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Comment by ciconia | Hacker News Reader

I love to spend time in my garden looking at all the different creatures: all insects, for example, seem to have a very intricate behavior. Recently I noticed how bees, not being able to drink nectar from comfrey flowers due to their elongated form, would pierce a hole in the flower's petals in order to reach the nectar.

It seems to me each creature, each species, have their own kind of intelligence. Plantes also seem to me to have an awareness of some kind. They know where the sun is, they know when to sprout, they can find water, they have such complex relationships with everything around them, the microbiome in the soil, other plants, insects.

Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.

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> Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.

Ok, but an anthropomorphic view of nature is fanciful and _also_ pointless.

This is not alive by any but the most inclusion-oriented definitions, and yet it follows light: https://www.popsci.com/make-light-following-robot-instructio...

Talking about "intelligence" and "awareness" makes sense _sometimes_ because we don't understand where our consciousness comes from. For mechanisms where we have the capacity to concretely observe how and why they happen, cavalierly throwing in notions like "intelligence" and "awareness" is an emotional deception, a pathetic fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science), that adds nothing except fantasy.

You see a complex mechanical process and call it grim and pointless unless one introduces metaphysics. I see a complex mechanical process and call it fundamentally beautiful and awesome without needing the metaphysics.

What if consciousness is fundamental instead of emergent?

> What if consciousness is fundamental instead of emergent?

And what if Wolverine was Lord of the Vampires?

Speculative fiction is still speculative and still fiction.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Newton%27s_flaming_laser_swor...

I'm reminded of this quote:

> we don't understand where our consciousness comes from

Your two options are:

1. Make something up about whether consciousness is fundamental and run with it.

2. Don't make anything up when you don't need to, because we can answer how plants follow the sun without needing to talk about consciousness, just like we can answer how an automatic door opens for me when I get close without deciding to call it conscious.

> From below: Is there an option where we don't act like consciousness is solved when it's convenient for our argument?

You're saying "Consciousness isn't solved, therefore we should imagine that these things are conscious."

I'm saying "Consciousness isn't solved and that's irrelevant because we have purely mechanical explanations for these things that don't require imagining that they're conscious."

Because a lightbulb's glow when I push a button or flip a switch _might_ be a sign of the lightbulb's consciousness, but that's 1) not necessary and 2) purely made up and deep into Russell's teapot.

Is there an option where we don't act like consciousness is solved when it's convenient for our argument?

> Reply to above: If consciousness is fundamental, the "purely mechanical" explanation is not purely mechanical.

I've found HackerNews to be broadly allergic to the idea of nonlocal consciousness, and worldviews that are not material reductionism. Nevertheless, I will once again point to the work of Dean Radin, among others, to demonstrate that these are not unfalsifiable claims.

I think the problem with both of your arguments is that neither of you will be able to actually define consciousness in a way that is satisfactory to the other party.

Which is cool. Because we don't really fundamentally understand what it actually is. We have a rough feeling, but any definition we put forth will either also be satisfied by something you both agree is not conscious or not be satisfied by something you both agree is conscious.

So we can't really say if it is emergent or fundamental. And it may even be a property of purely mechanical elements.

If consciousness is non-local or non-mechanical then it has a lot of very weird rules about physical and chemical things that can be done to brains to alter it.

"I'm saying "Consciousness isn't solved and that's irrelevant because we have purely mechanical explanations for these things that don't require imagining that they're conscious." "

Seems you don't really believe in consciousness which is fine. In the end whatever humans think consciousness is can probably also be explained with mechanical explanations.

It turns out that the bio-molecular machinery that neurons use to do their thing is also present throughout all cells. In other words, all life thinks. Brains are just concentrations of thinking tissue.

"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

> In other words, all life thinks

Only for a hyper-inclusive definition of "think" that loses any communicative value.

I commented 36 minutes ago and the video is 52 minutes long, which makes me suspect that you didn't watch it.

