11 ms·

How I Started to See Trees as Smart

107 points by Petiver 4y ago

ncmncm 4y ago
When you don't need answers in a hurry, there is no need for all the thinking bits to being one place. A lot less of that is needed because everything doesn't need to be done all at once; the same bits can work on different stages of a problem. It is safer to distribute it all more or less evenly throughout the organism. The bits can do other jobs besides, when not needed for thinking with. There is no need to connect everything directly to everything else; trunking and switching is more efficient. There is no reason to think we would recognize the cells they think with, even if anybody had bothered to look. A tree can afford any amount of thinking-stuff, because running it slowly can be an arbitrarily tiny part of its energy budget: trees can afford to be very, very smart. What remains is to find how intelligence could enable reproductively advantageous adaptive behavior in trees. What could a smarter tree do to outcompete rivals? It would be foolish to assume there are no such opportunities.
- triyambakam 4y ago
  Eloquently said!
- emmelaich 4y ago
  If trees could speed up their activity a thousand-fold, they might be as smart as us. I know, definitely not, but it's a thought I amuse myself with.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    Even more amusing to consider directional of change. If we assume trees are smarter than us, and speeding it up 1000 times brought them down to our level... and conversely, if we could learn to think slower, would we be smarter?
- mellavora 4y ago
  I've been thinking about plant intelligence for over a decade (and have a neuroscience-related Ph.D.), yet never took it down the path of computation efficiency/time/energy tradeoffs as you have done. Thank you for this new perspective, including its obvious conclusion: > trees can afford to be very, very smart. Hopefully I can use some of my perspective to address your follow-on question: > What could a smarter tree do to outcompete rivals? This may represent a limited understanding of Darwinian evolution. Trees have an economy, sharing resources with each other and with other living things. Tree also are (more or less) fixed in place, thus these economic games are repeated games with known participants. They thus have a vested interest in maximizing the wealth of the community, rather than their individual wealth. They may (and studies suggest they do) have a preference for supporting their offspring over other trees, but not to the point of killing the community their offspring will also depend on. Where I am going with this. Repeated economic games are not zero-sum; the pie can get bigger. "Competition" in this setting does not look like competition in a zero-sum "I have to beat the other guy" game. What trees can do with their intelligence is learn how to build long-term stable and nuturing communities which generate substantial wealth for many members. And that this is a logical local (perhaps global) optimium.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    I wrote something along those lines, then replaced it with what I did post, just for brevity. You said it better than I would have. Mutualism is a well-proven successful strategy. There does seem more scope for intelligence in crafting positive-sum arrangements than in simply competing. (Arguably our own brains hypertrophied in response to sexual selection of better storytellers, with other results secondary.) http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf
    - popcube 4y ago
      usually, we just presume the strategies were stored in genetic level.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        We can presume, but Nature keeps her own counsel. Anywhere there is any scope for intelligent behavior and capacity to exercise it, we should expect to see nature explore that, sooner or later. I know no reason to think that could not have been done yet.
freediver 4y ago
The article provoked a thought: Only when you slow down to a thought speed of a tree, you can fully enjoy the beauty of this world.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  I can't attest to its veracity but this animal perception is discussed b In this video by musician benn Jordan https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvg242U2YfQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvg242U2YfQ
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    As I indicated in my comment there, I think Benn got this one severely wrong: --- I'm not convinced that the visual/time part of this is correct. If we follow the analogy with sonic fusion frequency ... there's a point at which a repeating sound will change from being a rythmic experience and instead becomes a pitch. So, if you are in an acoustic environment that is generally filled with pitch information, and you could somehow shift your sonic fusion frequency ... if you moved it down, even some of the non-pitch sounds will become pitches; if you move it up, some of the pitches (the lower ones) will now be perceived as rhythmns instead. But ... and this is the important part ... the actual frequencies of the sounds will not change at all. So there's a fixed physical phenomenon (acoustic pressure waves at various frequencies) which does not change, but the sonic fusion frequency determines what kind of experience we have when we encounter that phenomenon. Notice though, that it's a more or less binary switch: either we perceive N Hz as a pitch or as a rythmn, and varying the fusion frequency doesn't alter that. Nor does it various the actual physical frequencies of the sounds - they continue to be whatever they were. I suspect this is likely true for visual fusion frequencies too. Moreover, the comparison with video and/or film is misleading. In those cases, the actual phenomena are a discrete series of images that because of CFFF end up being perceived (or not) as continuous motion. But when looking at the actual world, to within the limits of our senses, ALL phenomena are continuous. If an insect flies across your field of vision, there are no distinct series of images that your brain does (or does not) fuse into continuous motion. There is only a continuous motion, which you may or may not notice (the whole thing may happen too fast for you to even register the entire pass. CFFF, if I understand correctly, is measuring how fast you need to present discrete visual information for the brain to "fuse" it into continuous information (such as motion, or a persistently "on" LED light. But this doesn't seem to have anything to do with how we and other animals perceive reality, because reality is not a series of discrete images. I don't believe that CFFF has much to do with our ability to perceive time, or even with limit questions such as "how long must something be in our visual field in order to notice that it was there". Could be that I'm missing something huge here, in which case I hope that Benn or someone else will correct me.
darkerside 4y ago
It's an interesting thought, but not a very interesting article. I guess I expected more.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
donthellbanme 4y ago
carapace 4y ago
