Comment by stuntkite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stuntkite | Hacker News Reader

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I fully admit that I didn't read the first line of the article because I need a nap, but I stand by the fact that I think all things that sleep dream. I would not be surprised if we find out one day if we are around for a bit longer that trees dream. They definitely sleep and I've heard them say they make plans.

In all seriousness though, I like Douglas Hofstadter's consciousness cone. If it is life, it has a mirage of consciousness. I think his term "mirage" doesn't fully illustrate the holographic nature of it, but I don't quite have a better grip on it than that myself. If it has a rest period likely where it sorts what it's done and turns that into new patterns... well, that's a dream to me. I think we will see dreaming things anywhere we find life in the cosmos. I think it goes all the way down and is fundamental.

The results from this paper are very exciting to me in that context. They illustrate my assumptions. I think it's important research for sure. I watched octopus sleep and change color in person at an aquarium in Seattle. A great pacific octopus. I've also been there when they were awake just before feeding and had one all wadded up watching me through the glass waiting for their feeder. They are incredible.

While I agree that it's silly to pretend like dreams are something exclusive to humans (especially considering that our prefrontal cortex is largely deactivated during them anyway), I think it can be misleading to categorise all animals as having similar experiences to humans in their dreams.

Take Dolphins for example. They need to keep one hemisphere active at all times to keep themselves swimming and breathing while the other rests so at some point in their sleep, the hemisphere that's resting swaps over. This is going to give their dreams a very different feel to ours, possibly something in between a lucid and regular dream, and those are fellow mammals!

Imagine how different the experience of even birds must be never mind Octopuses which are 600 million years removed from us in terms of evolution and have a neural structure that is far more distributed than our own. Perhaps individual octopi legs have their own separate stream of consciousness distinct from the animal as a whole.

Do trees actually 'sleep'? Like they don't have neural centers that we consider to be brain-like, that I know of. Further, just defining the concept of sleep is a little tricky and I'm not aware of anything like sleep-ish brain waves, or not moving for a long period of time that we consider sleep-like in trees.

So this idea of sleep evolving in two different species whose ancestor didn't sleep is very interesting.

Trees definitely sleep nightly and hibernate in winter [0]. Their root system and the mycelial network that interoperates with them is astoundingly complex and looks very similar to a brain as we faster moving life are blessed with on top.

Here is a lady talking about some of Paul Stamets' research. [1] I also recommend this talk by him. [2]

Mushrooms interacting with plant roots look similar to a brain and we are just beginning to grok how deep that goes.

[0] https://onetreeplanted.org/blogs/stories/trees-sleep-night

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q0un2GPsSQ

[2] https://q.sustainability.illinois.edu/a-fungal-estrangement/

>Trees definitely sleep nightly

We're equivocating the term "sleep" here. Trees have a nightly cycle, but it's not sleep in the sense that I go to sleep at night.

I don't necessarily buy that this is equivocating anything. How else would you define sleep scientifically other than as a nightly cycle that follows a circadian rhythm and propagates metabolic and hormonal changes throughout the body?

If you're trying to argue that it needs to have a "rest" component to it, I would remind you that during night time, trees do not photosynthesise and also the human brain is not at all at rest during sleep in terms of objective neurochemical activity. Consciousness is lost (except even this is a hazy cut off thanks to dreams) but there is a lot going on still in the brain and body.

How do you expect plants to photosynthesize at night without light. I don't think that holds up

That's a fair rebuttal, my bad. However, one thing that plants do more during the night without any bio-mechanical necessity attached to it is the release of auxin which is the flora analogue to growth hormone, just like animals do during sleep.

I guess you're catching up on the conversation. I don't think you know that much about tree sleep.

> So this idea of sleep evolving in two different species

You're assuming sleep comes after consciousness. Whatever sleep and dreams are, it's entirely possible they are the precursor to consciousness, not an evolutionary step off of consciousness.

Very concise. ^^ This guy dreams ^^

I’ve heard it said that trees are upside down people, with a “head” buried in the earth. It’s a flawed metaphor of course but it gets people thinking.

There’s been some interesting experimental research on how certain plants respond to stimuli and taproot lobotomies. These seem to be evidence for the equivalent of a brain-like computational center in plants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_cognition is a good jumping-off point.

For a long time, people thought that applying terms like cognition and intelligence to plants and mold was anthropomorphizing, but nowadays it might be seen as animal-centrism, to proclaim that cognition and intelligence are exclusively within the domain of the animal kingdom.

Similar to what you find interesting here, plants seem to have evolved computational structures that are similar to our neural system, in that they have stimuli responses that are biased genetically, but that can also adapt to lived experience via hormonal feedback loops that serve as a kind of memory.

Thank you for these pre-nap contributions. They are the best things I’ve read all week.

If agreeing with you makes me eccentric then count me in.

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