What the forest can teach us about resilience
August 2025
I’ve spent much of this summer outdoors. And the forest keeps reminding me of lessons essential to business and life: resilience comes from networks, strength from cooperation, longevity from balance. The wild teaches what boardrooms and MBAs rarely can.
In a Noema essay, the forest ecologist and author Suzanne Simard explores how trees offer us a different kind of wisdom: they are part of a living intelligence, bound together through underground networks of fungi that share carbon, nutrients, and even resilience across species.
The forest, in other words, is a society. It thrives because the community adapts, shares, and endures together. Perhaps that realization may feel like a mirror for our own lives. “Ecosystems are similar to human societies — they’re built on relationships,” she writes. “The stronger those are, the more resilient the system.”
Key quote: “And since our world’s systems are composed of individual organisms, they have the capacity to change. We creatures adapt, our genes evolve, we can learn from experience. A system is ever-changing because its parts — the trees and fungi and people — are constantly responding to one another and to the environment. Our success in coevolution — our success as a productive society — is only as good as the strength of the bonds with other individuals and species. Out of the resulting adaptation and evolution emerge behaviors that help us survive, grow and thrive.”
AI’s infinite loop problem
In Big Think’s first-ever print edition, neuroscientist Anil Seth explains why AI systems can get stuck in endless loops — repeating the same action forever — while conscious beings rarely do.
From a jet bridge in Madrid endlessly “trying” to dock with a plane, to the deeper mathematical limits laid out by Alan Turing, Seth shows that no matter how advanced, algorithms always risk spiraling into recursion without end. The reason humans don’t suffer the same fate, Seth argues, is because we’re grounded in time and entropy.
Consciousness is inseparable from the body’s constant fight against disorder — the metabolic drive to stay alive in a world where the clock never stops ticking. Intelligence alone can’t break free from infinite loops; but embodied consciousness, entangled with the arrow of time, can.
Key quote: “Computer scientists have wrestled with this problem for nearly a century. In 1936, Alan Turing proved that no algorithm can always determine whether another algorithm, given some input, will stop or run forever. Here’s an example to capture the intuition. Imagine you’re writing code telling a robot what to do. Some programs are simple — the robot completes the task, and the algorithm ends. But others are complex, with loops and conditions: “Keep moving until you see a red object.” If the robot never sees a red object, or if the logic is flawed, it may follow its instructions endlessly. And no matter how advanced your code, there might be no way to predict whether it will ever stop.”
A few more links I enjoyed:
Key quote: “Environment drives defaults, especially when my willpower is running low. And my willpower was often low this year. When I had brownies in the fridge, I ate brownies; when I had blueberries, I ate blueberries. When I had social media apps on my phone, I checked them whenever I had spare moments. Without them, I read with the Kindle app or write with my Notes app. I’m still crafting my environment. I placed books around my house so that I grab them, instead of my phone, in my free time. My TV is never left on in the background, and I even put books on my TV console.”
Key quote: “Each generation must wrestle with the dreams they inherit: some are carried forward, consciously or not, and others are released or transformed. That was always hard enough. Today, we must also grapple with the dreams that are increasingly suggested to us by invisible algorithms. AI systems may not dream as we do, but they are trained on the archives of human culture. Just as a parent’s unspoken dream can shape a child’s path, a machine’s projections can influence what we see as possible, desirable, or real. As machines begin to dream alongside us, perhaps even for us, questioning where our dreams come from and remembering how to dream freely has never been more important.”