It puts me in mind of Gibson's quote "the future is here it's just not evenly distributed yet." The folks over at Findhorn have been communicating with "nature spirits" for decades. Levin (mentioned in TFA) has shown that all cells have the machinery of thought. That is, all cells have the same biomachinery as neurons. (It's just concentrated in neurons) All tissues think.
netfl0 4y ago
Summarized in a succinct, allegorical, and atavistic way, this man has discovered the wonder of God’s creation.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  In Buddhism we might say, the immense complexity of emptiness, or the dharmakaya
  - peterburkimsher 4y ago
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      The Buddha didn't say he was coming back. The Buddha said that there would be a future Buddha at some point: Maitreya. That could be many thousands of years away. In Buddhism we forsake God, we explicitly reject Him. We reject all creation, and embrace only the dark: emptiness, in which all things are fundamentally non-distinct.
      - peterburkimsher 4y ago
        "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die"? I might not live for thousands of years, but would like to make the world a little better during this time here. "Always leave the code better than you found it." https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#the-scout-rule https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#the-scout-rule Please let's not derail this conversation into religious debate here. I love talking about philosophy, and if you'd like to talk more about absolute/relative morality, I am currently online for a video/audio/text chat on the BeWelcome chatroom. https://meet.jit.si/BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers https://meet.jit.si/BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers
        bowsamic 4y ago
blueside 4y ago
And maybe they are smarter than humans - they are playing the long game. They know they will still be here after humans wipe themselves out
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> In the game of survival, an insect’s reaction time easily beats my attempts to swat it. I may think of myself as the smartest creature in the room, but a fly can make me look foolish. This just seems completely wrong. The wrongness comes from conflating completely orthogonal concepts: speed of detection, speed of response and "smartness". The fly is very fast at detecting and responding to motion in its vicinity, but that property does not make the author look foolish, just slow. It seems like a strange mistake to make, given the article's musings on different time scales of thought in e.g. plants. If the author applied the same analysis as they do in the quote above, then obviously us humans make the trees look foolish because we can detect and react to things so quickly. I don't think they believe that about a human/tree comparison, so I have no idea why they would close an article with the same comparison and conclusion between a human and a fly.
- sgillen 4y ago
  True, but many people oppose eating even very simple animals (think clams) for ethical reasons, but have no qualms with plants. I don’t think it’s totally absurd to use the authors point to argue that maybe plants reach the level of agency of some simple animals.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    I don't disagree with that in any way. My point was that "super-fast-reacting thing makes obviously intelligent slower thing look foolish" is both an incorrect and odd conclusion to close TFA with.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      If you repeatedly swat at a fly that's obviously outclassing you in speed, you will look like a fool. Try enough times without success, and it isn't just a look. Let it land and hit it with a newspaper, flyswatter, rubber band, etc, and you'll have demonstrated your superior reasoning ability.
- doodlebugging 4y ago
CaptainPistache 4y ago
I do think trees are more evolve than us. Simply by existing, trees constantly create opportunity for life to grow. They shelter quantity of animals, feed billions of more or less microscopic living creatures (insects, mushrooms, bacteria), induce rain, create an environment with ideal climatic conditions, prevent landslides, provide us incredible useful resources (wood, fruits, substances for medication)... Not even talking about the air you're breathing. And when they die, it's another cycle of benefits that begins. Meanwhile we may have invented iPads, but as for now, we are at the exact opposite of trees and only know to live the destructive way.
top_sigrid 4y ago
While I think this was a good read, I do not like the mingling of scientific reasoning and esoteric thinking in some places. A scientist tripping on a drug has an idea for an experiment and puts it as the plant told her which is then taken as an argument for intelligence in other things than animals. Not a good argument.
- chahex 4y ago
  The thing is for people with some ESP capability it is part of their living experience that the world is more alive than what average person perceives. In such a world of feelings the material science inevitably falls short as it started with the fundamental assumption of a dead and mechanical world, which deals well with general objects but still having trouble understanding consciousness. The material science is good at dealing with material in general, but it is not the proving method that is illogical but the assumption needs to be challenged altogether
falling_ 4y ago
I don't understand the recent push to ascribe consciousness to trees. An anesthetized human being has many more allostatic and homeostasic mechanisms than a tree, and yet we don't ascribe consciousness to anesthetized humans...
peterburkimsher 4y ago
The article says: "First, I took an acid trip. Then I asked scientists about the power of altered states." Please, don't do drugs. If you play with fire, you might get burned. There is an alternative. Play with electricity! With a plasma globe. And a radiometer. What happens when you wave a plasma globe next to high-voltage power cables under a bridge, alone at night? Nothing unusual. What happened when I walked away afterwards? I felt different. Touching a tree made a grounding point. Yes, ground loops are real. DC and AC are real. Trees are smart, they grow. They're still alive. So are you and I. Let's play in this world and discover something new!
- mandmandam 4y ago
  Fire is powerful. And the war on drugs was a mistake. Fire requires caution. Matches aren't for everyone. But we don't ban lighters for adults, nor would it be smart to. The incredible health and therapeutic potential in mind altering substances has been held back long enough. It's time for facing reality; ironically enough.
chahex 4y ago
Calling it an “altered state” might be normal but misleading. Maybe what has really been altered is the state we call “normal”. Nonetheless, Itzak Bentov would probably describe it as a more evolved state, an Indian Yogi May call it “Samadhi” and according to Sadhguru JV Yoga means “Union”, a sense of unity with all that is or “Law Of One”, this is actually a most normal state for people who claimed to have realized... and this is not about being an atheist or not this is about the learned belief and probably also the choice of “separation” and the final discovery of the fact that matter is consciousness, and consciousness is matter

