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When it comes to other animals, theres a lot of principled caution about attributing supposedly "human" concepts to apes or orca whales. When it comes to comput

When it comes to other animals, theres a lot of principled caution about attributing supposedly "human" concepts to apes or orca whales. When it comes to computers, we tend to be exceedingly cautious. For some reason that principled caution goes out the window once we start talking about plants. Here on HN I've seen folks equate photoreceptivity to consciousness, chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication", and indulge in open ended musing about the gaia hypothesis. Practically everything is game and there's no telling how seroius people are being or if they're just getting lost in their own metaphors.

_Microft 5y ago
I don’t think that there is a contradiction since I would not expect the ones who are careful with these ideas on animals and the ones suggesting them for plants to be the same people. Different people, different ideas.
- glenstein 5y ago
  Right, but I was talking about the community level rather than the individual level.
andai 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_communication See also: bacteria and fungi
- glenstein 5y ago
  I'm aware of this wiki article.
zasdffaa 5y ago
"equate photoreceptivity to consciousness" - is this any more than one or two nutters? "chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication"" - without context it may have been a perfectly reasonable supposition. "open ended musing about the gaia hypothesis" - hard to tell if it's a few or endemic without examples
- glenstein 5y ago
  Like anyone else, I am not in the position of being able safely generalize from what I've seen to what is believed by 50% + 1 of the community. I can just make inferences based on what I've experienced and what it shows about the ideas the community is comfortable entertaining. But yes, I've seen people suggest that photo-receptivity amounts to consciousness, that amoeba can feel sensation, that the human genome is complex and can be reasonably assumed to host its own form of consciousness, and that chemical exchanges between plants amounts to full fledged communication, without any limiting qualifications. >"chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication"" - without context it may have been a perfectly reasonable supposition. Perhaps I can add your endorsement of this view to the list, and we can later see if your view is brushed off belonging to a small minority of nutters.
  - zasdffaa 5y ago
    You make a claim that others are stupid, I can't dismiss it, nor can I accept it. As such I accept your evaluation as honest held, but I can't do anything with it like learn something useful from it. As for "Perhaps I can add your endorsement of this view to the list..." please be careful. Communication requires an exchange of information. If the exchange is in the form of chemicals, that's fine as communication is happening via chemical exchange. But whether chemical exchange alone IS communication is a philosophical question[1]. All I'm saying is that you may be misrepresnting or misunderstanding other people's stated position. Again, without links to read I can't judge. [1] I'd say yes it is but am open to being shown wrong. It probably depends on whether you believe conscious intent is required. I say no, others may say yes, it is needed.
calibas 5y ago
The caution about attributing "human concepts" to other animals, like emotions, empathy, language and self-awareness, comes from the religious idea that humans are "above" all the other creatures. If God created humans as some special case, then it makes sense. Not long ago, it was believed that animals (and human babies) couldn't feel pain. Nowadays it's a ridiculous notion, but it was born of the idea that a certain animal was "exceptional" among all those others and has all these special properties, granted by God, that no other animals possess. That's not a belief that should be the "scientific" default anymore.
- circlemaker 5y ago
  Not at all. The caution about attributing human concepts to other animals is that they can have an arbitrarily different brain organization in such a way that stretches those notions beyond what we usually take them to mean. Does a tiger experience joy? If it does, what does joy feel like to a tiger? Is bird song language? What are they saying? That last question is obviously begging the question, are they saying anything? Is "saying" something that more than humans can do, or when we refer to the word "say" do we only apply it to humans expressing human concepts? We don't even know if the concepts we use to describe minds are even valid, or if they are just products of introspection. This, along with the fact that other abstract aspects of the human condition are also on shaky ground when you change the underlying substrate those aspects emerge from, means that it's not clear that animals have those same exact aspects in their species-specific condition, and if they do have some similar aspects, those aspects can be quite different than what we'd find in humans, with completely different sets of states. TL;DR We hardly know if you and I see the same red, let alone if a tiger and a human feel the same joy.
  - calibas 5y ago
    > Is bird song language? What are they saying? Depends on what you mean by language. If you mean "a structured system of communication", then it absolutely is. The only modern scientific rejection of birds songs as language is based around the definition of the word "language". They're saying many different things such as "I'm ready to mate", "I'm hungry", "Stay away", "Come here", and "Predator nearby". Not only that, but birds are able to specify which kind of predator is nearby. There's a resistance to these ideas that goes beyond objective science, and it's because we were previously basing our understandings on faulty assumptions. There's even a term for it, "human exceptionalism".
hidelooktropic 5y ago
I'm surprised to see communication in the list. Maybe you meant to critique the notion those signals are tied to sentient communication?
culi 5y ago
I think you're underestimating how much scientific weight the Gaia hypothesis actually has.[0] Despite its, admittedly unfortunate, name, it's main proponents include really influential figures in biology[1][2] [0] https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one-of-its-key-sceptics https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis

_Microft 5y ago

I don’t think that there is a contradiction since I would not expect the ones who are careful with these ideas on animals and the ones suggesting them for plants to be the same people. Different people, different ideas.

glenstein 5y ago
Right, but I was talking about the community level rather than the individual level.

andai 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_communication See also: bacteria and fungi

glenstein 5y ago
I'm aware of this wiki article.

zasdffaa 5y ago

"equate photoreceptivity to consciousness" - is this any more than one or two nutters? "chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication"" - without context it may have been a perfectly reasonable supposition. "open ended musing about the gaia hypothesis" - hard to tell if it's a few or endemic without examples

glenstein 5y ago
Like anyone else, I am not in the position of being able safely generalize from what I've seen to what is believed by 50% + 1 of the community. I can just make inferences based on what I've experienced and what it shows about the ideas the community is comfortable entertaining. But yes, I've seen people suggest that photo-receptivity amounts to consciousness, that amoeba can feel sensation, that the human genome is complex and can be reasonably assumed to host its own form of consciousness, and that chemical exchanges between plants amounts to full fledged communication, without any limiting qualifications. >"chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication"" - without context it may have been a perfectly reasonable supposition. Perhaps I can add your endorsement of this view to the list, and we can later see if your view is brushed off belonging to a small minority of nutters.
- zasdffaa 5y ago
  You make a claim that others are stupid, I can't dismiss it, nor can I accept it. As such I accept your evaluation as honest held, but I can't do anything with it like learn something useful from it. As for "Perhaps I can add your endorsement of this view to the list..." please be careful. Communication requires an exchange of information. If the exchange is in the form of chemicals, that's fine as communication is happening via chemical exchange. But whether chemical exchange alone IS communication is a philosophical question[1]. All I'm saying is that you may be misrepresnting or misunderstanding other people's stated position. Again, without links to read I can't judge. [1] I'd say yes it is but am open to being shown wrong. It probably depends on whether you believe conscious intent is required. I say no, others may say yes, it is needed.

calibas 5y ago

The caution about attributing "human concepts" to other animals, like emotions, empathy, language and self-awareness, comes from the religious idea that humans are "above" all the other creatures. If God created humans as some special case, then it makes sense. Not long ago, it was believed that animals (and human babies) couldn't feel pain. Nowadays it's a ridiculous notion, but it was born of the idea that a certain animal was "exceptional" among all those others and has all these special properties, granted by God, that no other animals possess. That's not a belief that should be the "scientific" default anymore.

circlemaker 5y ago
Not at all. The caution about attributing human concepts to other animals is that they can have an arbitrarily different brain organization in such a way that stretches those notions beyond what we usually take them to mean. Does a tiger experience joy? If it does, what does joy feel like to a tiger? Is bird song language? What are they saying? That last question is obviously begging the question, are they saying anything? Is "saying" something that more than humans can do, or when we refer to the word "say" do we only apply it to humans expressing human concepts? We don't even know if the concepts we use to describe minds are even valid, or if they are just products of introspection. This, along with the fact that other abstract aspects of the human condition are also on shaky ground when you change the underlying substrate those aspects emerge from, means that it's not clear that animals have those same exact aspects in their species-specific condition, and if they do have some similar aspects, those aspects can be quite different than what we'd find in humans, with completely different sets of states. TL;DR We hardly know if you and I see the same red, let alone if a tiger and a human feel the same joy.
- calibas 5y ago
  > Is bird song language? What are they saying? Depends on what you mean by language. If you mean "a structured system of communication", then it absolutely is. The only modern scientific rejection of birds songs as language is based around the definition of the word "language". They're saying many different things such as "I'm ready to mate", "I'm hungry", "Stay away", "Come here", and "Predator nearby". Not only that, but birds are able to specify which kind of predator is nearby. There's a resistance to these ideas that goes beyond objective science, and it's because we were previously basing our understandings on faulty assumptions. There's even a term for it, "human exceptionalism".

hidelooktropic 5y ago

I'm surprised to see communication in the list. Maybe you meant to critique the notion those signals are tied to sentient communication?

culi 5y ago

I think you're underestimating how much scientific weight the Gaia hypothesis actually has.[0] Despite its, admittedly unfortunate, name, it's main proponents include really influential figures in biology[1][2] [0] https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one-of-its-key-sceptics https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis