Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[popeye1945]

Excellent, no disagreement here. I've never read Nagle but just might.

[Sy Borg]

His essay, 'What Is It Like To Be A Bat" is quite famous. The TLDR is, as you can no doubt imagine, "we have no way of knowing".

[popeye1945]

Hi Sy Borg,
I will get the book, just googled it it sounds wonderful. Off the top of my head, shot in the dark, speaking of bats--lol! I believe that what it is like to be anything is what it is capable of experiencing, what it indeed does experiences, largely that is the most distinguishing and self-defining aspect of personal identity, the I if you will. The board spectrum of possible human experiences outside of a hardy or weak constitution is vast, as vast as our belief in our own uniqueness, our uniqueness is our experiences or who we are.

[Sy Borg]

Being a paper, rather than a book, it is available online.

The spectrum of possible experiences is rather mind blowing. It includes all those of simpler animals in the past through to post-human experience. Our current human experience is most likely just a sliver of what is possible, just as visible light is only a sliver of the whole EM spectrum.

[popeye1945]

Sy Borg,
Thanks for the heads up on it being available online. Wow, your insights as to the broadening of the perspective on how deep goes, is indeed mind-blowing. On a physical level, it might give us room to reawaken the elements of some of our animal ancestors qualities, like the regeneration of limbs, psychologically seems a bottomless well

[popeye1945]

Panpsyicism re-troactive!

[Pattern-chaser]

An apposite article from the latest issue of the New Scientist: "Suzanne Simard interview: How I uncovered the hidden language of trees".

[Consul]

An apposite article from the latest issue of the New Scientist: "Suzanne Simard interview: How I uncovered the hidden language of trees".

"But Simard and her colleagues continue to challenge our preconceptions of how plants interact. Among other things, their research shows that the wood wide web is like a brain and can communicate information throughout the entire forest, that trees recognise their offspring and nurture them and that lessons learned from past experiences can be transmitted from old trees to young ones."

It is highly doubtful that the information in question here is semantic information rather than mere signal-information. A genuine language essentially has a semantic dimension (meaning & reference).

[psyreporter]

An apposite article from the latest issue of the New Scientist: "Suzanne Simard interview: How I uncovered the hidden language of trees".

"But Simard and her colleagues continue to challenge our preconceptions of how plants interact. Among other things, their research shows that the wood wide web is like a brain and can communicate information throughout the entire forest, that trees recognise their offspring and nurture them and that lessons learned from past experiences can be transmitted from old trees to young ones."

It is highly doubtful that the information in question here is semantic information rather than mere signal-information. A genuine language essentially has a semantic dimension (meaning & reference).

The intented distinctive quality between a signal and semantic information (meaningless vs meaningful) would merely be possible by the idea that plants are automata (machines) and not sentient, which is questioned by this topic, and thus such an idea would not be possible with the assumption of 'common sense' (e.g., that readers would automatically understand why a signal would be different from semantic information).

From your reference:

σ is an instance of information, understood as semantic content, if and only if:

• (GDI.1) σ consists of one or more data;
• (GDI.2) the data in σ are well-formed;
• (GDI.3) the well-formed data in σ are meaningful.

When plants send signals to specifically their own off-spring, that is clear evidence of semantic information (meaningful interaction). While it may be possible to make a case how such interaction originates from meaningless machine-like processess, meaninglessness is not evident from the mere notion of such communication.

[Sy Borg]

Sy Borg,
Thanks for the heads up on it being available online. Wow, your insights as to the broadening of the perspective on how deep goes, is indeed mind-blowing. On a physical level, it might give us room to reawaken the elements of some of our animal ancestors qualities, like the regeneration of limbs, psychologically seems a bottomless well

Yup, there's a lot of reality that we simply cannot access. Certainly there are, and have been, many simpler minds than ours that we cannot hope to understand. Also, imagine how much more consciousness is possible with future advanced beings emerging in the next trillion years.

So we can't hope to understand the fine points of the complex networks of, in, through and around us. Further, as mentioned, a huge slice of reality - the subjective experience of all other living beings - is not available to us. At least, other minds are only in thin slivers that we can infer from behaviour and circumstances. (As for neural mapping, we are good at finding out simple mental dynamics while hooked up in a laboratory, but measuring real world interactions remains a long way off).

[popeye1945]

Its an adventure, you are pretty good at expanding upon, open to the wonder, the cosmos, the future of being. We are our experiences, and throughs experiences seem greatly expanded, whats it like?

[Sy Borg]

Its an adventure, you are pretty good at expanding upon, open to the wonder, the cosmos, the future of being. We are our experiences, and throughs experiences seem greatly expanded, whats it like?

We treat this "reality" of ours as all-encompassing, yet we are just the thinnest sliver of an organic hydrous system on a single planet's crust. Yet, subjectively, that sliver is basically all that exists to us in this grand simian soap opera. In a sense, subjective reality is inside out, as if the thin sliver of life on the Earth's surface is everywhere, and the rest of reality is reduced to a thin film around like a bubble.

Oh, I'd better address the thread. It seems that plants are already being treated like animals, in that they are routinely displaced, farmed, killed and consumed.

[Pattern-chaser]

It seems that plants are already being treated like animals, in that they are routinely displaced, farmed, killed and consumed.

This sums up what is. But the topic is about what ought to be. And if these two contradict one another, as they do (IMO), the issue is a moral one. Are we capable of changing our behaviour if we determine that we ought to treat them better? Are we willing to change our behaviour if we determine that we ought to treat them better? I regret that the answer to both questions is "no", which makes me wonder what we can achieve here?

[Consul]

When plants send signals to specifically their own off-spring, that is clear evidence of semantic information (meaningful interaction). While it may be possible to make a case how such interaction originates from meaningless machine-like processess, meaninglessness is not evident from the mere notion of such communication.

Charles Peirce, one of the fathers of modern semiotics, presented several definitions of "sign": http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/sign

For example:

"A sign is an object which stands for another to some mind."

"A sign is an object capable of determining in a mind a cognition of an object, called the object of the sign."

If receivers and users of meaningful signs (semantic information) rather than of meaningless signals must have a mind, then the question is whether plants are mind-havers, minded beings rather than mindless ones. But what exactly is a mind?

Behavioral psychologists would say that a mind is nothing but a complex of behavioral dispositions and corresponding kinds of behavior. Plants do have minds in the purely behavioristic sense of the term: They send and receive physical or chemical signals, and respond physiologically and behaviorally to them.

However, it is arguable that having a purely behavioristic mind isn't sufficient for having a mind capable of using genuine, i.e. meaningful, signs (semantic information).
As Peirce writes, "a sign is an object capable of determining in a mind a cognition of an object," so mind-havers must be cognizers; i.e. they must have a mind which is a cognitive system, and is thus more than a complex of behavioral tendencies and competences. This is the concept of a mind used by cognitive psychologists.

Do plants have minds qua cognitive systems?
What exactly is a cognitive system?

"The central hypothesis of cognitive science is that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures. While there is much disagreement about the nature of the representations and computations that constitute thinking, the central hypothesis is general enough to encompass the current range of thinking in cognitive science, including connectionist theories which model thinking using artificial neural networks."

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science/

So minds in the cognitivist sense are dynamic systems of computations over mental representations (signs).

What exactly are mental representations (signs)?

"The notion of a “mental representation” is, arguably, in the first instance a theoretical construct of cognitive science. As such, it is a basic concept of the Computational Theory of Mind, according to which cognitive states and processes are constituted by the occurrence, transformation and storage (in the mind/brain) of information-bearing structures (representations) of one kind or another.
However, on the assumption that a representation is an object with semantic properties (content, reference, truth-conditions, truth-value, etc.), a mental representation may be more broadly construed as a mental object with semantic properties. As such, mental representations (and the states and processes that involve them) need not be understood only in cognitive/computational terms."

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ment ... sentation/

(Semantic properties are meaning (sense), reference, aboutness (intentionality), truth & falsity.)

So minds qua cognitive systems are "semantic engines" (John Haugeland); and then, to rephrase Peirce's definition, a sign is an object which stands for another to some cognitive system.

Now, again, the question is whether plants have such minds and are doing genuine semiosis (= the processing of semantically evaluable signs or representations).
I doubt they do, especially as it is arguable that (natural) minds or cognitive systems are physically realized by special parts of organisms, viz. (central) nervous systems, which plants do not have. There are doubtless causal signaling processes in and between plants, but due to their mindlessness (in the cognitivist sense) those aren't semiotic processes with a semantics.

QUOTE>
"If we are going to explore cognition from an evolutionary point of view, we need a precise definition of what it is. As used here, cognition will refer to processes that underlie the acquisition of knowledge by creating internal representations of external events and storing them as memories that can later be used in thinking, reminiscing, and musing, and when behaving. Its dependence on internal representations of things or events, in the absence of the external referent of the representation, is what makes cognition different from noncognitive forms of information processing. Given this definition, processes that allow behavioral responses to an immediately present stimulus are not, strictly speaking, under cognitive control. Only responses that depend on internal representations are. As we’ll see, because cognitive science figured out how to make such distinctions, it thrived.

One of the offshoots of cognitive science, and its early connection to computer science, was the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Some argue for what is called strong AI—the idea that cognition, and even consciousness, can result from information representation in artificial systems. I tend to go with a weaker version—that similarities between human cognition and information processing in artificial systems can be valuably exploited for research purposes to help understand human cognition. In other words, the flow of electrons in electronic devices can shed light on cognition but is not sufficient to create it.

My view is thus that cognition is a product of biological evolution, and as such, requires biological information processing. Still, not all instances of biological information processing count. Every cell, for example, engages in biological information processing at every moment of its life. Some scientists restrict cognition to biological information processing underlying behavior. According to this position, behavioral activities of plants, fungi, and even of unicellular microbes reflect rudimentary cognitive capacities. In his book The First Minds, Arthur Reber claims that because bacteria exhibit phototaxic responses, they have cognitive minds. In my opinion, the equation of cognition with the ability to generate a response to environmental stimulation stretches the term so far as to make it meaningless.

The view that I will be pursuing is that cognition is a product of biological processes made possible by a nervous system. This means that cognition is a feature that only evolved in animals, and only in some of them. Given how I have defined cognition, the job of determining which animals are cognitive creatures, and which are not, is thus one of determining which animals have nervous systems that can form, store, and use internal representations."

(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. pp. 205-7)
<QUOTE

[Sy Borg]

It seems that plants are already being treated like animals, in that they are routinely displaced, farmed, killed and consumed.

Are we willing to change our behaviour if we determine that we ought to treat them better?

Some of us are. Some try extraordinarily hard to do the right thing (much harder than I attempt).

With political, philosophical and religious schisms widening everywhere, the word "we" seems to no longer apply to humanity, if it ever did.