Do Plants Think?

A relatively recent (2021) article on plant intelligence, which includes an interview with Monica Gagliano, a professor in Evolutionary Ecology at Southern Cross University in Australia:

Plant Intelligence

It's known that plants can communicate with each other to "warn" their neighbors about potential attacks. Some plants also use animals to defend against pests, such as by releasing chemicals to attract wasps that prey on caterpillars. Researchers have discovered evidence that plants may have "memory" of a sort. In the interview, Gagliano defines intelligence as decision-making in reaction to one's environment. She insists that "you do not need a nervous system or a brain to embody this kind of behaviour and decisions." She goes so far as to declare, "Of course plants are intelligent, as much as bacteria and amoebas, and fish and birds and humans."

Bacteria? That wide-ranging application of the concept may come as a shock to many people's mental categories, as it does to mine. We typically think of intelligence as requiring brains and involving sapience or at least consciousness. I'm reminded of a vintage horror story that begins with a conversation about the nature of mind, in which one character rhetorically asks, "With what does a plant think, in the absence of a brain?" The other character scoffs, while the first maintains that intelligence exists everywhere in many shapes. When or if we eventually travel to extrasolar planets, we might plausibly discover plants or a vegetative group mind possessing a capacity for thought we'd recognize as similar to our own. However, mutual communication might be hard because organisms the size of trees or larger might think on a slower time scale than we do—like Tolkien's Ents, only much more so.

Another article on plant intelligence I came across queried whether, if plants can think in some sense, we would be obligated to stop eating them. If so, we'd be stuck with rather narrow diets, composed entirely of foods we could harvest without killing any complex organism (dairy products, unfertilized eggs, fruits, nuts, honey, the leaves of green vegetables that regenerate throughout the growing season—that's about it). Fortunately, the writer of that essay reassured us we wouldn't, since animals regularly consume plants as part of the cycle of life. Besides, many plants have parts (e.g., fruit) especially meant to be eaten by animals for the purpose of spreading seeds.

Remember the Shmoos in the old "Li'l Abner" comic strip, delicious animals that rejoiced in sacrificing themselves as food?

Shmoo

Maybe on a world shared by intelligent plants and humanoids, some vegetative life forms would partake in a symbiotic partnership whereby they produced renewable offshoots to feed sapient animals in exchange for helpful services such as fertilizing and pest control.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Hacker Ways And The Decline of Language

Decadent thought leads to decadent language, which leads to even more decadent thought... and a vicious vortex of decay and corruption ensues. Is the process accidental or deliberate?

In "Politics And The English Language", George Orwell compares sloppy language to a sloppy drunkard.

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." 

 

In 1945/1946, Orwell seemed to believe that the decline was reversible and clarity of thought and expression could be revived if writers and speakers made an effort and followed simple, critical rules such as:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

 

Today, public speakers appear not to know the difference between a benefactor and a beneficiary, or between an expletive (noun) and something that is explicative (adj).  Badly written advertisements don't say what the advertiser intends: "Like you, my hands mean everything to me." "Report your allergy to your doctor."  "As a scientist, my dog..."  How supportive of vaccine acceptance is it for one Medicare coverage provider to be advertising, "With all the uncertainty of the virus AND VACCINE..."?

 

The one-time service to help copyright owners remove infringing copies of copyrighted works from the internet, MUSO writes about the predictive value of piracy , based on a study conducted in Europe.

They describe pirates as a bellwether, and explain (approximately) what a wether is... while decorously omitting the difference between a ram and a wether.  In a nutshell, a wether is castrated.

 

If one has to explain ones metaphor or simile, and if one cannot explain it fully, perhaps the metaphor is dead and the imagery stale. That said, I dropped the "nutshell" knowingly.

 

While MUSO  may or may not be pivoting to a marketing business,  the authorities in Canada seem to have less use for intellectual property pirates.

Legal bloggers Ken Clark and Lawrence Veregin  representing the combined intellectual property team of Aird and Berlis LLP and Aird and McBurney LP predict the beginning of the end of online piracy in Canada, and describe how Take Down and Stay Down will work --in Canada-- via real time site blocking.

https://www.airdberlis.com/insights/blogs/thespotlight/post/ts-item/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-online-piracy-in-canada

On hacking, Mary B. Ramsay and Grant P. Dearborn of  Schumaker Loop and Kendrick discuss the devious ways of Hackers and the risk from phishers phishing. Never give your email address and PW in order to open an attachment, even if it appears to have come from your better half or significant other.
 

There is a story involving far greater effrontery than that shown by all those young men who make telephone calls to seniors in the hope that the senior victim will find it plausible that he or she has a grandchild in immediate financial distress... but with access to Bitcoin or Western Union.

Lexology link
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=06214f43-8b53-46d1-9281-076a4569a61a

Original link:
https://www.shumaker.com/latest-thinking/publications/2021/06/client-alert-the-risk-from-phishing

The news has covered the Colonial Pipeline and the JBS meat packer hacks but less has been said about the hacking of iConstituent, perhaps because the latter is less inconvenient to the public.

Apparently, according to at least two sources, sixty members of the US Congress have been hacked or phished, and as a result they lost their access to iConstituent.  If you notice a pause in the begging letters and emails, you might infer that your Congressperson's internet hygiene is --or was-- substandard.  Maybe if your trusted Congressperson sends you an attachment or link, you should not open it or click through.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/congress-ransomware-attack-internet-latest-b1861759.html

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/261214/20210608/new-ransomware-targets-congress-members-complete-breach-iconstituent.htm

On that happy note...

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

 

Insect Consciousness?

A honeybee scientist, Andrew Barron, and a philosopher, Colin Klein, have collaborated on a study that suggests insects may have consciousness and emotions:

Insects Are Conscious

Does insects' inner life comprise more than simple reflexes? Conventionally, the neocortex is thought to be the site of consciousness. Suppose, rather, the "much more primitive midbrain" synthesizes experience into "a unified, egocentric point of view"? Barron and Klein maintain that insects have midbrain-like neural structures that enable them to "model themselves as they move through space." (The quotations come from an article about this study in SMITHSONIAN magazine.) Insects may feel, at the very least, hunger and pain.

Since I've always shared the prevailing belief that invertebrates don't have enough neural processing capacity to feel anything, this hypothesis strikes me as rather unsettling. Insects do appear to "plan," in a sense, in that they pursue definite goals. They can learn from experience (even flatworms, a much "lower" life form, can do that), so do they have "memory"? They make choices between alternatives, so are they "deciding"?

Whether insects have consciousness and the ability to think depends, of course, on how we define "conscious" and "think." C. S. Lewis in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN points out that an unconscious human body may reflexively react to hurtful stimuli although obviously without being aware of pain. If by "self-awareness" we mean the ability to meditate on our own existence, possibly only human beings have that quality. Self-awareness on the level of recognizing one's own reflection in a mirror is confined to us, some primates, and a select few other animals. If "thinking" means only abstract thought that can be formulated in words, by definition we classify ourselves as the only thinking organisms on the planet. If any kind of problem-solving equals thinking, the field becomes much wider.

I once read a story (can't remember the title or author) in which one character tries to convince another that thought isn't confined to human beings and higher animals. He says, "With what does a plant think, in the absence of a brain?"—classifying a plant's phototropism as a form of thinking.

Barron and Klein hope investigating the mental lives of insects may throw light on the origins of subjectivity in "higher" species, including ourselves.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Modes of Thinking

One of Robert Heinlein's characters declares that conscious thought is like the display window in a calculator, showing the result of a process that goes on underneath, in the preconscious or unconscious mind. I think he's probably right; nevertheless, most people (as far as I know) do experience thinking as a conscious procedure. Suzette Haden Elgin often wrote about "preferred sensory modes" in learning and interacting with the environment—some children learn best by sight, others by hearing, some by touch. (And the last group suffers a distinct disadvantage in our public school system.) Likewise, people seem to have different "thinking modes."

I've always been highly verbally oriented. In my early years, I took it for granted that "thinking" MEANT "formulating thoughts in words." Mental verbalization, "talking to yourself," was the only process I recognized as thought. It was quite a revelation to learn not everybody's mind works that way. C. S. Lewis, one of my idols and certainly a brilliant wordsmith, was a strongly visual thinker. He said all his fiction began with "pictures." THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE, for example, sprang from an image of a faun carrying packages through a snowy forest. Lewis described his writing technique as something like "bird-watching." Various "pictures" would appear in his mind, and eventually he would sense that a group of them belonged together as part of a single narrative. Only then would the conscious work of devising a plot to link them begin. Only after Aslan "came bounding" into Narnia did it occur to him to include Christian content in the story (contrary to the popular belief that he intentionally set out to write "allegory"). Animal scientist Temple Grandin describes herself as so much of a visual thinker that words are her "second language." I'm so much the opposite, so non-visual, that I have trouble connecting faces with names and, in movies, telling characters apart if they look similar. This tendency also means that as a writer I struggle with creating vivid descriptions.

It's clear to me now that verbal thinking and even abstract thinking aren't the only processes that can legitimately be classified as "thought." Aren't animals thinking when they solve problems, even if they don't have the capacity for abstract thought? When our dog extracts a treat from a hollow toy or a cat bats at the swinging closet door until she can wiggle inside, they are clearly acting from intention, not trial-and-error. So I have to label their mental processes "thinking," even if that definition contradicts the narrower assumptions I used to hold.

How can we be sure of recognizing "thought" among extraterrestrial aliens who may not think anything like the way we do?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Theme-Character Integration Part 3 - Why Did Spock Become Popular

Theme-Character Integration Part 3 - Why Did Spock Become Popular

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Last week, in the context of the criticism of Science Fiction Romance novels,  we looked at the TV Series Vampire Diaries, a Fantasy, and Gray's Anatomy, a mundane Series, so now let's look into a Science Fiction series.  Of course, Star Trek leaps to mind.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/07/theme-character-integration-part-2-fire.html

Part 1 of this skill integration sequence is here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/06/theme-character-integration-part-1-what.html

Previously we discussed What Does She See In Him (an essential ingredient in firing up a love life)

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

Note there is a rising attempt by David Gerrold and many folks long involved in the series to create a new Star Trek TV Series, and it's rolling along, even though it fell just short of it's Kickstarter goal.

Here is the Kickstarter for Star Wolf email sent out on June 3, 2013, (or thereabout).

----------QUOTE ----------------
...we almost made it... Just almost!  (Well, maybe we were a little further off...)

It has been heartening to see so many people pledge their support for
STAR WOLF.

I want you all to know that I absolutely consider you all honorary members of our official Launch Crew, and will tell you now, that we will go on! 

Although the Kickstarter is over, we want to keep all of you...our fans of great Science Fiction involved.

By the end, we received an incredible amount of media attention and letters of support (from including Bill Prady (BIG BANG THEORY) and of course Spock himself (Leonard Nimoy)! This well help greatly in our next steps.

We're 100% dedicated to launching, and the success of the series and we will be updating you on our progress in making it happen.

Presently, we're starting our own mailing list to make it easier to reach you, and will soon be converting 'http://www.thestarwolf.com' as our headquarters for the series, and will be posting updates as we proceed...

You're support here touches our hearts, and as a thank you for your enthusiasm, those who pledged, AND sign up for the mailing list will receive the PDF of the pilot episode script on Wednesday (to give people time to send us their e-mail addresses. When we send out the e-mail, the link to the PDF will ONLY be available for a 24 period, so please send us your e-mail address soon!  (If you send us all of your contact info, mailing address, etc., you may get a surprise in the mail in the future.

So please... send us an e-mail right away to: thestarwolfseries@gmail.com

TODAY.

As for those hard earned dollars you're still holding onto, we would of course ask you to pledge again if we were to start another campaign but as for exciting projects being funded now, we'd like you to take a look at:

HARBINGER DOWN:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1117671683/harbinger-down-a-practical-creature-fx-film

Our friends at Alec Gillis, Lance Henriksen, and Dennis Skotak (ALIENS, TITANIC, X2), (The Star Wolf's VFX Director of Photography). Are working to make a great practical effects sci-fi horror film that celebrates old-school animatronics and Makeup FX.

They are taking a stand for great live-action visual effects, and are truly a great collection of talent.  We love them, and you'll love their work too.  So PLEASE... seriously consider showing them the great support you've shown us, and we'll all enjoy their terrific work soon.

From the bottom of all of hearts, thank you for your pledge, your time and your support.

Rest assured... WE'RE ONLY JUST BEGINNING! 

Thank you again!  We love you guys!

-- David C Fein
----------END QUOTE------------

So we'll be seeing and hearing a lot more about Star Trek coming at us from every direction. (good, I say!)

