6 ms·

Plants communicate, nurture their seedlings, and get stressed

225 points by dnetesn 7y ago

MayeulC 7y ago
What is intelligence anyways? We tend to define it based on ours. But how about collective intelligence? Other forms of intelligence? More specifically, there are two things that bother me with the way we usually look at intelligence: time scale, and individuality. To assess intelligence, we often look at individuals, not at the group. And we tend to do it on our own time scales. But I wouldn't be surprised if the "individual" you have to assess is the ant colony, not the ants themselves. And who is to say that rocks aren't smart? Have you observed them over hundreds of millennia? (I'm just kidding about the last one, though the question is still theoretically valid).
- shard972 7y ago
  The ability to conceptualize abstract concepts?
- wukerplank 7y ago
  A few years ago I came accross Systems Theory[1] that seems to explain phenomena (like ant colonies) quite well. But I think they call "systems of higher order" or "emergence", not collective intelligence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  I think we humans commonly use the word “intelligence” as a placeholder for human-like ability to learn new skills, absorb new knowledge, process said information to filter/transform it, and the ability to apply it. It might help to distinguish effectiveness or usefulness from these capabilities - trees are effective in reproducing and useful perhaps, as are insects. But we wouldn’t consider them to be intelligent per my prior definition, unless you consider their species’ changes in response to selective pressure to be semantically similar to human intelligence. However such changes are passive not deliberate/active/intentional, and so I don’t count them as intelligence. Ultimately it’s just about our definition and semantics.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    > However such changes are passive not deliberate/active/intentional This is a subjective interpretation. Human "intention" is informed by selective pressures as well, both those that have etched themselves into our genetics and those that have influenced mental development.
- proc0 7y ago
  DUNE has a perfect example for those familiar. The most intelligent being can see multiple timelines and can shape civilizations over millenia. The more intelligent you are the more you can predict the future and plan accordingly. This isn't to say trees or plants can't be intelligent, but I think in order for that to happen the amount of information processing would have to be comparable, so maybe at best some slow, distributed process that has triggers more so than an internal model of the world.
- cicero 7y ago
  There are all kinds of intelligence. What is unique about human intelligence, which has been known since Aristotle, is our ability to recognize abstractions and make generalizations, which then leads to human language. Various plants and animals might react to red things, but we can abstract red as a color, thinking and talking about it as separate from the things that are red.
  - mnem 7y ago
    The difficulty with that reasoning is that you can say that you can abstract red, but you can't definitely state that I can abstract red any more than other animals may. Interestingly, we're starting to find evidence for grammatical rules in other animal languages: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20615-first-evidence-that-birds-tweet-using-grammar/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20615-first-evidence-...
  - jbotz 7y ago
    What you say has been "known since Aristotle" appears to be wrong. There is really no evidence that this ability, or any cognitive ability, is "unique to humans". Yes, humans have more of this ability to "recognize abstractions and make generalizations" than pretty much any other species on this planet, but it is not unique to humans. In the contrary, there is lots of evidence that generalization and some amount of abstraction are fundamental to all forms of problem-solving (and "all life is problem-solving") and that the fundamental neural mechanisms that lead to these capacities are no different in quality between different species, just in quantity. This is being demonstrated in objective research again and again... there is no cognitive capacity we humans have that you can point to and say "this is totally different, no other animal has anything like this." Yes, your linguist abilities are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than those of most other animals, but even there it is only a matter of degree, not of a fundamental kind. For a very good treatment of this subject by a highly respected primatologist, see Frans de Waal's recent books. But he isn't alone... until fairly recently it was taboo to say that animals are "intelligent" or "conscious" or "sentient", but this is thankfully beginning to change, and among the current generation of biologists, ethologists and animal cognitive psychologists many consider the notion that animals aren't sentient to be outmoded, or as Frans de Waal puts it, "anthropodenial". But there is one thing that makes us truly different from all other animals and it's only indirectly related to cognition: for better or for worse we are the only animal that uses and controls fire. It's fire that really defines humans, not our big brains (and fire probably came first; cooking made our calorically expensive large brains possible). And it is fire that may be the end of us, as well.
- detcader 7y ago
  I am wondering if this question puts the cart before the horse. Can we first ask: why is intelligence the thing that makes a living being valuable and worthy of respect? What about being a part of something bigger than itself? Being consistent, strong, rooted, and durable? Being non-judgmental or generous? Happy to exist in stillness right where it is? From the Tao Te Ching to Chris Arnade's "Dignity" I really have found many reasons to become disillusioned with "intelligence" as a virtue.
- carapace 7y ago
  You might like a couple of books by Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" and "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity" He explores the idea that evolution and thought are the same phenomenon, and that what we call "mind" is ambient.
  - bsmitty5000 7y ago
    Thank you for this, I love good book recommendations.
  - bcbrown 7y ago
    Fantastic books. I highly recommend Mind and Nature.
  - MayeulC 7y ago
    Thank you, I will try to read them when time permits. I forgot to mention evolution in my post, but that's part of the point. Our genes seem like a very long-term memory, trough them species (including ours) can learn new strategies over millennia. I asked my father the very thing I wrote above, and he answered that intelligence was the ability to reuse previously acquired knowledge in a given context. Which would seem fitting, if a bit stretching.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  Leo Gura of Actualized.org has a really great lecture on what intelligence is that sort of breaks the bounds of other previous explanations of intelligence I've heard. It's available on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQSUu2CRRBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQSUu2CRRBE I only post this because it's a direct answer to the question, What is intelligence, and I find it to be a rather deep explanation compared to many others.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Intelligence is adaptation on the timescale of minutes. Trees are too slow to be technically intelligent. Although on a larger timescale what they are is indistinguishable from intelligence.
adelHBN 7y ago
A company in No.Cal. (Santa Rosa) specializes in forest therapy. I think they've been expanding and doing special trips to places like the forest in Costa Rica.
drbojingle 7y ago
I'm going to severely underestimate anything that lets me cut it down and turn it in to matches.
detcader 7y ago
> Is that an _emotional_ response? I guess it is. But I can hear my botanist side saying, “That’s not an emotion. That’s just a response.” But I think we can draw these parallels. It comes down to language again, to how we apply this language to look at these responses in plants. ... [W]hen you go and whack off the top of a plant ... Its genes respond. It starts producing these chemicals. How is that different than us all of a sudden producing a whole bunch of norepinephrine? > Indigenous people have long known that plants will communicate with each other. This is... postmodernist in the colloquial sense, and then straight-up Noble Savage theory? I truly believe that we can't fuck-yea-science ourselves into better respecting and spending more time with trees and nature. This will never catch on, and I hope I'm right.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  Would be great if TFA elaborated on just how they "knew" such a thing.
carapace 7y ago
See also "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 Michael Levin's lab are uncovering the physical scientific basis for what a lot of people have always known: life thinks. - - - - Now then, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou > Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways: > 1. The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience. > 2. The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds. We need to learn to relate to Nature as I-Thou (not I-It.) The vast majority of our problem right now is our divorce from Nature and our attempt to relate to Her as I-It. The good news is that it's fun and easy to return to Nature (and, as Geoff Lawton says, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden.) I recommend Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos: http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ esp. "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture".
- squidsurfer 7y ago
  "I Thou" Reminds me also of Roger Scruton's writing on the subject. Here Scruton backs up Buber's description the "I Thou" relationship as precisely the thing that separates us from the natural order. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/opinion/if-we-are-not-just-animals-what-are-we.html?ref=opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/opinion/if-we-are-not-jus... As far as plants, I think its a mistake to anthropomorphize them like this. They have no ability to enter into an "I Thou" relationship because they have no concept of "I". Modern philosophies that disregard the special place in nature of Man, and deny Man's nature, are a mess and lead to some pretty horrible outcomes, such as the dehumanization of undesirable groups.
  - carapace 7y ago
    I don't see the line of thinking from anthropomorphizing plants to dehumanizing humans. If anything the experience of getting in touch with Nature forms a powerful and undeniable basis for loving other humans, due to our shared existence within the unifying web of life. In any event, I'm not anthropomorphizing plants, quite the opposite: I'm pointing out that humans are the anthropomorphization of the ambient natural "processing power" of living intelligence. Without getting into to metaphysics of identity and the subjective "I"†, there is a result in cybernetics to wit: "every good regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that system." Ergo, in a system under evolution we should expect models of systems to appear in those systems. In other words, a self-concept (of some kind) should develop in any stable evolving system. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Regulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Regulator http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Conant_Ashby.pdf http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Conant_Ashby.pdf So you have a system that includes many "I"'s and each of them is "running on" the same biological "wetware", so it's really not at all strange that they can communicate with each other, eh? From my POV, this is filling in the scientific story for phenomenon that are common knowledge. There has been to time or place in human history without some people understanding and practicing the I-Thou relationship with Nature. †(Gurdjieff distinguished humans from animals and plants as being "Three-brained" beings, as contrasted with "Two-" and "One-brained" beings. Unity of the subjective "I" and God is a foundation of, e.g. Hinduism: "Atman is Paramatman." That "I" of consciousness is the "I" of all beings, including plants, animals, and ecosystems, as well as the Whole Earth.) - - - - Er, FWIW... > To cut the story short: By speaking in the first person we can make statements about ourselves, answer questions, and engage in reasoning and advice in ways that bypass all the normal methods of discovery. As a result, we can participate in dialogues founded on the assurance that, when you and I both speak sincerely, what we say is trustworthy: We are “speaking our minds.” This is the heart of the I-You encounter. This is incorrect. Scruton has failed to sound the depths of "I-Thou", "a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds". There is nothing linguistic in it. No boundary. As an example, consider that you can be in the "I-Thou" relationship with an infant.
kleer001 7y ago
Except it's not really the trees, it's the trees and the mycelial network, well, mostly the mushrooms.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  And humans are 1-3% microbes. Nothing stands alone in nature.
  - junky228 7y ago
    On top of that, aren't there a bunch of studies or something that says our microbiome can affect emotions as well as what kinds of food we like to eat?
  - bsmitty5000 7y ago
    If by microbes you mean bacteria. Maybe we also contain fungus as well though. And actually, if you're looking at cell count our cells are outnumbered by about 10:1, it's incredible!
    - throwaway_law 7y ago
      Yes the human microbiome consists of fungus in addition to bacteria, protozoa and viruses.
psilocipher 7y ago
Wow, you all are absolutely insane. Seriously. You're nuts. I'm completely willing to believe that plants are intelligent, but exist in such completely different context from humans that we dismiss them as inanimate objects. Time passes differently for plants. They have different sensory perception, etc. But what are you talking about with all this "I, it, thou" nonsense? Maybe it's me, in fact I'm sure you all will say it's me. But my gosh. Is there something in the water (or lack thereof) in California?

225 points by dnetesn 7y ago

What is intelligence anyways? We tend to define it based on ours. But how about collective intelligence? Other forms of intelligence? More specifically, there are two things that bother me with the way we usually look at intelligence: time scale, and individuality. To assess intelligence, we often look at individuals, not at the group. And we tend to do it on our own time scales. But I wouldn't be surprised if the "individual" you have to assess is the ant colony, not the ants themselves. And who is to say that rocks aren't smart? Have you observed them over hundreds of millennia? (I'm just kidding about the last one, though the question is still theoretically valid).

shard972 7y ago
The ability to conceptualize abstract concepts?
wukerplank 7y ago
A few years ago I came accross Systems Theory[1] that seems to explain phenomena (like ant colonies) quite well. But I think they call "systems of higher order" or "emergence", not collective intelligence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory
throwawaysea 7y ago
I think we humans commonly use the word “intelligence” as a placeholder for human-like ability to learn new skills, absorb new knowledge, process said information to filter/transform it, and the ability to apply it. It might help to distinguish effectiveness or usefulness from these capabilities - trees are effective in reproducing and useful perhaps, as are insects. But we wouldn’t consider them to be intelligent per my prior definition, unless you consider their species’ changes in response to selective pressure to be semantically similar to human intelligence. However such changes are passive not deliberate/active/intentional, and so I don’t count them as intelligence. Ultimately it’s just about our definition and semantics.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > However such changes are passive not deliberate/active/intentional This is a subjective interpretation. Human "intention" is informed by selective pressures as well, both those that have etched themselves into our genetics and those that have influenced mental development.
proc0 7y ago
DUNE has a perfect example for those familiar. The most intelligent being can see multiple timelines and can shape civilizations over millenia. The more intelligent you are the more you can predict the future and plan accordingly. This isn't to say trees or plants can't be intelligent, but I think in order for that to happen the amount of information processing would have to be comparable, so maybe at best some slow, distributed process that has triggers more so than an internal model of the world.
cicero 7y ago
There are all kinds of intelligence. What is unique about human intelligence, which has been known since Aristotle, is our ability to recognize abstractions and make generalizations, which then leads to human language. Various plants and animals might react to red things, but we can abstract red as a color, thinking and talking about it as separate from the things that are red.
- mnem 7y ago
  The difficulty with that reasoning is that you can say that you can abstract red, but you can't definitely state that I can abstract red any more than other animals may. Interestingly, we're starting to find evidence for grammatical rules in other animal languages: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20615-first-evidence-that-birds-tweet-using-grammar/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20615-first-evidence-...
- jbotz 7y ago
  What you say has been "known since Aristotle" appears to be wrong. There is really no evidence that this ability, or any cognitive ability, is "unique to humans". Yes, humans have more of this ability to "recognize abstractions and make generalizations" than pretty much any other species on this planet, but it is not unique to humans. In the contrary, there is lots of evidence that generalization and some amount of abstraction are fundamental to all forms of problem-solving (and "all life is problem-solving") and that the fundamental neural mechanisms that lead to these capacities are no different in quality between different species, just in quantity. This is being demonstrated in objective research again and again... there is no cognitive capacity we humans have that you can point to and say "this is totally different, no other animal has anything