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Rendered at 19:35:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Kind of incredible how nothing has really changed since then. Discussions of plant consciousness are nearly always dominated by very loud self-proclaimed skeptics - more of a social identity than an intellectual one at this point. They are strict materialists to a fault - any theory that appears to threaten materialism is dismissed. Even if it doesn’t actually threaten “materialism” but rather expands the set of objects considered “material” or in this case “thinking” (which is too dangerous for them to consider because “thinking” quickly bleeds into “conscious”). It’s telling that Einstein and Kelvin were impressed by his work, but these days any self proclaimed skeptic can just dismiss these ideas out of hand.
This is demonstrated clearly later on:
“Among these contemporaries, there was little room for what Bose himself described as “the inherent bent of the Indian mind towards mysticism and unchecked imagination.””
This is not only racist but also demonstrates the exact skeptic bent I just described. By lumping in a new science grounded in physiology with “mysticism” they are poisoning the well very insidiously.
I guess science has probably always been like this. Peoples entire careers become dependent on the flimsy theories of today so anything unorthodox is automatically threatening to them. For what it’s worth I’m not saying skepticism isn’t warranted especially for new claims but it seems to me that Bose was treated very unfairly, and I suspect that his theories would’ve held up well if his field had expanded over the last hundred years. I also think we’ll see some studies soon that absolutely blow the lid off this stuff and Bose will be remembered as a Galileo type figure of his field.
I have to say I have had the opposite experience. Ever since "The Secret Life of Plants" the average person is much more open to the idea that plants have some kind of conscious experience than is warranted by our current understanding of them. Myths about plants growing better when exposed to classical music etc. are still around thanks to this book and will seemingly never die.
Pop science journalists are eager to report any new finding on some physiological capability of a plant as the plant "thinking", "feeling", or they invoke the classic Betteridge's law of headlines: "Are plants conscious?" In almost every case the original author of the scientific piece never described it as such.
Redheads are in much greater danger by that logic.
In a ResearchGate pdf, we read 'In India, where spirituality and mysticism are deeply ingrained in cultural practices, investigating parapsychological phenomena can provide significant insights into human consciousness.' Nothing racist, just one of the fascinating welcome differences of focus on the part of who happen to live in a different general cultural milieu from the West. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399124147_Mysticism...
Well put.
Pop science is what it is, but I'm bewildered when the rhetoric around plants "screaming in pain" weasels its way into my conversations. Then it's a game of understanding whether my correspondent sees it as a funny way of straining language, or whether they think it's close to the truth.
One of the most interesting adaptations I've been learning about is the various adaptations that these trees and their lianas have to lightning strikes. For us they seem like rare one-off events but if you are a stationary being that lives hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, lightning strikes might be the primary driver of disturbance.
Some organisms think on really long time scales and it's hard for us to appreciate their "intelligence". If AGI does ever come around, I wonder if hyper-intelligent fast-thinking robots will one day look at humans and go "wait, there's actually a lot of intelligent behavior in these creatures that we didn't notice because they think on much different timescales"
Actually recently I've mostly been listening to lectures by some scientists I follow:
Evan Gora at the Cary Institute does research on big trees in tropical rainforests and recently published some fascinating work on tree adaptations to lightning strikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjGFWDSXtJk or https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KjGFWDSXtJk
I'm also a big fan of Suzanne Simard's research on "mother trees". She wrote a book I've yet to read called Finding the Mother Tree that also has an audiobook available. But she also regularly does talks
A book that kicked off the popular interest in mycorrhizae is The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben which is also quite digestible. RadioLab also had a great episode about it https://radiolab.org/podcast/from-tree-to-shining-tree
And here are some of my favorite publication that sometimes cover these topics:
Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org/forests-emerge-as-a-major-ove...
Noema https://www.noemamag.com/the-intelligent-forest/
Aeon https://aeon.co/essays/what-constitutes-an-individual-organi...
Emergence Magazine https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-o...
Nautilus https://nautil.us/this-cloud-forest-should-not-exist-1226267
Try also:
- "Anthill" by E. O. Wilson
- "The Overstory" by Richard Powers
- "Oak: The Frame of Civilization" by William Bryant Logan
- "Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees" by William Bryant Logan
- "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer