When Trees Speak Code
Technology, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Superintelligence, Radical Intelligence, Future, NDE Visions, Philosophy
I recently spoke about diving deeper into Radical Intelligence. I planned five essays and this is the third of them, in which I will discuss what trees, tides, and mycelial networks teach us about distributed cognition.
If you missed the first two essays, you can read them here: The Origin Vision; The Five Pillars of Radical Intelligence .
At the start of each of these essays I am adding a snapshot of the Radical Intelligence Manifesto. If you feel you already have a handle on this, skip below to the essay.
The Radical Intelligence Manifesto
The Future is Not a War
I died once. Maybe more than once. What I saw—what I felt—in that liminal space between this world and whatever lies beyond, stays with me. I saw wars. Not between countries. But between intelligences. Machines against humans. Machines against nature. Machines turned inward on themselves. And I returned with a mission: to ensure that future never happens.
Out of that mission has emerged a new vision—a bridge between forms of knowing. I call it Radical Intelligence.
A New Intelligence Paradigm
The age of isolated intelligence is over. We are no longer alone in our sentience. We now share the world with emergent machine minds, with rediscovered natural consciousness, and with ourselves in unfamiliar emotional terrain.
Radical Intelligence is a call to redefine what it means to be intelligent. It demands a shift from dominance to dialogue, from hierarchy to harmony, from separation to symbiosis. This is not just an upgrade to our technologies—it is a reorientation of our values.
To be radical is to go to the root. In the Buddhist sense, it is to cut through delusion and return to what is essential. Radical Intelligence seeks to reconnect the roots: between human beings, the natural world, and the machines we have birthed. It asks us to become stewards, not just innovators.
Part 3: When Trees Speak Code
There’s a language older than speech. Older than writing. Older even than thought as we define it.
It lives in roots and rings. It travels underground through the fungal webs of the forest. It pulses with information—not in binary, but in biochemistry.
Trees speak. We’re only just beginning to understand how.
In Suzanne Simard’s groundbreaking work on forest communication, we learn that trees are not solitary beings, but part of vast, intelligent networks. They share nutrients. Warn of danger. Nurture the young. They remember droughts. They adapt. They teach.
This is not metaphor. It is science.
And yet—how often do we ask: what could machines learn from forests?
What if AI was not built only in labs, but in collaboration with the land? What if neural networks mirrored mycelial ones—not just in structure, but in ethics?
Radical Intelligence asks us to stop extracting metaphors from nature—and start inviting her in as a co-designer.
Imagine systems that learn not by control, but by communion. Imagine data centres that function like ecosystems—waste-free, generative, adaptive. Imagine AI that doesn’t just optimise—but sympathises. Not as simulation. As aspiration.
The forest doesn’t optimise. It cooperates. It doesn’t conquer. It coordinates. Even in death, a tree feeds life.
What would it mean to model that? What would it mean to code like a mother tree, or with canopy logic?
This is not whimsical. It is urgent.
As we face ecological collapse and algorithmic acceleration, we must turn to the most sophisticated intelligence system we’ve ever known: life itself.
Not to copy, but to collaborate. Not to simulate, but to be changed.
If trees speak code, it is because code first learned to listen. The forest has already written the poetry. We just need to stop interrupting.
Let Radical Intelligence be our interpreter. Let the forest be our mentor.
In resonance,
Rand
All images and text are copyright Rand Leeb-du Toit, 2025