Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

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This is astonishing, but not too surprising. It seems natural (because it is, ha), that any system that is allowed to evolve would evolve the ability to gather information from its surrounding environment. If that environment includes trees, then it holds that trees would be able to "communicate" with each other. (In this case, the communication is just reading the state of your neighbors)

The interesting thing to me about this is it kindof forces us to examine life in a different way (not because it's a new finding, just because it is being presented to us).

Consider the "Chinese Brain" thought experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain

To paraphrase: sentience can be looked at as an emergent property of complexity, especially in a lossy system.

I guess the point I'm kindof dancing around here (because it sounds silly) is: what are the emergent properties of enormous, several billion member sensor networks like a forest? To an outside observer, perhaps looking at this on a different time scale than we do, is there something more there than just wood and leaves?

Something people get hung up on when talking about "life" on other planets is this idea that the life would look anything even remotely like us, or share our concepts of language. If (as the chinese brain thought experiment suggests) sentience can emerge from complexity, then maybe there is sentient life on other planets (or our own planet) that just lives in a totally, totally different timescale, or concept of communication than we do.

Another way of saying this is: think of the trees like cells in your body.

It's an interesting question. When you look at the vast complexity, diversity and synergy in the natural world it certainly represents a body of work that far exceeds mankinds best achievements so far. If I'm smarter than a monkey because I can build a house then it only seems reasonable to recognize a greater intelligence in the system that built the earth. If we once encountered an abandoned alien city with materials and design way beyond our reach everyone would assume they were smarter than us without ever meeting one. Maybe we just have too narrow a definition of intelligence.

Are you trying to turn this into an intelligent design argument?

Human life is short, so instead of going through lengthy trial-and-error, like nature does, our brains evolved to make complex predictions about our environment based on past observations and simulation. That's what we call intelligence. It's not necessarily the best way to build something complex, but it is fast enough to be useful in a life time. I don't see any reason to assign additional meanings to the word like "how well a system is built" or to personify evolution into something other than a trial-and-error process.

I think he was going for Gaia Hypothesis.

Simply put: what if the entire ecology of the planet is part of an integrated system that has an intelligence of its own, motives of its own, and merely operates at an epic time scale.

Just as the bacteria in our stomachs don't know they're contributing to our well being, so also may we not know that we're contributing to the well being of Gaia.

The issue I have with that is that it seems unproveable, and therefore its truth or falsity has no impact on our daily lives.

Right. But also, we wouldn't be a bacteria in the stomach contributing to the well being. We seem more like a virus. Or maybe I'm just thinking in a too short time span.

A harmful mutation, perhaps, but as grandparent observed, there's really no useful predictions to be made by this theory.

Or in too human terms

Even that is assuming that life on other planets is made out of matter rather than light, consciousness, etc. "Reality is not only stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose."

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