It's pretty thought-provoking, I don't think you'll be disappointed by it.

> I commented 36 minutes ago and the video is 52 minutes long, which makes me suspect that you didn't watch it.

Youtube video playback speed is configurable.

So you did watch it? What do you think?

It's an excellent presentation, and I'm grateful that you shared it and agree that people should watch it. But I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism. We don't know how we get from molecules to thoughts, but saying "therefore thoughts" is a bridge too far. If you start doing that, the words we reserve for discussing the leap from mechanism to self lose their meaning because suddenly an automatic door is thinking, which is just...not...necessary.

> But I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism.

This is some pretty strong language.

We all use words to abstract concepts. It's not clear what "thinking" even means from a scientific standpoint. We can be pretty broad on the definition if this is a philosophical discussion.

> suddenly an automatic door is thinking

It is certainly performing an action in response to stimuli. And, given that more electronics are shifting to microcontrollers, a modern automatic door might as well have the machinery required to 'think', or at least, it will have a computer.

There's no evidence that our brain is any different from an automatic door – or more specifically, from an enormous collection of automatic doors.

> There's no evidence that our brain is any different from an automatic door – or more specifically, from an enormous collection of automatic doors.

"specifically" is key here. People want to differentiate between one tree and whole forest. Maybe you don't, but there is a reason why those two words exist. The same is with one door and enormous collection of doors acting as a whole big brain. The same is with intelligence of automatic doors and of humans. They live on continuum like light and dark, but we still have words for light and dark.

historically, it is simply called consciousness

in various traditions

> It's an excellent presentation, and I'm grateful that you shared it and agree that people should watch it.

Cheers! Thank you.

> I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism.

Fair enough. (FWIW, Galileo turned the charlatans' toys into telescopes.)

> We don't know how we get from molecules to thoughts, but saying "therefore thoughts" is a bridge too far. If you start doing that, the words we reserve for discussing the leap from mechanism to self lose their meaning because suddenly an automatic door is thinking, which is just...not...necessary.

Meaning no disrespect, this sounds like a philosophical rather than a scientific objection to me. Which is fine, but I want to ask, necessary for what?

I actually don't know if I think cells are robots or tiny people.

It seems to me that slime molds think, and already must have some kind of "self", but do they count as a person? Or the lowly trichoplax[1], a kind of tribe of cells, is it a person?

Cybernetics has a result that says that any efficient self-regulating system must contain an image of itself to function.

- - - -

[1] > There are no neurons present, but in the absence of a nervous system the animal use short chains of amino acids known as peptides for cell communication, in a way that resembles how animals with neurons use neuropeptides for the same purpose. Individual cells contain and secrete a variety of small peptides, made up of between four and 20 amino acids, which are detected by neighbouring cells. Each peptide can be used individually to send a signal to other cells, but also sequentially or together in different combinations, creating a huge number a different types of signals. This allows for a relatively complex behavior such as crinkling, turning, flattening, and internal churning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax#Signal_processing

I don’t understand the problem with being inclusive a bit. Plants could be aware, so could be all life of all the Kingdom, we kill them and we eat them for own survival.

What’s wrong with that? We’re just a bunch of talking animals. A huge bunch with complicated tools but technically still wild animals.

As for sun tracking in plants I do agree with you it’s probably not a sign of intelligence. If that’s your point, you can just point out that part.

In that case, what word is left for what a human does in their brain that a plant can't?

Why does there need to be a specific word to describe that?

You can just say humans and plants think in different ways, or through different mechanisms.

> Why does there need to be a specific word to describe that?

Communication efficiency. I'd like to have one short term for this so that I don't need to make elaborate differentiations every time I need to use it.

"Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem." - Wendell Johnson (Semanticist)

Good example of ppl who make up new words to "simplify" things as their world gets more and more complex every year are Lawyers and Accountants. But even so sometimes you end up requiring buildings full of them to decipher what one sentence they came up with last year actually means this year.