You all know I'm primary author of the Bantam Paperback, STAR TREK LIVES! which blew the lid on Star Trek fandom and ignited the revival campaign at the time the fan-run conventions had just begun.  At that time, no way on Earth would any professional in Hollywood (movies or TV) ever listen to a word any mere viewer said.  Nobody cared what we thought.

There was no feedback loop from consumer to producer that could guide them in creating entertainment that people would pay for.  They thought what they thought because of statistics generated by phone-survey firms and the TV set-top devices that Nielson used to monitor what a couple hundred select houses watched.  Statistics was just in its infancy.

Today we have that giant data center the US Government just fired up to collect all the internet traffic -- it will eventually be able to mine out exact numbers of how many watch what, and maybe even track what you, yourself, actually watch or spend time on.  Hollywood (if it can afford the fees) will be able to determine in advance what will be popular.

Today, there's all the streaming stuff -- audiences are wholly fragmented, but that gives new writers a chance to break in and create an audience for the stuff that author really wants.  Of course, the technical bar keeps getting higher.  To get your writing "out there" you need a full time tech specialist (or 10). 

So let's look at what a writer can do that replicates what Star Trek did to change the entire world of entertainment, and make "them" pay attention to "us."  The thing is, (considering the SFWA Bulletin Controversy we discussed last week), this is exactly what we need to do with SFR.

Star Trek actually launched the SFR genre via fan fiction -- fiction mostly written by women for women, and all about the real lives of the Enterprise crew and other crews of other ships in Star Fleet.  Today, all that fanfic pours online, all mixed up with beginning writers immature attempts.

Many people scoff at young writers writing about how the adult emotional world seems to them.  I don't.  I see these initial attempts to communicate what's important about life as the absolutely necessary work of training up a writer's mind.  All the best writers I've ever met started in childhood writing exactly what you see flooding fanfic online (nearly drowning out more mature attempts). 

Listen to the scoffing at young writers -- that's the scoff being aimed at Science Fiction Romance novels!  Same attitude.  Really.  Think about it.  If you have that attitude about young writers, can you seriously ask working SFWA members not to scoff at you?  Karma can be an issue in life.

So How Do We Replicate Star Trek?

The key question is why was Spock so popular?

He wasn't expected to be by Hollywood TV crafters, not even Gene Roddenberry! 

The "Spock" that gripped the world was originally two characters, a woman First Officer called Number One who was from a culture that was emotionless.  And the half-Vulcan Science Officer who was called Spock but behaved with obvious emotional reactions (especially the appreciation of beauty.) 

The Network wouldn't allow a woman to be in command on the bridge, to boss men around.

There's that sexism that exploded all over SFWA earlier this year!  It is not FROM SCIENCE FICTION, despite what SFR writers think.

That sexism is from OUR OWN CULTURE.

That sexism isn't gone, and it isn't just a few remnants inside SFWA that harbor this toxic stew.

So Gene Roddenberry's solution to that problem (he was the least sexist man of his age I ever knew) was the classic solution every beginning writer learns.

What you do when your THEME isn't "working" can be one of three things:

a) divide one character into two
b) combine two characters into one
c) add a new character

In TV and Film, adding characters adds expense, and that can prevent production from ever happening. 

GR wanted ST to get on the air.  He COMBINED TWO CHARACTERS -- and it made that one character much more powerful.

GR combined Number One and the original Spock into ONE CHARACTER -- our emotion-challenged Spock.

GR saw this new Spock as having emotions that he repressed. 

That is an anti-science-fiction premise that I rejected long before I met him and got to ask what he had in mind.  I wrote my fan-fic universe, Kraith, to explore "What If Spock Really Is What He Says He Is?"  Taking people at their word always leads to interesting territory and always generates great science fiction! 

http://simegen.com/fandom/startrek/

I did a very deep analysis of what makes Spock popular in STAR TREK LIVES!  I stand by that analysis, and it's still working today.

But today's world (as I've spent many posts here describing) is in massive shift due to new communications channels -- the web being only one.  Lately, Verizon (which provides fiber optic TV feeds as well as landline phone and cell phone) is offering TV channel feeds direct to your phone or other mobile device.  Take your TV shows with you, watch any time. 

