Plants communicate, nurture their seedlings, and get stressed

I don't see the line of thinking from anthropomorphizing plants to dehumanizing humans.

If anything the experience of getting in touch with Nature forms a powerful and undeniable basis for loving other humans, due to our shared existence within the unifying web of life.

In any event, I'm not anthropomorphizing plants, quite the opposite: I'm pointing out that humans are the anthropomorphization of the ambient natural "processing power" of living intelligence.

Without getting into to metaphysics of identity and the subjective "I"†, there is a result in cybernetics to wit: "every good regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that system." Ergo, in a system under evolution we should expect models of systems to appear in those systems. In other words, a self-concept (of some kind) should develop in any stable evolving system.

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Regulator

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Conant_Ashby.pdf

So you have a system that includes many "I"'s and each of them is "running on" the same biological "wetware", so it's really not at all strange that they can communicate with each other, eh?

From my POV, this is filling in the scientific story for phenomenon that are common knowledge. There has been to time or place in human history without some people understanding and practicing the I-Thou relationship with Nature.

†(Gurdjieff distinguished humans from animals and plants as being "Three-brained" beings, as contrasted with "Two-" and "One-brained" beings.

Unity of the subjective "I" and God is a foundation of, e.g. Hinduism: "Atman is Paramatman." That "I" of consciousness is the "I" of all beings, including plants, animals, and ecosystems, as well as the Whole Earth.)

- - - -

Er, FWIW...

> To cut the story short: By speaking in the first person we can make statements about ourselves, answer questions, and engage in reasoning and advice in ways that bypass all the normal methods of discovery. As a result, we can participate in dialogues founded on the assurance that, when you and I both speak sincerely, what we say is trustworthy: We are “speaking our minds.” This is the heart of the I-You encounter.

This is incorrect. Scruton has failed to sound the depths of "I-Thou", "a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds". There is nothing linguistic in it. No boundary. As an example, consider that you can be in the "I-Thou" relationship with an infant.

>Modern philosophies that disregard the special place in nature of Man, and deny Man's nature, are a mess and lead to some pretty horrible outcomes, such as the dehumanization of undesirable groups.

Which philosophies?

> And for nitrogen fixers, it's not at all clear that the nitrogen they fix is available to the plants around them. It might not become available until they die back and rot.

Do you mean it’s a question of if they provide more nitrogen then they use themselves? I literally just read from a children’s book in the nitrogen cycle about how bacteria that live on the roots of some plants are the only way plants can access it.

You make a good point, and I often substitute "applied ecology" to try to emphasize the scientific grounding that Permaculture originally had (Bill Mollison was an ecologist) and still has for a lot of people, myself included.

But I have to admit, I was once laissez-faire about non-native invasive species. I can thank E. O. Wilson for writing a thing that set me straight.

(I gotta add that the "Permaculture Designer's Manual" is IMO one of the finest guides to design (any design, not just farming) that I've ever read. FWIW)

So... you invented a new word that means the same thing as the old word, but isn’t associated with people doing stupid things yet?

Seems like a wasteful approach to language.

what if instead of actually "going back" (which we can't anyways) we just re-apply this notion going forward?

It seems you've got it backwards.

Abrahamic religions, for example, created an "I-It" relationship by declaring nature to be subordinate to mankind in Genesis.

The theory of evolution and the science of ecology defines the relationship as communal and interrelated, or "I-Thou".

You're right! I imagine that if we did just "go back to Nature" we would forget and do this all over again in a few thousand years, eh?

We need a new synthesis that incorporates our scientific knowledge with the deeper reality around us. That's exactly why I find TFA and Levin's work so fascinating: science is discovering that life thinks, which discovery then forms a bridge between the "mystic" experiential communing with nature and the "hard" rational-materialistic science.

If by microbes you mean bacteria. Maybe we also contain fungus as well though.

And actually, if you're looking at cell count our cells are outnumbered by about 10:1, it's incredible!

On top of that, aren't there a bunch of studies or something that says our microbiome can affect emotions as well as what kinds of food we like to eat?

> However such changes are passive not deliberate/active/intentional

This is a subjective interpretation. Human "intention" is informed by selective pressures as well, both those that have etched themselves into our genetics and those that have influenced mental development.

The difficulty with that reasoning is that you can say that you can abstract red, but you can't definitely state that I can abstract red any more than other animals may.

Interestingly, we're starting to find evidence for grammatical rules in other animal languages: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20615-first-evidence-...

What you say has been "known since Aristotle" appears to be wrong. There is really no evidence that this ability, or any cognitive ability, is "unique to humans". Yes, humans have more of this ability to "recognize abstractions and make generalizations" than pretty much any other species on this planet, but it is not unique to humans. In the contrary, there is lots of evidence that generalization and some amount of abstraction are fundamental to all forms of problem-solving (and "all life is problem-solving") and that the fundamental neural mechanisms that lead to these capacities are no different in quality between different species, just in quantity. This is being demonstrated in objective research again and again... there is no cognitive capacity we humans have that you can point to and say "this is totally different, no other animal has anything like this." Yes, your linguist abilities are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than those of most other animals, but even there it is only a matter of degree, not of a fundamental kind.

For a very good treatment of this subject by a highly respected primatologist, see Frans de Waal's recent books. But he isn't alone... until fairly recently it was taboo to say that animals are "intelligent" or "conscious" or "sentient", but this is thankfully beginning to change, and among the current generation of biologists, ethologists and animal cognitive psychologists many consider the notion that animals aren't sentient to be outmoded, or as Frans de Waal puts it, "anthropodenial".

But there is one thing that makes us truly different from all other animals and it's only indirectly related to cognition: for better or for worse we are the only animal that uses and controls fire. It's fire that really defines humans, not our big brains (and fire probably came first; cooking made our calorically expensive large brains possible). And it is fire that may be the end of us, as well.

The hilarious part of your example is that the Greeks didn't have words for colours, so couldn't actually talk about it as separate from things that are red.

Thank you for this, I love good book recommendations.

Fantastic books. I highly recommend Mind and Nature.

Thank you, I will try to read them when time permits. I forgot to mention evolution in my post, but that's part of the point. Our genes seem like a very long-term memory, trough them species (including ours) can learn new strategies over millennia.

I asked my father the very thing I wrote above, and he answered that intelligence was the ability to reuse previously acquired knowledge in a given context. Which would seem fitting, if a bit stretching.