How I Started to See Trees as Smart | Hacker News Reader

How I Started to See Trees as Smart

newyorker.com

107 pointsPetiver41 comments

> In the game of survival, an insect’s reaction time easily beats my attempts to swat it. I may think of myself as the smartest creature in the room, but a fly can make me look foolish.

This just seems completely wrong. The wrongness comes from conflating completely orthogonal concepts: speed of detection, speed of response and "smartness". The fly is very fast at detecting and responding to motion in its vicinity, but that property does not make the author look foolish, just slow.

It seems like a strange mistake to make, given the article's musings on different time scales of thought in e.g. plants. If the author applied the same analysis as they do in the quote above, then obviously us humans make the trees look foolish because we can detect and react to things so quickly. I don't think they believe that about a human/tree comparison, so I have no idea why they would close an article with the same comparison and conclusion between a human and a fly.

True, but many people oppose eating even very simple animals (think clams) for ethical reasons, but have no qualms with plants. I don’t think it’s totally absurd to use the authors point to argue that maybe plants reach the level of agency of some simple animals.

I don't disagree with that in any way. My point was that "super-fast-reacting thing makes obviously intelligent slower thing look foolish" is both an incorrect and odd conclusion to close TFA with.

If you repeatedly swat at a fly that's obviously outclassing you in speed, you will look like a fool. Try enough times without success, and it isn't just a look. Let it land and hit it with a newspaper, flyswatter, rubber band, etc, and you'll have demonstrated your superior reasoning ability.

>The fly is very fast at detecting and responding to motion in its vicinity, but that property does not make the author look foolish, just slow.

Actually the author is using the wrong technique if he is trying to swat the fly.

Flies use their compound eyes and a collection of sensitive hairs on their bodies to detect threats and avoid being swatted. You can use this to your advantage.

When the fly lands on something you should approach slowly and steadily from the same direction with your palms open and ready to clap together. Move slowly as your hands get close to the fly so as to cause a minimal air disturbance. By moving slowly, the fly finds it difficult to parse the fact that your hands are getting closer and once you are within a foot or so (.3m) clap your hands together as fast as possible.

Your hands will be close enough that even with the fly's excellent acceleration and detection skills it will be difficult for the fly to escape being crushed. Make sure your fingers are cupped so that the fly is spit out between them as the air escapes during the clap.

It may help to consider that many times a fly will launch itself slightly backwards when it takes flight before zipping forward rapidly. Plan your clap so that the fly will be trapped even if they shift backwards slightly.

Wash your hands when you're done.

This method is successful for me more than 95% of the time when I allow the fly to land. If the fly is nervously zipping around just be patient. It will pause and then you can clap.

I always use a small tupperware container to catch flies on a flat surface, seal it of with a piece of cardboard and release it outside.

You also avoid the mess left behind when clapping them. And in some way it also feels better.

It's actually a fun hobby of mine and after a while you can catch them nearly always. I also love watching my children trying to copy my approach. Highly recommended!

I use a much simpler technique which seems to work for me a similar amount of time. When you clap your hands together, move them up vertically as well as toward each other. Whatever other games they play, the fly will always move upward first.

Yeah this is the real one. If a fly is flying, aim a few inches above it with an overarm throw kinda move, you can grab them out of the air with enough practise. Decent party trick.

> but a fly can make me look foolish.

You should keep trying buddy. Try approaching your hand to a fly very slowly and when the distance will be ~20cm slap it with one powerful movement. Remember that a fly survives ~70% of slaps because it manages to hide between your fingers or something - you need to kill it after slap with squeezing. Keep trying and you will be able to kill flies with your hand with 50% efficiency in average. There are even easier way of killing a fly btw, for example do slowly approaching it with a thin pin which is too hard for a fly to see it coming.

It's hilarious that so many people have these crazy timing techniques and use their hands or a swatter

Use a spray bottle to get its wings wet, I usually use Windex or a multi-surface cleaner, then get a paper towel and kill it as slow or as fast as you want

When you don't need answers in a hurry, there is no need for all the thinking bits to being one place. A lot less of that is needed because everything doesn't need to be done all at once; the same bits can work on different stages of a problem. It is safer to distribute it all more or less evenly throughout the organism. The bits can do other jobs besides, when not needed for thinking with. There is no need to connect everything directly to everything else; trunking and switching is more efficient. There is no reason to think we would recognize the cells they think with, even if anybody had bothered to look.

