…Or, what is it like to be a tree?

Over the past couple of years, I’ve read the following books:

• Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
• An Immense World by Ed Yong
• Ways of Being by James Bridle
• Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith

(These are all affiliate links at Bookshop.org.)

I’ve also read articles in Scientific American about the same topics, and I’ve thought about this a lot. And I decided it was time to take a break from my new novel (Witness to the Scourge, which, even though it’s about the Fae folk including a were-cockroach, may be my most political story yet) to write this blog post.

The topic I’ve been obsessed with is basal cognition, the notion that intelligence as we know it might be wider spread among species of animals (and even plants!) than we typically conceive of it, and, more importantly, not necessarily dependent on brains. Do animals think? Are they sentient? Sapient? Do they have a sense of self? Certainly animals communicate, and we, in our human-centered worldview, have traditionally thought that communication was the domain of humanity. In the Scientific American article I linked to above, researcher Michael Levin says, “All intelligence is really collective intelligence, because every cognitive system is made of some kind of parts.”

There are all sorts of intelligences in the world, and all sorts of cognition. Take the planaria flatworm mentioned in the Scientific American article: When cut in half, each half appears to “know” how to create a new full flatworm, even if it’s the tail end. It doesn’t appear to be genetic, but there is a bioelectrical process involved.

Or take any species of octopus. While an octopus has a central brain, each arm contains a dense bundle of neurons as well, and there is plenty of evidence that each arm can act independently, of its own accord, yet in enough cohesion to allow the animal to swim, mate, feed, and so on.

And bacteria! There is evidence that colonies of, say, E. coli can learn to navigate a rough surface to get to a food source despite having no brains at all. This is not genetic information that one generation of the bacteria passes down to another via natural selection. It’s learning.

Of course, there’s also plenty of evidence that plants communicate and learn and (of course) respond to their environments and to external stimuli. That’s been the case for several years now, though the extent of plant cognition is not yet known. I remember when I first learned about xylem and phloem in high school, I began wondering whether trees had their own form of cognition, mediated by those two types of tissue. Though the mechanism I imagined was wrong, there is, as it turns out, some basal cognition going on, even in plants.

And, of course, there’s the humble slime mold, which scientists have studied for decades and have not made heads nor tails of.

All of which is to say that the world is teeming with intelligences that we can’t comprehend or be a part of, just because we are limited, in our human way, to one form of cognition (which itself may be affected by our very own gut biome!). We might be able to communicate or understand the world of an orca, a surprisingly intelligent and social animal, but will we ever understand what it’s like to be an orca? I doubt it.

I just find this fascinating. What say you on this topic, if anything?

This entry’s recommendation is A Quantum Love Story by Mike Chen.

This story of two people stuck in a time loop and finding love therein is fascinating, funny, intelligent, and even a bit sad. I found myself inspired by this novel in terms of how to improve Padma, my current revision-in-progress. I think you’ll enjoy it too.