It is a common mistake of a person to believe themselves above their environment, at least in regards to thought. Indeed, it's true that most animals cannot compare to the human mind, and those which do compare only match a three or four-year-old. It would be absurd to expect a crow to be capable of achieving a degree, goodness forbid a doctorate.
There is, however, a glaring flaw in this argument: It presumes thinking only and exclusively pertains to animalia and nothing else, when, as a matter of fact, almost anything can think.
Let us observe how an animal can think: Electrical signals coursing through a slab of rather intricate biological material. Stripped of all fanciness and reverence, even the most complex philosophical paradigm, or thorough mathematical theorem, is little more than a specific string of electric pulses.
Seen as such, it's obvious that thought and psychology aren't limited to animals. Grass is comparable to little more than jellyfish, given it's reduced working volume; shrubbery and bushes are equivalent to fish or ants.
This is unimpressive, until one knows what to look for: Step into a forest and hear a hundred thousand invisible voices argue philosophy, history, mathematics, geology, astronomy. Hear the leaves of a pine drone on the nature of language, and listen to an oak rustle in disagreement. The thoughts of trees are carried inside them, in the form of sap and chemicals coursing through little porous layers of skin; a forest is a storm of radio spires jutting upwards dressed in leaves.
And it's them who gossip the most, telling each other of woodpeckers that patters on their bark, or termites that march through their veins, or sparrows that nest in their eaves. Rumours spread slowly like waves: Word begins in Spain, and travels neighbour-to-neighbour until reaching the valleys of Laos; or an idea is started by a South African baobab, and finally heard by a boreal pine.
The dialectic conclaves of the Amazon and Congo are deeply entrenched in complex analysis and n-dimensional polygons, while the Siberian woods are more interested in astronomical observations.
But thought is not restrained to land, either: The kelp forests of the pacific discuss the intricacies of language and etymology; the Australian reefs argue over ichtyological classifications and studies.
None of these are anything close to a hivemind, of course, the same way one wouldn't call their academic colleagues a hivemind. They mourn their deforested members; they celebrate new growths; they weather storms and winter.
And yet, trees are not the only other thing that thinks. If a mind is a collection of electric pulses between neurons, then what stops a storm - with thunder jumping between suspended water droplets - from being a mind?
Indeed, as it happens, all clouds think. Tonnes of light vapour suspended miles above the Earth, all observant and pondering the mountains, rivers, valleys, cities.
A cloud drifts over Amsterdam blown from the North Sea: It watches the canals and the people, and the plumes of pale smoke rising from the chimneys, and it looks at the workers on the port as they ready a ship to go elsewhere, farther, away back to the sea where the cloud formed.
And the cloud brings with it a humid, cold storm -- Boreas if named by the Greeks. It doesn't judge as its waters, filled with its ideas, fall and hit the stones of the pavement or disturb the waters of the canal, or as they drum on the roof of a home or wash the windows of a storefront. The cloud is uncaring (but not callous), as it ruins a clothesline set out to dry.
The cloud continues into the continent, commingling with others that drift past or through it - a thought can never be said to belong to this or that cloud; they share them all indistinctly upon hugging or kissing.
Until the cloud reaches the Alps, and in trying to vault over them, dries itself of rain and, consequently, of neurons. It will regain its humidity, once across the mountain range, but its wonderings and ideas will have already rained on Bern and Geneva. The cloud that thinks again is not the same that thought before.
Yet, further out, there's another great observer of all these cycles and events: Magnets conduct electricity, and thus, the Earth in it's immenseness thinks. It feels like someone deaf-blind -- all buildings erected on its skin, and all the trees and flowers blossoming from its soil, and all the rivers scarring the landscape in thin meandering lines. The Earth, immense and full, spends its time simply observing its inhabitants -- it doesn't fear for its destruction, it knows it'll survive all cataclysms; it still mourns every extinction, every death.
Almost all of its thoughts are grief.
Even still, further out, circling old Jove endlessly, Io imagines. In its sulphuric surface, it draws its own visions and ideas; it blows material sky-high in a vain attempt to be heard. Almost all circles with it, until snowing back to it, into its pools of boiling fire. The small rest falls in, in, in. To Jupiter, who thinks too.
Jupiter, mightiest of the gas giants, second only to the bright luminous Sun, who dismisses Io's fairytales as soon as they fall into its hydrogen-helium depths. Jupiter is hellishly, painfully, cruelly, callously, terribly lonely: A hundred-thousand miles from anything that could match it, it cannot do anything but angrily mull over its misery.
Imagine- Imagine! To be a mind of such herculean proportions, to be an octillion kilograms of neurons that have only ever known loneliness! Everything thinks - but there comes a vastness of the self that only allows to think of misery.
And in Jupiter's billions of years worth of ruminating, it never thinks to read the messages sent between its lesser siblings: Neptune convenes with Saturn, Mars and Mercury exchange geological anecdotes, all by means of carrier-comets: Halley, Caesar, Klinkenberg–Chéseaux.
It should be clear by now that planets are not the largest thinking thing: The Sun, in its brilliant shifting of electromagnetic plasma tides, is a philosopher predating even the first conceptions by the Earth or by Jupiter. The Sun is prideful and boastful: It emits its ideas and theorems shamelessly, flooding its subjects minds with its solar glory.
To go further out would be pointless: An animal's brain can only picture so many levels higher than itself. Each arm of a galaxy imagines independently, each impossibly titanic nebula is a chorus of debating luminous voices. It is not unreasonable to say the very cosmos thinks, at the sluggish speeds light allows.
How absurd is it, then, for a person to declare humans as the only thinking thing?