The problem is not the Lawyer or the Accountant but Human Language itself.

Plants are chemical-binding, animals are space-binding, humans are time-binding.

Korzybski, "Manhood of Humanity"

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25457/25457-pdf.pdf

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

IIRC, he meant that plant life binds and manipulates chemicals in the immediate environment; animals move matter over the surface of the earth (at a much higher rate than plants); humans shift information through time via culture (and later writing, et. al.)

I agree with your insinuation that there is utility in having a language for describing the brain processes or their functions in humans that is different from the other living beings.

One way that I like to think about it is that there's a spectrum of "sophistication". Even within the human population, there's gradation: not everyone is great at critical thinking, forecasting, imagining, reasoning, meta cognition, etc.

When I look to the stars, I wonder what levels exist above the human mind.

Looking "downward", are there "thinking processes" that we could assimilate through technology into our own minds?

Philosophy

I find that the more we learn about intelligence and consciousness, the more we realize how little we really know about it.

I also think that once we truly understand what intelligence and consciousness is, we'll be able to actually create it.

Yeah I agree with you. There is a lot of interesting stuff the more you study it. Like Physarum polycephalum, a slime that solves mazes despite not having a nervous system and is used to create better road networks. I really hope in the future we combine bio-tech as things like this already use their form of A* and pathing system. Once plants & slime are used to create logic gates and truth tables start to take off I see that as being the cleanest tech around.

Then you have things like the Turritopsis dohrnii a jellyfish. They are immortal beings that decide to change between child and adult forever... or just basically once they start starving or get too old they reboot their cells and turn back into a baby jelly. It's a pretty fast process I've read. Although apparently it's really hard to rise them in captivity so studies are somewhat limited.

Then you have planarian flatworms that store their memories outside their brain... I think is similar to how plants function in many regards...

Although plant gnosophysiology is a bit different, their "screams" are a bit too ultrasonic for us, but other animals like mice and stuff can hear them. But yes, look up how plants respond to danger and react or warn other plants. It's really cool stuff.

Heck going even smaller and just imaging cells hunting down food or working together to create an organ, or nerve or something is amazing. It's a bit mind boggling to think of all the tiny things going on in just your fingertip.

I also spend a lot of time watching nature - just yesterday I was marvelling at ants carrying grass seeds to their nest, each carrying the seed the same way around, so that the burrs don’t snag on anything - pretty much the same behaviour as Darwin notes with his worms and leaves. It fascinates me that something with such a limited little mind can still figure out something like “carry from this end”.

I actually take a very mechanistic view of nature, and find it glorious - that mechanical processes at a minuscule scale can result in such a panoply and profusion of form is positively miraculous. Matter seems to want to be alive - what enters organic chemistry rarely leaves it, and life always tends to more forms, more individuals, more diversity - and it’s all just chemistry and physics and entropy at play.

I guess one can find a spiritual beauty in the idea that living matter, thinking matter, is a preferable state of being for matter in this universe. Cosmos, know thyself.

> I guess one can find a spiritual beauty in the idea that living matter, thinking matter, is a preferable state of being for matter in this universe.

But it seems that the thinking species are creating all the problems on this planet ...

Also, some say that the function of the brain is to stop thinking as soon as possible. We're using it in the wrong way.

> Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.

Would you find it ridiculous if I said that it serves an ideological purpose so deeply entrenched in our civilization at this point that we hardly notice its contingent nature?

I wouldn't call it ridiculous, but you are kind of begging the question ;-)

> Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.

I find the opposite: Knowing how something works just makes me appreciate it more. The fact that an insect can pull off all of these staggeringly complex behaviours (beyond what we can do with kilowatts of GPU power) with a couple of hundred neurons and a power budget of almost nothing, all the while being able to self-reproduce, it's incredible.

Is a rainbow more or less amazing when you understand total internal reflection?

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