A tree can afford any amount of thinking-stuff, because running it slowly can be an arbitrarily tiny part of its energy budget: trees can afford to be very, very smart. What remains is to find how intelligence could enable reproductively advantageous adaptive behavior in trees. What could a smarter tree do to outcompete rivals?

It would be foolish to assume there are no such opportunities.

Eloquently said!

If trees could speed up their activity a thousand-fold, they might be as smart as us.

I know, definitely not, but it's a thought I amuse myself with.

Even more amusing to consider directional of change.

If we assume trees are smarter than us, and speeding it up 1000 times brought them down to our level...

and conversely, if we could learn to think slower, would we be smarter?

I've been thinking about plant intelligence for over a decade (and have a neuroscience-related Ph.D.), yet never took it down the path of computation efficiency/time/energy tradeoffs as you have done. Thank you for this new perspective, including its obvious conclusion:

> trees can afford to be very, very smart.

Hopefully I can use some of my perspective to address your follow-on question:

> What could a smarter tree do to outcompete rivals?

This may represent a limited understanding of Darwinian evolution.

Trees have an economy, sharing resources with each other and with other living things.

Tree also are (more or less) fixed in place, thus these economic games are repeated games with known participants.

They thus have a vested interest in maximizing the wealth of the community, rather than their individual wealth. They may (and studies suggest they do) have a preference for supporting their offspring over other trees, but not to the point of killing the community their offspring will also depend on.

Where I am going with this. Repeated economic games are not zero-sum; the pie can get bigger. "Competition" in this setting does not look like competition in a zero-sum "I have to beat the other guy" game.

What trees can do with their intelligence is learn how to build long-term stable and nuturing communities which generate substantial wealth for many members. And that this is a logical local (perhaps global) optimium.

I wrote something along those lines, then replaced it with what I did post, just for brevity. You said it better than I would have.

Mutualism is a well-proven successful strategy. There does seem more scope for intelligence in crafting positive-sum arrangements than in simply competing. (Arguably our own brains hypertrophied in response to sexual selection of better storytellers, with other results secondary.)

http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf

usually, we just presume the strategies were stored in genetic level.

We can presume, but Nature keeps her own counsel. Anywhere there is any scope for intelligent behavior and capacity to exercise it, we should expect to see nature explore that, sooner or later. I know no reason to think that could not have been done yet.

There is some scope for winged humans, and hypothetically some capacity to exercise it. Nature did not explore this route. The opportunity cost of exploratory settling into a non-preferred niche usually outweighs the benefits of that exploration simply due to the scarcity of available resources to buffer against the opportunity cost.

But, as noted, for this case there is very little in the way of cost.

Nature did, in fact, explore the winged-bipeds body plan to full fruition twice, once in mammals, and did winged quadrupeds before and again in mammals. She is progressing on a another as I write this. And, humans did end up conquering the air without growing wings. Nature isn't picky about methods.

The article provoked a thought:

Only when you slow down to a thought speed of a tree, you can fully enjoy the beauty of this world.

I can't attest to its veracity but this animal perception is discussed b In this video by musician benn Jordan

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvg242U2YfQ

As I indicated in my comment there, I think Benn got this one severely wrong:

---

I'm not convinced that the visual/time part of this is correct. If we follow the analogy with sonic fusion frequency ... there's a point at which a repeating sound will change from being a rythmic experience and instead becomes a pitch. So, if you are in an acoustic environment that is generally filled with pitch information, and you could somehow shift your sonic fusion frequency ... if you moved it down, even some of the non-pitch sounds will become pitches; if you move it up, some of the pitches (the lower ones) will now be perceived as rhythmns instead. But ... and this is the important part ... the actual frequencies of the sounds will not change at all. So there's a fixed physical phenomenon (acoustic pressure waves at various frequencies) which does not change, but the sonic fusion frequency determines what kind of experience we have when we encounter that phenomenon. Notice though, that it's a more or less binary switch: either we perceive N Hz as a pitch or as a rythmn, and varying the fusion frequency doesn't alter that. Nor does it various the actual physical frequencies of the sounds - they continue to be whatever they were.

I suspect this is likely true for visual fusion frequencies too.

Moreover, the comparison with video and/or film is misleading. In those cases, the actual phenomena are a discrete series of images that because of CFFF end up being perceived (or not) as continuous motion. But when looking at the actual world, to within the limits of our senses, ALL phenomena are continuous. If an insect flies across your field of vision, there are no distinct series of images that your brain does (or does not) fuse into continuous motion. There is only a continuous motion, which you may or may not notice (the whole thing may happen too fast for you to even register the entire pass.

