Come chat with Spendy about plants

[sus]

What I'm reading:

Norman Borlaug - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Borlaug was often called "the father of the Green Revolution",[5][6] and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation.

The Intelligent Plant

Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora.

www.newyorker.com

It is only human arrogance, and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time, that keep us from appreciating their intelligence and consequent success. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, “just traces.”

This is a thread to talk about:
- The myth of homo sapien supremacy
- The thesis that plants colonized humans, and use us to achieve reproduction at a massive scale
- Whether plants experience pain
- Whether plants have moral standing
- The intelligence of plants

There will be real content soon but I'm busy today. You can ignore this thread in the meantime.

 

[Clinamenic]

I suspect there is something of a progenitor consciousness to these organic systems, even ones lacking in discernible brain matter perhaps, seeing as the nervous system may constitute a sort of proto-brain in some ways, not sure.

They may just lacking, as far as we can presently discern, in the phenomenon we refer to as cognition, which I gather is considered to be embodied by the cerebral cortex and particularly the pre-frontal region thereof.

 

[Clinamenic]

Consciousness may not be so regionally limited in its embodiment, or such may eventually be our scientific conclusion, is what I'm saying.

 

[Clinamenic]

That heliotropic programmed movement is an excellent metaphor, I find, for any developmental methodology in general. A sort of stochastic probing unto positive feedback, as qualified by the subsistence of the organic system itself. That is, the state of not being dead or maimed retroactively affirms previous actions in such a way that positively reinforces their future re-execution.

 

[line b]

I give this 3 pages before gus tries to pivot this into his eugenics treatise

 

[Clinamenic]

As usual I suspect much of the debate of whether or not these things are intelligent depends on semantics which, I would argue, ought to be democratically harmonized from the offset.

 

[version]

I give this 3 pages before gus tries to pivot this into his eugenics treatise

He's planning to forge a new society inspired by the famous work, Vegetable Empire.

 

[line b]

Suspended posted an interesting tweet about plant communication through fungus. I would like to make it clear that I already knew this from my close horticulturist friend however and I did not learn it from gus.

 

[Clinamenic]

Ubermelon

 

[...]

I couldn’t see the full title on my iPad and I thought what turned out to be “plants” was going to say “plastic surgery”!

 

[version]

Imagine a future where plants and machines/AI combine forces. A merging of the internet and mycorrhizal networks.

 

[line b]

 

[sus]

Imagine a future where plants and machines/AI combine forces. A merging of the internet and mycorrhizal networks.

Biomechanoid.

 

[version]

Have you read that Goethe book on plants I was on about a while back?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I was initially going to post this in 'plants, they exist', but a broader thread on Goethe will probably prove more fruitful. Just reading an illustrated edition of The Metamorphosis of Plants I found online and it's really intriguing. It's of a piece with the stuff mentioned in the language...

dissensus.com

 

[sus]

Haven't, I'll read the thread.

Also:

World's largest meat-eating plant can consume rats

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6041241/Rat-eating-plant-discovered-in-Philippines.html The plant is among the largest of all pitchers and is believed to be the largest meat-eating shrub, dissolving rats with acid-like enzymes. The team of botanists, led by British experts Stewart...

www.dissensus.com

 

[luka]

your name is not spendy youre name is Gus

 

[luka]

He's planning to forge a new society inspired by the famous work, Vegetable Empire.

 

[sus]

(i)

Parent plants preferentially nurture and nourish their child seedlings. Mycorrhizal fungal networks allow trade economies between evergreen and deciduous species, firs and birch—seasonal reciprocity, where excess sugar reserves are transferred to the needy, who pay the debt at other times in the season, when they flourish. "Every tree in a plot thirty metres square was connected to the network; the oldest trees functioned as hubs, some with as many as forty-seven connections. The diagram of the forest network resembled an airline route map."

 

[sus]

(ii)

Our history is a history of attempted self-distinction, a history of boasted uniqueness, each attempt deflated. Geocentrism to heliocentrism, sapiencentrism to Darwin, metazoan supremacy to... to what? (How many theorists have suggested distinctions between human and non-human, even in the age of Darwin: that only humans fear death, that only humans have language, have tools, have culture, have morals? How many have stood the test of time? None.) There's a reason I use "supremacy": part of the purpose of these theories is the justification of exploitation. Reducing the field of ethical mattering simplifies optimization problems; you have to hold less welfares in mind, consider less aspects ends instead of means. "We live in a world where we must eat other organisms." Could it be possible that "the perfume of jasmine or basil, or the scent of freshly mowed grass, so sweet to us, is (as the ecologist Jack Schultz likes to say) the chemical equivalent of a scream?"

 

[version]

Could it be possible that ... the scent of freshly mowed grass, so sweet to us, is (as the ecologist Jack Schultz likes to say) the chemical equivalent of a scream?"

I've heard this before. That, and it's a warning to other plants.