107 points by Petiver 4y ago

When you don't need answers in a hurry, there is no need for all the thinking bits to being one place. A lot less of that is needed because everything doesn't need to be done all at once; the same bits can work on different stages of a problem. It is safer to distribute it all more or less evenly throughout the organism. The bits can do other jobs besides, when not needed for thinking with. There is no need to connect everything directly to everything else; trunking and switching is more efficient. There is no reason to think we would recognize the cells they think with, even if anybody had bothered to look. A tree can afford any amount of thinking-stuff, because running it slowly can be an arbitrarily tiny part of its energy budget: trees can afford to be very, very smart. What remains is to find how intelligence could enable reproductively advantageous adaptive behavior in trees. What could a smarter tree do to outcompete rivals? It would be foolish to assume there are no such opportunities.

triyambakam 4y ago
Eloquently said!
emmelaich 4y ago
If trees could speed up their activity a thousand-fold, they might be as smart as us. I know, definitely not, but it's a thought I amuse myself with.
- mellavora 4y ago
  Even more amusing to consider directional of change. If we assume trees are smarter than us, and speeding it up 1000 times brought them down to our level... and conversely, if we could learn to think slower, would we be smarter?
mellavora 4y ago
I've been thinking about plant intelligence for over a decade (and have a neuroscience-related Ph.D.), yet never took it down the path of computation efficiency/time/energy tradeoffs as you have done. Thank you for this new perspective, including its obvious conclusion: > trees can afford to be very, very smart. Hopefully I can use some of my perspective to address your follow-on question: > What could a smarter tree do to outcompete rivals? This may represent a limited understanding of Darwinian evolution. Trees have an economy, sharing resources with each other and with other living things. Tree also are (more or less) fixed in place, thus these economic games are repeated games with known participants. They thus have a vested interest in maximizing the wealth of the community, rather than their individual wealth. They may (and studies suggest they do) have a preference for supporting their offspring over other trees, but not to the point of killing the community their offspring will also depend on. Where I am going with this. Repeated economic games are not zero-sum; the pie can get bigger. "Competition" in this setting does not look like competition in a zero-sum "I have to beat the other guy" game. What trees can do with their intelligence is learn how to build long-term stable and nuturing communities which generate substantial wealth for many members. And that this is a logical local (perhaps global) optimium.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  I wrote something along those lines, then replaced it with what I did post, just for brevity. You said it better than I would have. Mutualism is a well-proven successful strategy. There does seem more scope for intelligence in crafting positive-sum arrangements than in simply competing. (Arguably our own brains hypertrophied in response to sexual selection of better storytellers, with other results secondary.) http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf
  - popcube 4y ago
    usually, we just presume the strategies were stored in genetic level.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      We can presume, but Nature keeps her own counsel. Anywhere there is any scope for intelligent behavior and capacity to exercise it, we should expect to see nature explore that, sooner or later. I know no reason to think that could not have been done yet.