CFFF, if I understand correctly, is measuring how fast you need to present discrete visual information for the brain to "fuse" it into continuous information (such as motion, or a persistently "on" LED light. But this doesn't seem to have anything to do with how we and other animals perceive reality, because reality is not a series of discrete images. I don't believe that CFFF has much to do with our ability to perceive time, or even with limit questions such as "how long must something be in our visual field in order to notice that it was there".

Could be that I'm missing something huge here, in which case I hope that Benn or someone else will correct me.

I imagine in a competition about the perception of sound you would do much better than I would, given your experience, so I'll take your word on it. You and Benn Jordan can hash it out!

The Overstory, a book by Richard Powers, explores this idea, starting with a story of American chestnuts over many human generations and westward expansion.

Just finished this and came here to mention it. Amazing, beautiful and sad book.

It made me think about timescales very much: if trees moved at human scale time, we'd think about them in a totally different way, and I'm sure would be very much more open to the notion that they're intelligent in many ways.

Good time to plug my favorite nature documentary ever, Attenborough's 6-episode 'The Private Life of Plants' (1995).

It's an interesting thought, but not a very interesting article. I guess I expected more.

Calling it an “altered state” might be normal but misleading. Maybe what has really been altered is the state we call “normal”. Nonetheless, Itzak Bentov would probably describe it as a more evolved state, an Indian Yogi May call it “Samadhi” and according to Sadhguru JV Yoga means “Union”, a sense of unity with all that is or “Law Of One”, this is actually a most normal state for people who claimed to have realized... and this is not about being an atheist or not this is about the learned belief and probably also the choice of “separation” and the final discovery of the fact that matter is consciousness, and consciousness is matter

I do think trees are more evolve than us. Simply by existing, trees constantly create opportunity for life to grow.

They shelter quantity of animals, feed billions of more or less microscopic living creatures (insects, mushrooms, bacteria), induce rain, create an environment with ideal climatic conditions, prevent landslides, provide us incredible useful resources (wood, fruits, substances for medication)... Not even talking about the air you're breathing. And when they die, it's another cycle of benefits that begins.

Meanwhile we may have invented iPads, but as for now, we are at the exact opposite of trees and only know to live the destructive way.

The article says: "First, I took an acid trip. Then I asked scientists about the power of altered states."

Please, don't do drugs. If you play with fire, you might get burned.

There is an alternative. Play with electricity! With a plasma globe. And a radiometer.

What happens when you wave a plasma globe next to high-voltage power cables under a bridge, alone at night? Nothing unusual. What happened when I walked away afterwards? I felt different. Touching a tree made a grounding point.

Yes, ground loops are real. DC and AC are real. Trees are smart, they grow. They're still alive. So are you and I. Let's play in this world and discover something new!

Fire is powerful. And the war on drugs was a mistake.

Fire requires caution. Matches aren't for everyone. But we don't ban lighters for adults, nor would it be smart to.

The incredible health and therapeutic potential in mind altering substances has been held back long enough. It's time for facing reality; ironically enough.

It puts me in mind of Gibson's quote "the future is here it's just not evenly distributed yet." The folks over at Findhorn have been communicating with "nature spirits" for decades. Levin (mentioned in TFA) has shown that all cells have the machinery of thought. That is, all cells have the same biomachinery as neurons. (It's just concentrated in neurons) All tissues think.

And maybe they are smarter than humans - they are playing the long game. They know they will still be here after humans wipe themselves out

While I think this was a good read, I do not like the mingling of scientific reasoning and esoteric thinking in some places. A scientist tripping on a drug has an idea for an experiment and puts it as the plant told her which is then taken as an argument for intelligence in other things than animals. Not a good argument.

The thing is for people with some ESP capability it is part of their living experience that the world is more alive than what average person perceives. In such a world of feelings the material science inevitably falls short as it started with the fundamental assumption of a dead and mechanical world, which deals well with general objects but still having trouble understanding consciousness.

The material science is good at dealing with material in general, but it is not the proving method that is illogical but the assumption needs to be challenged altogether

Summarized in a succinct, allegorical, and atavistic way, this man has discovered the wonder of God’s creation.

In Buddhism we might say, the immense complexity of emptiness, or the dharmakaya

I don't understand the recent push to ascribe consciousness to trees. An anesthetized human being has many more allostatic and homeostasic mechanisms than a tree, and yet we don't ascribe consciousness to anesthetized humans...

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