The un-tethering of the world is going to affect what fiction gets popular enough to afford expensive productions, and that will change everything -- except the core essence of what makes a story gripping and energizing.

That core essence is theme-character integration -- and all the theme integrations with other story elements.  But what really grabs and won't let go is character. 

How do you build a gripping character for today's media distribution methodology?

You do what has always worked.  You look at what is popular today, and ask WHY? 

The TV show The Vampire Diaries is very popular -- as are other Vampire works.

OK, why are Vampires popular and what is it about The Vampire Diaries that is rattling teen minds?

As noted last week, the element of The Vampire Diaries that is drawn from the deepest (and thousands of years old) depths of human psychology is the combination of Good vs. Evil with Emotion vs. Logic.

Yep, LOGIC!

Remember last week we noted how the THEME-CHARACTER integration in The Vampire Diaries is a perfect "show don't tell" for the philosophical discussion this entire world is having (with guns blazing all over the Middle East) about the place of EMOTION in the scheme of LIFE.

Vampire Diaries modified the Vampire myth so that when these vampires turn OFF emotion, they become the typical Evil Menace type of selfish, power-hungry, dominating, tyrannical, human-eating, remorseless, force of evil that Vampires used to be in the standard myth.

If they turn ON their emotions, they become pretty ordinary humans, spanning the spectrum of good, bad and who-knows?

The thematic statement is woven into the Worldbuilding seamlessly and thrusts up into the characters as they play out the plot-events. 

Emotion = Good.

VULCANS are depicted as having the reputation of looking like the Devil (they're greenish instead of reddish -- the remake Spock isn't so greenish), and of being Emotionless.

That premise arose in the 1960's and ignited sexy-panting-furor.

Spock was the sexiest thing EVER on TV or in Film, and that's proven by all the non-fiction now being written analyzing the appeal of Star Trek and the history of it.

In fact, I have an essay in yet another book on the topic of Star Trek fandom.  When it's published, it will appear on my amazon page

http://www.amazon.com/Jacqueline-Lichtenberg/e/B000APV900/

And at the top of the right column you should now find an 'EMAIL ME WHEN THERE ARE NEW RELEASES BY JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG"  -- so you can keep up without effort.

So EMOTIONLESS = EVIL = SEXY.

Hmmm, and that dates back to the 1960's and 70's - the sexual revolution begun by the "Hippies" and then carried into adulthood and the workplace in the 1970's by "Women's Lib." 

And it still works today.

EMOTION = GOOD has surfaced now into explicit, on the nose style, dialogue. 

But it works even better when sunk deep into Worldbuilding as in The Vampire Diaries (which now has spun off THE ORIGINALS, the older and most Evil of the Vampire-Siblings with a leader who wants to be King.)  We're talking major success for EMOTION = GOOD on the commercial markets. 

Here's a link-list index post to Theme-Plot integration

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

I'll have to collect Theme-Worldbuilding Integration at some point.  Here is #6 with links to previous parts to that series.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/02/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-6.html

And here is my post on Star Trek: Into Darkness:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/07/theme-plot-integration-part-11-correct.html

It has links to prior posts in that series.

It is followed by Part 12 about a Tom Clancy book/movie.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/07/theme-plot-integration-part-12-tom.html

The essential ingredients to creating your "Spock Character" are as follows:

1) Use the techniques I've been illustrating for studying our "real" world, the world of your reader, from an angle and at a depth the reader will not be aware of.  See my posts on THE ART OF WRITING.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/writers-eye-finds-symmetry.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

2) Extract the THEME of your reader's world that's bugging them mightily and encapsulate that theme in a simple statement (like EMOTION = GOOD and THOUGHT = EVIL, but pick one of your very own, something that has true meaning to you personally) (this is what Gene Roddenberry did, but came up with 2-characters to state that theme, and the sexist thing really bugged him.)

3) CAST that theme into a Work by building a character, then building his/her world out around him from the essence of that character's internal conflict.  Remember Spock's EMOTIONLESS exterior covered a BURNING CURIOSITY -- and so he chose (against parental will) a career in Star Fleet to go where No Man Has Gone Before (sexist -- read last week's post on sexism).

4) Write your story to speak to your chosen audience in their medium of choice.  

5) Come back here next Tuesday for more.  We have barely scratched the surface of what there is to learn about fiction. 

by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com