freediver 4y ago

The article provoked a thought: Only when you slow down to a thought speed of a tree, you can fully enjoy the beauty of this world.

LegitShady 4y ago
I can't attest to its veracity but this animal perception is discussed b In this video by musician benn Jordan https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvg242U2YfQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvg242U2YfQ
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  As I indicated in my comment there, I think Benn got this one severely wrong: --- I'm not convinced that the visual/time part of this is correct. If we follow the analogy with sonic fusion frequency ... there's a point at which a repeating sound will change from being a rythmic experience and instead becomes a pitch. So, if you are in an acoustic environment that is generally filled with pitch information, and you could somehow shift your sonic fusion frequency ... if you moved it down, even some of the non-pitch sounds will become pitches; if you move it up, some of the pitches (the lower ones) will now be perceived as rhythmns instead. But ... and this is the important part ... the actual frequencies of the sounds will not change at all. So there's a fixed physical phenomenon (acoustic pressure waves at various frequencies) which does not change, but the sonic fusion frequency determines what kind of experience we have when we encounter that phenomenon. Notice though, that it's a more or less binary switch: either we perceive N Hz as a pitch or as a rythmn, and varying the fusion frequency doesn't alter that. Nor does it various the actual physical frequencies of the sounds - they continue to be whatever they were. I suspect this is likely true for visual fusion frequencies too. Moreover, the comparison with video and/or film is misleading. In those cases, the actual phenomena are a discrete series of images that because of CFFF end up being perceived (or not) as continuous motion. But when looking at the actual world, to within the limits of our senses, ALL phenomena are continuous. If an insect flies across your field of vision, there are no distinct series of images that your brain does (or does not) fuse into continuous motion. There is only a continuous motion, which you may or may not notice (the whole thing may happen too fast for you to even register the entire pass. CFFF, if I understand correctly, is measuring how fast you need to present discrete visual information for the brain to "fuse" it into continuous information (such as motion, or a persistently "on" LED light. But this doesn't seem to have anything to do with how we and other animals perceive reality, because reality is not a series of discrete images. I don't believe that CFFF has much to do with our ability to perceive time, or even with limit questions such as "how long must something be in our visual field in order to notice that it was there". Could be that I'm missing something huge here, in which case I hope that Benn or someone else will correct me.

darkerside 4y ago

It's an interesting thought, but not a very interesting article. I guess I expected more.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

donthellbanme 4y ago

carapace 4y ago

It puts me in mind of Gibson's quote "the future is here it's just not evenly distributed yet." The folks over at Findhorn have been communicating with "nature spirits" for decades. Levin (mentioned in TFA) has shown that all cells have the machinery of thought. That is, all cells have the same biomachinery as neurons. (It's just concentrated in neurons) All tissues think.

netfl0 4y ago

Summarized in a succinct, allegorical, and atavistic way, this man has discovered the wonder of God’s creation.

bowsamic 4y ago
In Buddhism we might say, the immense complexity of emptiness, or the dharmakaya
- peterburkimsher 4y ago
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    The Buddha didn't say he was coming back. The Buddha said that there would be a future Buddha at some point: Maitreya. That could be many thousands of years away. In Buddhism we forsake God, we explicitly reject Him. We reject all creation, and embrace only the dark: emptiness, in which all things are fundamentally non-distinct.
    - peterburkimsher 4y ago
      "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die"? I might not live for thousands of years, but would like to make the world a little better during this time here. "Always leave the code better than you found it." https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#the-scout-rule https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#the-scout-rule Please let's not derail this conversation into religious debate here. I love talking about philosophy, and if you'd like to talk more about absolute/relative morality, I am currently online for a video/audio/text chat on the BeWelcome chatroom. https://meet.jit.si/BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers https://meet.jit.si/BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers
      - bowsamic 4y ago

blueside 4y ago

And maybe they are smarter than humans - they are playing the long game. They know they will still be here after humans wipe themselves out

