Learning Without Brains

Can creatures without brains think? Many of them can learn, so are they thinking? This article highlights several brainless life forms capable of learning:

Organisms Without Brains

Of course, this premise depends on what we mean by learning. If we think of that activity as a process that requires consciousness, a brain is probably essential. However, the article defines learning as "any change in behaviour as a result of experience." By that definition, creatures such as jellyfish, some plants, and even slime molds can learn, remember, and modify their reactions to the environment accordingly. For example, the beadlet anemone as a rule "violently opposes any encroachment on its territory by other anemones," yet it doesn't show aggression toward its genetically identical clones. Slime molds remember routes to food and use those experiences to guide future foraging. The Venus flytrap also acts as if it has a memory. Another article explores the potential "intelligence" of plants in more detail, discussing how chemical and electrical signals in their transport systems may carry information.

Can Plants Think?

I've probably mentioned in the past a story in which one character asks another, "With what does a plant think, in the absence of a brain?" The skeptical second character who scoffs at the idea of plant cognition might be wrong after all.

The concept of brainless organisms capable of remembering and learning raises the question, again, of how we could be sure of recognizing an intelligent alien if we met one. Suppose they have modes of intelligence that, unlike ours, don't need anything that seems analogous to a brain? How easily could we realize they are actually thinking?

If "learning" means "any change in behaviour as a result of experience," considering what we watch and read in the daily news, we might well doubt whether some Earth-humans with allegedly functional brains have the ability to learn!

Margaret L. Carter

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

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

Xenobots

Organic "robots" developed from frog cells have learned to reproduce:

Self-Replicating Robots

Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog, the "xenobots," as was revealed in 2020, "could move, work together in groups and self-heal." Now they've developed the ability to reproduce "in a way not seen in plants and animals." The article compares them to Pac-Man figures, and there's a video clip showing them in action. Although they have no practical use yet, eventually they may be capable of applications such as "collecting microplastics in the oceans, inspecting root systems, and regenerative medicine."

These nanobots problematize the definition of "life." Are they robots or organisms? Furthermore, they potentially raise the question of what constitutes intelligence. If intelligence means the ability to respond to environmental changes by adapting one's behavior, even plants and bacteria have it. If true intelligence requires sapience—consciousness—it may be restricted to us, some other higher primates, and a few cetaceans. But if intelligence mainly equals problem-solving, the xenobots do exhibit "plasticity and ability of cells to solve problems."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Bird Brains

Research published in the journal SCIENCE in 2020 raises the possibility that crows have mental abilities formerly thought of as restricted to our species and other higher primates:

Crows Are Self-Aware

It's been known for a while that corvids (crows, ravens, jays, etc.), like monkeys and apes, use tools and recognize faces. These birds bring gifts to people they like and never forget people who injure or offend them. Experiments show, however, that they also apparently think about their own thoughts. A brain structure called the pallium, performing the same function as the cerebral cortex in mammals, holds densely packed neurons in greater quantity than in even some much larger animals such as elephants. This arrangement makes up for the smaller body and brain size of birds. The firing of neurons in the crows' brains during the experiment described in the article suggests that crows think about problems in somewhat the same way we do.

Parrots are highly intelligent, too. They don't just "parrot" human speech but often utter words in the proper context, such as asking for what they want or saying "Hello" when people arrive but not when they leave. As the famous African Grey named Alex demonstrated, parrots can work with numbers, too. They also pass some intelligence tests on the same level as five-year-old children:

Parrots Pass Classic Test of Intelligence

Here's a Wikipedia article on bird intelligence:

Bird Intelligence

For me, one exciting implication of these facts is that we now realize an animal doesn't require a large brain to be intelligent. Sapient aliens on other planets wouldn't have to resemble us in size or shape. Imagine a world dominated by brainy birds. With wings instead of arms, birds have limitations on their ability to use tools. What if they evolved with six limbs, though, like all the higher animals in the manga series A CENTAUR'S LIFE? Birds on a planet where the standard higher-life-form body plan includes six limbs rather than four could have legs, wings, and hands. Thus they could develop a civilization with material artifacts recognizable to us as products of higher intellect.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Internet of Trees

