Communing with snapping turtles

A snapping turtle I helped across the road, who was in no mood to commune

I was inspired to write this column after listening to Patti Smith’s story about her nonverbal communication with a snapping turtle during a recent NYT interview with Ezra Klein. She recounts how, when she was 5 or 6, she was taking a shortcut through the woods and came face to face with a giant snapping turtle that had crawled out of the water in front of her.

“We looked at each other for a long time and just communed. It wasn’t unnatural to me because I communed with my siblings that way, without words. As a child, it seemed totally natural to commune with an animal, a dog, a massive snapping turtle, your brother and sister, without words.”^⁠1

Her experience resonated with me: A treasured part of my life is spent communing with my pets, the wandering raven who sometimes visits, and, of course, family members and friends. I suspect it’s true for many of you reading this post. And we can do it in so many ways.

We can communicate without words through body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. We can also commune with one another on a deeper emotional level through empathetic nonverbal communication, which fosters a sense of connection, understanding, and acceptance.

While nonverbal communication is essential for human interaction, it is incomprehensible to the binary circuits of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This poses an existential threat to the global knowledge system, according to a recent Guardian article by Deepak Dennison. “What’s at stake, then, isn’t just representation: it’s the resilience and diversity of knowledge itself.”^⁠2

First of all, every AI system now vying with each other for supremacy is based on Western, institutional models that marginalize “oral traditions, embodied practice and languages considered ‘low-resource’ in the computing world, such as Hindi or Swahili.”^⁠3

As a result, modernity’s scientific materialism is often built on foundations of shifting sand. For instance, traditional Eastern practices such as yoga, acupuncture, tai chi, and meditation were written off as quackery by Western science until their overwhelming benefits could no longer be ignored.

Another Western example of a marginalized embodied practice is the Quaker “Meeting for Worship,” which is conducted almost entirely in silence. The shared silence creates a space for participants to connect and reach a collective understanding or agreement without the need for verbal debate.

I’ve listed only a sampling of the countless human practices considered ‘low resource’ by AI. But the consequences are already clear: By excluding these systems of understanding that have developed over centuries, AI is disconnecting future generations from vast amounts of insight and wisdom that were never embedded. Yet they remain vital human ways of knowing.

Dennison raises an important question: Will we continue erasing marginalized ways of understanding through biased Western hierarchies, only to find ourselves scrambling to colonize Mars because we never learned to listen to those who knew how to live sustainably on Earth?^⁠4

Yes, that’s the truth of it for me. We are not slapdash computer simulations, but flesh-and-blood, living creatures, connected seamlessly to the earth below our feet. For me, what is most real is the touch of an intimate, the smile of a baby, the colors of a magnificent sunset, and time spent communing with my hound dog – things AI will never understand.

xxx

Footnotes:

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-patti-smith.html

² https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/nov/18/what-ai-doesnt-know-global-knowledge-collapse

³ Ibid.

⁴ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/nov/18/what-ai-doesnt-know-global-knowledge-collapse