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

> In the game of survival, an insect’s reaction time easily beats my attempts to swat it. I may think of myself as the smartest creature in the room, but a fly can make me look foolish. This just seems completely wrong. The wrongness comes from conflating completely orthogonal concepts: speed of detection, speed of response and "smartness". The fly is very fast at detecting and responding to motion in its vicinity, but that property does not make the author look foolish, just slow. It seems like a strange mistake to make, given the article's musings on different time scales of thought in e.g. plants. If the author applied the same analysis as they do in the quote above, then obviously us humans make the trees look foolish because we can detect and react to things so quickly. I don't think they believe that about a human/tree comparison, so I have no idea why they would close an article with the same comparison and conclusion between a human and a fly.

sgillen 4y ago
True, but many people oppose eating even very simple animals (think clams) for ethical reasons, but have no qualms with plants. I don’t think it’s totally absurd to use the authors point to argue that maybe plants reach the level of agency of some simple animals.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  I don't disagree with that in any way. My point was that "super-fast-reacting thing makes obviously intelligent slower thing look foolish" is both an incorrect and odd conclusion to close TFA with.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    If you repeatedly swat at a fly that's obviously outclassing you in speed, you will look like a fool. Try enough times without success, and it isn't just a look. Let it land and hit it with a newspaper, flyswatter, rubber band, etc, and you'll have demonstrated your superior reasoning ability.
doodlebugging 4y ago

CaptainPistache 4y ago

I do think trees are more evolve than us. Simply by existing, trees constantly create opportunity for life to grow. They shelter quantity of animals, feed billions of more or less microscopic living creatures (insects, mushrooms, bacteria), induce rain, create an environment with ideal climatic conditions, prevent landslides, provide us incredible useful resources (wood, fruits, substances for medication)... Not even talking about the air you're breathing. And when they die, it's another cycle of benefits that begins. Meanwhile we may have invented iPads, but as for now, we are at the exact opposite of trees and only know to live the destructive way.

top_sigrid 4y ago

While I think this was a good read, I do not like the mingling of scientific reasoning and esoteric thinking in some places. A scientist tripping on a drug has an idea for an experiment and puts it as the plant told her which is then taken as an argument for intelligence in other things than animals. Not a good argument.

chahex 4y ago
The thing is for people with some ESP capability it is part of their living experience that the world is more alive than what average person perceives. In such a world of feelings the material science inevitably falls short as it started with the fundamental assumption of a dead and mechanical world, which deals well with general objects but still having trouble understanding consciousness. The material science is good at dealing with material in general, but it is not the proving method that is illogical but the assumption needs to be challenged altogether

falling_ 4y ago

I don't understand the recent push to ascribe consciousness to trees. An anesthetized human being has many more allostatic and homeostasic mechanisms than a tree, and yet we don't ascribe consciousness to anesthetized humans...

peterburkimsher 4y ago

The article says: "First, I took an acid trip. Then I asked scientists about the power of altered states." Please, don't do drugs. If you play with fire, you might get burned. There is an alternative. Play with electricity! With a plasma globe. And a radiometer. What happens when you wave a plasma globe next to high-voltage power cables under a bridge, alone at night? Nothing unusual. What happened when I walked away afterwards? I felt different. Touching a tree made a grounding point. Yes, ground loops are real. DC and AC are real. Trees are smart, they grow. They're still alive. So are you and I. Let's play in this world and discover something new!

mandmandam 4y ago
Fire is powerful. And the war on drugs was a mistake. Fire requires caution. Matches aren't for everyone. But we don't ban lighters for adults, nor would it be smart to. The incredible health and therapeutic potential in mind altering substances has been held back long enough. It's time for facing reality; ironically enough.

chahex 4y ago

Calling it an “altered state” might be normal but misleading. Maybe what has really been altered is the state we call “normal”. Nonetheless, Itzak Bentov would probably describe it as a more evolved state, an Indian Yogi May call it “Samadhi” and according to Sadhguru JV Yoga means “Union”, a sense of unity with all that is or “Law Of One”, this is actually a most normal state for people who claimed to have realized... and this is not about being an atheist or not this is about the learned belief and probably also the choice of “separation” and the final discovery of the fact that matter is consciousness, and consciousness is matter