Finding Animals with Plant Intelligence

Sustainable Attention Attractors (sacraments) and the Noösphere

Professor Richard Doyle

Penn State University

mobius@psu.edu

Original Abstract

Precursor: A Textual Bramble

Attention. Attention" __Island__, Aldous Huxley

From the current state of progress, it looks as though plant communication is likely to be as complex as that within a brain. Trewavas, 2003, "Aspects of Plant Intelligence"

Finally, the author, during the preparation of this article, has become very aware that human language guides and greatly limits our thoughts when trying to appreciate the functioning of plants. It might ultimately be unproductive to debate whether a plant has memory, whether a plant can learn or whether a plant can possess a spatial map, because the key terms come from an organism that is highly individual, an organism that finds it hard to appreciate the faculties of organisms that lack individuality and all that that implies. Our language lacks appropriate words. However, if new words are needed to describe how plants function, maybe we should invent new ones rather than trying to redefine existing ones. Firn, 2004, "Plant Intelligence: An Alternative Point of View"

Viewing plants as expressing intelligent behaviour should lead to better understanding of their ecological success and indicate experiments to test the basic concept.  Aspects of Plant Intelligence: An Answer to Firn

"The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love." Luther Burbank uttered this wisdom as I walked beside him in his Santa Rosa garden. We halted near a bed of edible cacti."While I was conducting experiments to make 'spineless' cacti," he continued, "I often talked to the plants to create a vibration of love. 'You have nothing to fear,' I would tell them. 'You don't need your defensive thorns. I will protect you.' Gradually the useful plant of the desert emerged in a thornless variety." Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

Intro: The Return of the Repressed of Plant Intelligence?

In a recent article in Annals of Botany, A Trewavas offered an "admittedly controversial" argument to shift scientific ( botanical) language toward "plant intelligence."  As 99 percent of biomass of the earth, plants are clearly successful - why articulate this success as "intelligence"? Trewavas argues that such a vocabulary would help guide future research to less noticed aspects of plant signal transduction. In an earlier (1999) article, what Trewavas wrote concerning researcher "attention" would later be applied to attention, or at least intelligence, itself:

Although this classification was sensibly designed to bring order out of chaos, it had one major drawback. Division into just four types implied a limited diversity and perhaps a lack of specificity in the mechanism of protein dephosphorylation. Consequently, investigators have tended to concentrate attention on protein kinases where, it was surmised, all the action was to be found. Trewavas, How Plants Learn, 1999

Trewavas, arguing for the importance of our rhetorical frameworks for the evolution of knowledge through the differential focusing of attention, closes his "Aspects of Plant Intelligence" with a rhetoric sampled, even grafted from a poem:

Trewavas text argues in its very title for the actuality of plant intelligence - he does not so much argue for plant intelligence as map its aspects and implications. Perhaps we ought, therefore, to read this poetic sample or  "graft" with which he closes with some attention, chosen as it was to end an article arguing for the importance of carefully chosen vocabulary in the creation of scientific models, what I will call "attention attractors" for future research. What does Trewavas's troping of Frost's "The Road Not Taken" suggest about his inquiry into the aspects of plant intelligence?

• replication with a difference - genetic drift
• common signalling pathway of calcium ions
• meditation on plant intelligence induces re-discovery of symbol using animal ( general semantics re-enacted with Firn's response in terms of "economies" displays remarkable sensitivity to context; "Plant Intelligence" is....words.)
• notion of "lacking individuality", Firn, and collective intelligence 

 Watch as "plant intelligence" returns to botany as a problematic, perhaps helpfully amplifying assumptions concerning subjectivity and consciousness. A figure ground shift: "Animal" as outsourced genetic mobility. From seed dispersion to consciousness.

"For centuries, plants have been regarded as passive creatures." "Mindless Mastery", Trewavas, 2002

(1) Finding Animals, Interspecies: DMT Snuffs as Hunting Allies, Ayahuasca as sexual selector

     Based on human subject trials carried out in the early 1990's, scientist Richard Strassman hypothesizes the existence of alternate ontologies accessible through DMT and other modalities for inducing Nonordinary Conciousness (NOC, Harner). In this segment, I will discuss the role of "ecstatic signification" (Munn) as an aspect of Plant Intelligence that has proved crucial to participations in plant intelligence.

(2) Finding Animals, intraspecies: Iboga as Primate Courtship Adjunct,

When a male mandrill must engage in combat with another, either to establish his claim to a female or to climb a rung of the hierarchical ladder, he does not begin to fight without forethought. Instead, he first finds and digs up an iboga bush, eating its root; next, he waits for its effect to hit him full force (which can take from one to two hours); only then does he approach and attack the other male he wants to engage in battle.” (Samorini 2002, p. 58) ( ecstatic signification)

Finding Jaguars, Finding Ayahuasca

(3) Finding Animals, Transspecies: The "Mindless Mastery" of  Plant Intelligence Thermodynamics & The Noosphere

Outro: Cellular automata and collective intelligence?

Responses to FindinAnimals