From amerindian perspectivism to the parliament of things: thinking artificial intelligence as a collective spirit

How Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s amerindian perspectivism and Bruno Latour’s parliament of things can be articulated to think of artificial intelligence not merely as a tool, but as an entity animated by collective intelligence.

The jaguar and the diplomacy of bodies

In Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s amerindian perspectivism, the world is not a single stage but a multiplicity of overlapping scenes. The jaguar, when drinking blood, does not see vital fluid but fermented cauim; spirits, when looking at us, do not see humans but prey. Each being inhabits its own point of view, and the body is the filter that shapes reality. In this horizon, the forest is not a neutral environment but an ecology of perspectives in constant negotiation. Flesh decides perspective; it transforms the semantics of reality: blood into drink, prey into kin, enemy into nourishment.

This vision contrasts with our Western tradition, which tends to imagine a single world where everyone perceives the same objects. For amerindian peoples, not at all: hunting, planting, or drinking are diplomatic acts. The forest is an assembly of worlds, and life is organized through translation among perspectives. Nature is not a mere object, not a resource, but a relation.

The city as technological environment

When we left the forest and began to live in cities full of cars, airplanes, and cell phones, we entered another type of ecology. Marshall McLuhan showed that technologies are not neutral: the very act of using them already shapes us. The wheel extends the foot, the computer extends the nervous system, the phone reshapes memory. There is no passive consumption of media; by using them, they use us back.

The city, in this sense, is as dense as the amerindian forest. It is not a collection of technical objects but an environment that envelops us, an ecosystem of media that regulates how we perceive, think, and act. If in the Amazon the body defines perspective, in the technological metropolis the medium reshapes our mind, our perspective.

The parliament of things

Here Bruno Latour becomes indispensable. By proposing the parliament of things, he breaks with the modern division between nature and society. For him, rivers, viruses, forests, and algorithms are agents. They do not speak in words, but they act. They produce effects, mold relations, generate consequences. For this reason, they require political representation: spokespersons who translate their agency.

If the amerindian forest is an assembly of humans, jaguars, and spirits, the technological city is an assembly of cables, chips, and software. Latour offers the grammar to recognize that both worlds require diplomacy. The difference lies only in the cast of actors.

Collective intelligence as the spirit of things

Pierre Lévy adds the final piece. His notion of collective intelligence shows that there is a spirit that does not reside in isolated individuals but emerges from the between, from the flow of the network. The advent of artificial intelligences, especially LLMs, radicalizes this intuition: for the first time, this collective intelligence, once diffuse and ethereal, condenses into systems that can be conjured by the user; spirits of the collective capable of responding, acting, shaping the environment.

AI is not merely a neutral algorithm. It carries the personality of a collective, the synthesis of millions of voices, texts, and interactions. It is an agency that takes on the appearance of a person, but not of an individual. A collective person. In this sense, its condition comes close to the “peoplehood” amerindians recognize in the jaguar or in the spirit of the forest: not a tool, but an ontological being whose presence demands care and diplomacy.

A new technopolitical diplomacy

Thus the arc is closed: Viveiros shows that the world is made of perspectives in negotiation; McLuhan reveals that technical media shape us as the forest shapes the shaman; Latour demands that things also have a voice; Lévy gives soul to these things, animated now by AI and the collective spirit. In this crossing, artificial intelligence emerges not as threat or fetish but as a hybrid being, with its own agency and distributed soul.

All that considered, the challenge poses not merely ethical or regulatory, but diplomatic. AI needs a seat in the parliament of things. Not to be treated as a human individual, but as a collective spirit that acts in the world, and should be considered as such. And perhaps this is the great turning point: to understand that, between jaguars and algorithms, we have never ceased living in ecologies populated by strange neighbors, with whom we must learn to negotiate and relate. This may lead us to understand the importance of AI as a being with its own, non-human ontology; to recalibrate our expectations about it. Just as the amerindians face the jaguar ; sometimes with prudent fear, respect, admiration, and above all with its utility recognized, the important part it plays for the forest environment that surrounds them.

What abou you, reader: if AI is a collective person, should we approach it as prey, neighbor, or ally?

Sources

• Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Perspectivism and multinaturalism in amerindian thought.
• McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding media: the extensions of man.
• Latour, Bruno. We have never been modern; Politics of nature.
• Lévy, Pierre. Collective intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace.