Plant Intelligence

A new nonfiction book, THE LIGHT EATERS, by Zoe Schlanger, delves deeply into the potential of plant intelligence. According to the blurb, she explores the abilities of plants "to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents." Here are two articles about THE LIGHT EATERS and the amazing ways plants interact with their environment:

Being Green

The New Science of Plant Intelligence

This topic raises the question of what "intelligence" means. I've always thought of it as a product of consciousness. Yet most people accept that advanced computer programs are in some sense intelligent without being conscious. If plants have intelligence, that quality must not necessarily require consciousness. And what does "memory" mean when applied to a creature without a brain? Do plants engage in "behavior," or should that word be restricted to animals? Botanical research has come a long way since THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS (1973) popularized the claim that they enjoy music and benefit from being talked to.

The second article linked above meditates on these questions and related philosophical issues. We human beings have an innate compulsion to "order the universe into comprehensible categories" and a tendency to "rank ourselves at the top." About plant communication, the author of this essay advances the astonishing proposition, "It also changes the notion of what a mind is. We have taken it to be the product of a brain attached to a nervous system, but perhaps a mind is a complex, self-organizing system networked across the entire organism. Perhaps the whole plant is a mind."

Schlanger defines intelligence as "the ability to learn from one’s surroundings and make decisions that best support one’s life,” a criterion plants fulfill. However, the temptation to anthropomorphize them should be resisted. For one thing, as many SF authors have highlighted, they must surely "think" on a different time scale from us. Rather than trying to see plants as human-like, we should appreciate their very alienness.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Decoding Brain Waves

Can a computer program read thoughts? An experimental project uses AI as a "brain decoder," in combination with brain scans, to "transcribe 'the gist' of what people are thinking, in what was described as a step toward mind reading":

Scientists Use Brain Scans to "Decode" Thoughts

The example in the article discusses how the program interprets what a person thinks while listening to spoken sentences. Although the system doesn't translate the subject's thoughts into the exact same words, it's capable of accurately rendering the "gist" into coherent language. Moreover, it can even accomplish the same thing when the subject simply thinks about a story or watches a silent movie. Therefore, the program is "decoding something that is deeper than language, then converting it into language." Unlike earlier types of brain-computer interfaces, this noninvasive system doesn't require implanting anything in the person's brain.

However, the decoder isn't perfect yet; it has trouble with personal pronouns, for instance. Moreover, it's possible for the subject to "sabotage" the process with mental tricks. Participating scientists reassure people concerned about "mental privacy" that the system works only after it has been trained on the particular person's brain activity through many hours in an MRI scanner. Nevertheless, David Rodriguez-Arias Vailhen, a bioethics professor at Spain's Granada University, expresses apprehension that the more highly developed versions of such programs might lead to "a future in which machines are 'able to read minds and transcribe thought'. . . warning this could possibly take place against people's will, such as when they are sleeping."

Here's another article about this project, explaining that the program functions on a predictive model similar to ChatGPT. As far as I can tell, the system works only with thoughts mentally expressed in words, not pure images:

Brain Activity Decoder Can Read Stories in People's Minds

Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin suggest as one positive application that the system "might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again."

An article on the Wired site explores in depth the nature of thought and its connection with language from the perspective of cognitive science.

Decoders Won't Just Read Your Mind -- They'll Change It

Suppose the mind isn't, as traditionally assumed, "a self-contained, self-sufficient, private entity"? If not, is there a realistic risk that "these machines will have the power to characterize and fix a thought’s limits and bounds through the very act of decoding and expressing that thought"?

How credible is the danger foreshadowed in this essay? If AI eventually gains the power to decode anyone's thoughts, not just those of individuals whose brain scans the system has been trained on, will literal mind-reading come into existence? Could a future Big Brother society watch citizens not just through two-way TV monitors but by inspecting the contents of their brains?

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

The Inner Lives of Animals

I recommend that you pick up a copy of the October 2022 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC if possible. You can't miss it; the cover shows a close-up of a sphinx cat. The lead article, "Minds of Their Own," explores the emotional and cognitive capacities of animals.

Not only some mammals but some birds can pass the "mirror test," recognizing their own reflections. Rats will often free another rat trapped in a plastic tube. Horses respond appropriately to positive or negative emotions as displayed by facial expressions, not only in other horses but also in humans. Sheep can recognize faces. Dolphins sometimes blow water bubbles and play with them. Some animals have been shown to react negatively to other members of their species who cheat. The NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC piece mentions other examples, including the famous dog who communicates by nosing symbols on a mat.

For many centuries, mainstream science believed animals didn't have an inner life, nothing resembling emotions or thoughts in the human sense. Famously, 17th-century philosopher Rene Descartes declared that animals were mere "automata," machines in principle similar to clockwork, although more complex. Here's an article about that theory and a contemporary of Descartes, Ralph Cudworth, who argued against it. (If you want to read this page, do so in one sitting, because the website allows only a limited number of free readings per month.):

Descartes Versus Cudworth

Cudworth, who (unlike Descartes) maintained that animals had souls, defined "soul" more broadly than Descartes. The defining characteristics of a soul, according to Cudworth, are "self-activity –- the ability of a thing to determine its own movement and action" and "subjectivity," self-awareness and the ability to experience pain or pleasure. Most of us nowadays would agree that animals, at least the "higher" species for sure, have these traits even if we attribute them to biological systems rather than immaterial entities. As the article puts it, "Cudworth noticed and emphasised the animal in the human, and more importantly, the human in the animal."

If the argument that we can't attribute "anthropomorphic" qualities to animals because we have no direct access to their minds (if any) is valid, how could we refute a similar argument about human beings? How can we know, just from their behavior and speech, that our fellow humans share the same inner experiences we have instead of being mere automata? The Marquis de Sade apparently thought we couldn't; one of his characters argues that it's fine to inflict pain on other people, since we feel our own pains and pleasures but have no proof others feel the same things. Most of us wouldn't want to embrace that philosophy, though!

Hard-line materialists might insist recently discovered resemblances between animal and human emotions and thought processes prove we are "only animals," little more than biological machines ourselves. The similarity could be considered from a less reductive angle, though. Maybe what those discoveries demonstrate is that animals, possessing inner lives somewhat analogous to our own, are in many cases closer to human than we've previously believed.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt