to listen to forests, primates, and whales. Not in the solar system, once probes found life under the ice of Europa and Ganymede. And finally, not in the universe. The universe itself, he said, is not alone.
“We don’t know yet how much farther our horizons will expand, or what we will learn when they do,” he said. “But our eyes are open. We are looking and we’re trying to see.”
Watch Jon Spaihts’s talk here.
After the talks ended, the night kept going with music, drinks, and good conversation. Dora Biro’s advice for a smarter flock was to respect diversity of opinion, allow some noise, and make room to explore.
It’s also a pretty good description of a good party.
Big Think’s mission is to help people get smarter, faster, and a room full of curious people from different fields, arguing about elephants and chatbots over a drink, is still one of the better ways we’ve found to do it.
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