like this." Yes, your linguist abilities are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than those of most other animals, but even there it is only a matter of degree, not of a fundamental kind. For a very good treatment of this subject by a highly respected primatologist, see Frans de Waal's recent books. But he isn't alone... until fairly recently it was taboo to say that animals are "intelligent" or "conscious" or "sentient", but this is thankfully beginning to change, and among the current generation of biologists, ethologists and animal cognitive psychologists many consider the notion that animals aren't sentient to be outmoded, or as Frans de Waal puts it, "anthropodenial". But there is one thing that makes us truly different from all other animals and it's only indirectly related to cognition: for better or for worse we are the only animal that uses and controls fire. It's fire that really defines humans, not our big brains (and fire probably came first; cooking made our calorically expensive large brains possible). And it is fire that may be the end of us, as well.
detcader 7y ago
I am wondering if this question puts the cart before the horse. Can we first ask: why is intelligence the thing that makes a living being valuable and worthy of respect? What about being a part of something bigger than itself? Being consistent, strong, rooted, and durable? Being non-judgmental or generous? Happy to exist in stillness right where it is? From the Tao Te Ching to Chris Arnade's "Dignity" I really have found many reasons to become disillusioned with "intelligence" as a virtue.
carapace 7y ago
You might like a couple of books by Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" and "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity" He explores the idea that evolution and thought are the same phenomenon, and that what we call "mind" is ambient.
- bsmitty5000 7y ago
  Thank you for this, I love good book recommendations.
- bcbrown 7y ago
  Fantastic books. I highly recommend Mind and Nature.
- MayeulC 7y ago
  Thank you, I will try to read them when time permits. I forgot to mention evolution in my post, but that's part of the point. Our genes seem like a very long-term memory, trough them species (including ours) can learn new strategies over millennia. I asked my father the very thing I wrote above, and he answered that intelligence was the ability to reuse previously acquired knowledge in a given context. Which would seem fitting, if a bit stretching.
mikelyons 7y ago
Leo Gura of Actualized.org has a really great lecture on what intelligence is that sort of breaks the bounds of other previous explanations of intelligence I've heard. It's available on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQSUu2CRRBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQSUu2CRRBE I only post this because it's a direct answer to the question, What is intelligence, and I find it to be a rather deep explanation compared to many others.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
Intelligence is adaptation on the timescale of minutes. Trees are too slow to be technically intelligent. Although on a larger timescale what they are is indistinguishable from intelligence.

adelHBN 7y ago

A company in No.Cal. (Santa Rosa) specializes in forest therapy. I think they've been expanding and doing special trips to places like the forest in Costa Rica.

drbojingle 7y ago

I'm going to severely underestimate anything that lets me cut it down and turn it in to matches.

detcader 7y ago

> Is that an _emotional_ response? I guess it is. But I can hear my botanist side saying, “That’s not an emotion. That’s just a response.” But I think we can draw these parallels. It comes down to language again, to how we apply this language to look at these responses in plants. ... [W]hen you go and whack off the top of a plant ... Its genes respond. It starts producing these chemicals. How is that different than us all of a sudden producing a whole bunch of norepinephrine? > Indigenous people have long known that plants will communicate with each other. This is... postmodernist in the colloquial sense, and then straight-up Noble Savage theory? I truly believe that we can't fuck-yea-science ourselves into better respecting and spending more time with trees and nature. This will never catch on, and I hope I'm right.

