The Intelligent Forest | Hacker News Reader

The Intelligent Forest

noemamag.com

50 pointsaxiomdata31622 comments

The title reminds me of the sci-fi book The Dark Forest, whose premise is that the galaxy is full of life that stays silent for fear of being annihilated. In retrospect, not a whole lot different from an actual forest.

I sometimes subscribe to the spiritual view of the author, that space (in this case a forest) is part of a larger intelligence that communicates with us. It's not something I bring up a lot, for fear of sounding unhinged, but it lines up with my experiences.

> The Dark Forest

This is a tangent, but have you found any other books you can recommend for someone having a hard time finding sci fi books they like while absolute adoring The Three-body Problem trilogy / Remembrance of Earth's Past?

Searching /r/printSF is my go to for finding like titles.

I’ll try that, thank you.

Read the whole Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy a few years back.

Check out 'There Is No Antimemetics Division' -- just the most recent one I read and really enjoyed, quick read too, probably only a few hours if you really dig into it, took me like 4 or 5 IIRC.

Also, because it's timely. A friend recommended me the above book, and it reminded me of this book that I have yet to recommend to him...

The Fifth Science by Exurb1a

Other good ones in no particular order.

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds -- probably my favorite starting point for his work as it's a standalone novel, but I've read everything he's written and enjoyed most of it. This is a story told over the course of multiple tens of millions of years, and it flows well.

Culture Series by Ian M. Banks -- Only made it through the first two books, and really enjoyed them, having trouble getting into the third but I have a feeling I'll enjoy the rest of the series. Just re-read the 2nd a few days ago.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky -- Planet of the Apes but with Spiders, not entirely accurate but an apt teaser I think.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie -- Only got through the first in this series of three, but really enjoyed it.

I've probably burned through another 250 books in the last 5 years or so, this is just top of mind recent memory stuff. I have the good luck that my father is an absolute monster with reading, so I'm a few thousand recommendations behind.

Feel free to reach out, e-mail is username here at gmail.

Great! Thanks a lot for that! Have a good one.

Anathem worked for me

Ilium/Olympos by Dan Simmons is very good, also anything from Alastair Reynolds.

Yeah, definitely. The three body problem gripped me as well, can't really be topped but I also liked:

Stories of your life by Ted Chiang

Fragnemt by the lovely twitter.com/ctrlcreep

Borges

qntm.org/fiction

Haruki Murakami

Accerelando by Charles Stross

Thank you and is that Jorge Luis Borges? Anything in particular you suggest?

Yep! The stories that really stand out to me are the library of babel, the circular ruins, and the short one about the map (on exactitude in science). His writing style isn't the best, comes across as overdone or clunky sometimes, but the themes he explores are wonderful.

I read the Children of Time Series by Adrian Tchaikovsky after Remembrance of Earth's Past and really enjoyed both.

That's actually why I clicked on this thread. Glad I did though, was a great read.

Spirituality is very sweet and pleasant. This article for example is a joy to read. But for that very reason, it's very dangerous. Look at this question: “Why would the old pines trust their reproductive success to these birds and animals?” . In nature, things just are, they don't have human character. They don't "trust" in the same way that a grandma trusts the grandchildren of her neighbors to clean her garden. You can say "birds and animals have been around pines for long enough that pine cones evolved," and that's it.

Then there is this one: "Recognizing that forest ecosystems, like societies, have elements of intelligence would help us leave behind the old notion that they are inert and predictable." Of course they are not inert. But the notion of unpredictability in this context requires, at the very least, some elaboration. Since living organisms like humans are walking ecosystems[1], the treatment of many common and rare ailments depends on our capacity to model and predict ecosystems[2][3][4][5][6]. And just slightly further from home, our capacity to heal and maintain those ecosystems the article's authors love so much also depends on predicting. We can not just walk away saying they are "unpredictable", specially without providing any proof. Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen.

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/9/2/40 [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7350295/ [3]: https://aacijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1322... [4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK552154/ [5]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41531-021-00156-z [6]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7333005/

The article's author is Suzanne Simard [1], who was the first to observe and study the fungi-mediated carbon transfer between trees of different species. This isn't a non-expert romanticising science; this is one of the world's leading experts on the topic at hand trying to make their research accessible to a wide audience.

More than that, the idea that communicating via metaphor is necessarily dangerous and misleading seems wrong. These complex biological systems are indeed very different to our human experience. And in many cases our understanding is very nascent; requiring creative thought to develop new insights and make progress. In that context, using metaphors as hooks helps to guide our thoughts and suggest possible paths to further elucidation.

Of course, at some point one needs to back up the mental model with hypotheses that can be tested quantitatively, and to actually go out and do the experiment. And it is true that one can take the mental model implied by a metaphor and overapply it, making you believe you understand something that you don't. But that can also happen with any kind of model; one can learn some equations relating supply and demand and feel like that's sufficent to "understand eonomics" but end up making bad predictions when the real world situation turns out to more complex than the assumptions underlying the model.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Simard

One can be the leading expert in a field and still believe weird things, sometimes to the detriment of said field. Though in this case is more likely Dr. Simard and her editor agreed this was the best language to present her subject to a wide audience... imho, again to the detriment of her field.

> fungi-mediated carbon transfer between trees of different species.

I knew first from Suzanne Simard in Peter Wohlleben's book "The Hidden Life of Trees". Among other things, it describes how fungi interact with trees. It's absolutely fascinating and can very much recommend. Just as Dr. Simard, Wohlleben likes to attribute personality to trees. From the broad viewpoint of cognitive theory, it kind of makes sense. It doesn't change the fact that these are natural systems worth understanding, modelling and predicting. Anthropomorphizing ecosystems via parables in a popular science book directs public opinion in ways that can be very counter-productive.

> More than that, the idea that communicating via metaphor is necessarily dangerous and misleading seems wrong.

Thank you for this point. I think this is one of the gaps in science communication.

If anyone wants a good overview of the research surrounding how trees 'talk' with each other, check out this recent video over at Real Science on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HiADisBfQ0

A really good article about the very complex interactions in natural environments.

Love the art, wish it was in poster form.

Ecosystems "inert and predictable"?. Nobody thinks that.

This is some of the most pretentious crap I've ever read.

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