An old song laments, "I talk to the trees, but they don't listen to me." Apparently, however, trees listen to each other. Some of them communicate among themselves by means of a symbiotic fungus connected to their roots:

Plants Talk to Each Other

Mycelia—thin threads that make up the underground portion of mushrooms, far more extensive than the part we see aboveground—"act as a kind of underground internet, linking the roots of different plants." In a symbiotic relationship, mycelia that colonize the roots of plants "help the plants suck up water, and provide nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen," while the host plant supplies the fungus with nourishment in the form of carbohydrates. The fungus also enhances the host's immune system. In addition, through their mycelial connections some plants "help out their neighbours by sharing nutrients and information – or sabotage unwelcome plants by spreading toxic chemicals through the network." By transferring nutrients such as carbon, phosphorus, and nitrogen, large trees have been found to "help out small, younger ones using the fungal internet."

The article compares this network to the global communication among trees in the 2009 movie AVATAR. The fungal internet also brings to mind Clifford D. Simak's 1965 novel ALL FLESH IS GRASS, which portrays an invasion by a "planetwide biological computer that works through photosynthesis," manifesting in the form of purple flowers, as discussed on this website:

Intelligent Plants in Science Fiction

Do plants in fact have some form of intelligence? A few scientists think they might, according to this article about plant neurobiology:

New Research on Plant Intelligence

Of course, plants don't have neurons. They do, however, display reactions analogous to memory, learning, and response to stress. Their roots shift direction to avoid obstacles without coming into physical contact with the obstruction. Experiments have shown plants producing defensive chemicals when they "hear" a recording of a caterpillar eating a leaf. So it all depends on what we mean by "intelligence."

If we visited a planet dominated by a global hive-mind composed of sentient trees, would we be able to communicate with it? Or would the time scales on which our thought processes operate be too different for mutual comprehension?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Pre-Human Civilizations?

Could some other species have built a civilization on Earth long before we evolved? Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, considers that possibility:

Are We Earth's Only Civilization?

If a society of intelligent, nonhuman beings existed before the Quaternary period, 2.6 million years ago, mainstream geology tells us no material evidence of them would remain. "Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust." Then how would we know about their civilization? The preservation of fossils and artifacts, even if that hypothetical nonhuman society had flourished recently enough to possibly leave such relics, depends on sheer chance. Schmidt speculates about how we could know they existed, as a thought experiment exploring what evidence, if any, from our own society would survive millions of years in the future. He suggests plastics, changes in sedimentary nitrogen patterns (from using so much of it as fertilizer to feed our population), and the appearance in sedimentary layers of "rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos." Above all, our intensive burning of fossil fuels should leave evidence in the form of shifts in the balances of carbon and oxygen isotopes. Schmidt wonders, if our own Anthropocene epoch is in the process of depositing traces in the Earth's bedrock, "might the same 'signals' exist right now in rocks just waiting to tell us of civilizations long gone?"

The article concludes, "By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking about the possibility for universal rules guiding the evolution of all biospheres in all their creative potential, including the emergence of civilizations." Could guidelines for such "universal rules" help us predict what we may find on alien worlds?

While Schmidt and the author of the article don't believe such a nonhuman culture actually preceded us on this planet, the possibility is interesting to consider. And since it's hard if not impossible to prove a negative, especially regarding events so unimaginably far in the past, we can't be sure one didn't exist. Unless time travel were invented, we would never have any contact with the builders of such a civilization or even know what they were like. That is, unless we somehow found long-buried structures such as the vast city of the extinct Elder Things in Antarctica in H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness." These creatures arrived on Earth when the moon was young and became extinct long before advanced terrestrial life evolved. The Elder Things also coexisted with giant penguins, and interestingly, the fossilized bones of penguins about the size of human adults have been found in New Zealand. They came along much too late to be alive at the same period as the Elder Things, though:

Giant Penguin in New Zealand

Suppose we discovered an abandoned city like that, miraculously having avoided being "crushed to dust," inhabited only by monstrous, amorphous shoggoths that survived and continued to reproduce after their creators died off? Hmm, I wonder what we could do with tame shoggoths. . . .

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt