The mind of a forest

"TREE ?!?!? I AM NO TREEEEEE !!!"

Whoops...

But perhaps if an individual tree can't think for itself, maybe the entire forest can. Perhaps it's not so much Tolkein's Ents as it is Doctor Who's sentient forest. Is this totally mad ? Not necessarily. We know that trees are interconnected and interdependent :

Simard went on to show how mycorrhizae-linked trees form networks, with individuals she dubbed Mother Trees at the center of communities that are in turn linked to one another, exchanging nutrients and water in a literally pulsing web that includes not only trees but all of a forest’s life. These insights had profound implications for our understanding of forest ecology—but that was just the start.

She—and other scientists studying roots, and also chemical signals and even the sounds plant make—have pushed the study of plants into the realm of intelligence. Rather than biological automata, they might be understood as creatures with capacities that in animals are readily regarded as learning, memory, decision-making, and even agency.

I am wont to say that just because connections look similar, it doesn't mean that they necessarily have similar results. Too many idiots have compared the structure of the Universe to the structure of a brain. And yet... trees are alive. There would be an undeniable advantage to it being able to respond in an intelligent way. Or at least a pseudo-intelligent way - if the network produces purely mechanistic but beneficial responses, that would still be an example of the connections giving rise to something greater than the sum of the parts. It wouldn't necessarily mean that the trees or forest could be said to be "thinking."

I’ve used the word intelligence in my writing because I think that scientifically we attribute intelligence to certain structures and functions. When we dissect a plant and the forest and look at those things—Does it have a neural network? Is there communication? Is there perception and reception of messages? Will you change behaviours depending on what you’re perceiving? Do you remember things? Do you learn things? Would you do something differently if you had experienced something in the past?—those are all hallmarks of intelligence. Plants do have intelligence. They have all the structures. They have all the functions. They have the behaviours.

But of course, the same thing could be said for a computer program. It raises the question of whether plants made "conscious" choices, if they have a deliberate purpose in choosing what they do.

We have done what we call choice experiments, in which we have a mother tree, a kin seedling, and a stranger seedling. The mother tree can choose which one to provide for. We found that she’ll provide for her own kin over something that’s not her kin. Another experiment is where a mother tree is ill and providing resources for strangers versus kin. There’s differentiation there, too. As she’s ill and dying, she provides more for her kin.

Even so, that too could be due to a purely mechanistic response. Worse, it would be difficult to test : if you could fool the plant with some chemical or fungal alteration that the other wasn't related, it would tell you no more about its consciousness than if you fooled a human being into thinking another person was a dog : of course they'd act differently given different knowledge.

Let’s say you have a group of plants and stress one out, it will have a big response. Botanists can measure their serotonin responses. They have serotonin. They also have glutamate, which is one of our own neurotransmitters. There’s a ton of it in plants. They have these responses immediately. If we clip their leaves or put a bunch of bugs on them, all that neurochemistry changes. They start sending messages really fast to their neighbours.

I think I've switched from skepticism to total agnosticism on this issue. I don't what it is, but consciousness is manifestly not a physical thing - there are no consciousness particles or fields or whatever. So how could we ever prove something has internal experiences ? I'm not sure we ever could. Why, then, should we presume that plants are not conscious, instead of assuming that they are ?

Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees - Issue 77: Underworlds - Nautilus

Consider a forest: One notices the trunks, of course, and the canopy. If a few roots project artfully above the soil and fallen leaves, one notices those too, but with little thought for a matrix that may spread as deep and wide as the branches above.