mieseratte 7y ago
Would be great if TFA elaborated on just how they "knew" such a thing.

carapace 7y ago

See also "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 Michael Levin's lab are uncovering the physical scientific basis for what a lot of people have always known: life thinks. - - - - Now then, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou > Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways: > 1. The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience. > 2. The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds. We need to learn to relate to Nature as I-Thou (not I-It.) The vast majority of our problem right now is our divorce from Nature and our attempt to relate to Her as I-It. The good news is that it's fun and easy to return to Nature (and, as Geoff Lawton says, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden.) I recommend Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos: http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ esp. "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture".

squidsurfer 7y ago
"I Thou" Reminds me also of Roger Scruton's writing on the subject. Here Scruton backs up Buber's description the "I Thou" relationship as precisely the thing that separates us from the natural order. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/opinion/if-we-are-not-just-animals-what-are-we.html?ref=opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/opinion/if-we-are-not-jus... As far as plants, I think its a mistake to anthropomorphize them like this. They have no ability to enter into an "I Thou" relationship because they have no concept of "I". Modern philosophies that disregard the special place in nature of Man, and deny Man's nature, are a mess and lead to some pretty horrible outcomes, such as the dehumanization of undesirable groups.
- carapace 7y ago
  I don't see the line of thinking from anthropomorphizing plants to dehumanizing humans. If anything the experience of getting in touch with Nature forms a powerful and undeniable basis for loving other humans, due to our shared existence within the unifying web of life. In any event, I'm not anthropomorphizing plants, quite the opposite: I'm pointing out that humans are the anthropomorphization of the ambient natural "processing power" of living intelligence. Without getting into to metaphysics of identity and the subjective "I"†, there is a result in cybernetics to wit: "every good regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that system." Ergo, in a system under evolution we should expect models of systems to appear in those systems. In other words, a self-concept (of some kind) should develop in any stable evolving system. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Regulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Regulator http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Conant_Ashby.pdf http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Conant_Ashby.pdf So you have a system that includes many "I"'s and each of them is "running on" the same biological "wetware", so it's really not at all strange that they can communicate with each other, eh? From my POV, this is filling in the scientific story for phenomenon that are common knowledge. There has been to time or place in human history without some people understanding and practicing the I-Thou relationship with Nature. †(Gurdjieff distinguished humans from animals and plants as being "Three-brained" beings, as contrasted with "Two-" and "One-brained" beings. Unity of the subjective "I" and God is a foundation of, e.g. Hinduism: "Atman is Paramatman." That "I" of consciousness is the "I" of all beings, including plants, animals, and ecosystems, as well as the Whole Earth.) - - - - Er, FWIW... > To cut the story short: By speaking in the first person we can make statements about ourselves, answer questions, and engage in reasoning and advice in ways that bypass all the normal methods of discovery. As a result, we can participate in dialogues founded on the assurance that, when you and I both speak sincerely, what we say is trustworthy: We are “speaking our minds.” This is the heart of the I-You encounter. This is incorrect. Scruton has failed to sound the depths of "I-Thou", "a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds". There is nothing linguistic in it. No boundary. As an example, consider that you can be in the "I-Thou" relationship with an infant.

kleer001 7y ago

Except it's not really the trees, it's the trees and the mycelial network, well, mostly the mushrooms.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
And humans are 1-3% microbes. Nothing stands alone in nature.
- junky228 7y ago
  On top of that, aren't there a bunch of studies or something that says our microbiome can affect emotions as well as what kinds of food we like to eat?
- bsmitty5000 7y ago
  If by microbes you mean bacteria. Maybe we also contain fungus as well though. And actually, if you're looking at cell count our cells are outnumbered by about 10:1, it's incredible!
  - throwaway_law 7y ago
    Yes the human microbiome consists of fungus in addition to bacteria, protozoa and viruses.

psilocipher 7y ago

Wow, you all are absolutely insane. Seriously. You're nuts. I'm completely willing to believe that plants are intelligent, but exist in such completely different context from humans that we dismiss them as inanimate objects. Time passes differently for plants. They have different sensory perception, etc. But what are you talking about with all this "I, it, thou" nonsense? Maybe it's me, in fact I'm sure you all will say it's me. But my gosh. Is there something in the water (or lack thereof) in California?