cognitive science

AMA with Hannah Aline Taylor. Wednesday 2/4 at 4:00 PM CT

love, boundaries, and mistakes in relating, community, and peopling together (+ thank god love doesn’t look like you expect it to)

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?

The Cost of Letting main stream media and social media Do Our Thinking. Lately I’ve been thinking about how both the political left and right are pushing narratives through social media, and a lot of what’s being shared is made up of half-truths or no truth at all. It feels like emotions are being intentionally poked and prodded to build followers around ideologies, not facts.

Honestly, you can’t even scroll social media anymore without stopping to ask yourself, “Is this actually true?” And that the norm now.

Before you can even consider the message, you have to research it just to figure out if it’s real. That alone tells me things are out of control.

What worries me most is how much of this stuff gets absorbed emotionally. A lot of people don’t consciously assess what they believe or take the time to verify it. If something aligns with how they feel, it gets accepted and then repeated.

Sometimes something goes viral almost instantly and gets accepted as truth, whether it’s fact or fiction, simply because it hits people emotionally.

And I get it. When something hits you emotionally and connects to a belief you already have, human nature is to accept it as truth, because our own biases want us to believe it.

If this keeps going, I really think it damages our ability to function as a country, because we lose a shared understanding of what’s real and what isn’t. Everything becomes narrative instead of truth.

I think part of the problem is that we’re becoming mentally lazy. We stop thinking critically and let confirmation bias run unchecked, and it just keeps building on itself.

The solution is simple, even if it’s not easy. Slow down. Question what we’re seeing. Separate facts from feelings. Think logically before reacting emotionally. Truth shouldn’t depend on which side it benefits.

Just something I’ve been thinking about.

v/r Russ

AMA with Nate Soares. Wednesday 2/4 at 10am CT

Author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies answers questions about why superhuman AI would kill us all.

AMA with Nate Soares. Wednesday 2/4 at 10am CT

Author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies answers questions about why superhuman AI would kill us all.

AMA with Nate Soares. Wednesday 2/4 at 10am CT

Author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies answers questions about why superhuman AI would kill us all.

PLANTS ARE NOT CONSCIOUS.  

This is my response to a post to a Facebook group post about the idea that plants and animals without brains have consciousness; that plants, and other life forms without nervous systems like ours, might also have it. The comment, albeit popular in a trendy sorta' way, is far from justified. Here's why:

_____________________________________

Moving the Goal Posts:

To start with consciousness isn’t being found in plants. There’s no evidence for that at all. What is happening is that the word itself is being reframed to include more physical processes than intellectual reflection. That’s not new, panpsychism has been around for hundreds of years, probably longer. What’s changed isn’t the "discovery", it’s the cultural redefining of what consciousness is. With all of the obstacles to overcome creating AIs, computer science started taking it seriously, so people stopped laughing at the idea, and that tolerance has spread to neurology and layman speculations about nature; BUT let’s be clear, there is no actual evidence for plant consciousness at all. None. There’s just a social shift to how popular culture is saying it should be defined. The problem being that simple reaction ISN'T consciousness.

When people say “plants are conscious,” what they’re really describing is what a plant does when it’s faced with something that might harm it, but that’s not awareness, it’s an evolved physical response. You grow your hair for evolutionary reasons too, but are you aware of your hair growing? Can you choose for it not to? Are you monitoring the process as it happens

__________________________________________________

What Actually is Consciousness?

Consciousness is an evolved, sophisticated result of the need for certain animals to move in complex ways for complex reasons. Take pain, as one example. Why does pain exist? Because when we’re in pain, we move away from it, QUICKLY. That’s its purpose. If you had to analyze pain before reacting, if say you leaned on a stove and had to think about whether to move or not, you’d be badly burned before you finished the thought. Pain bypasses thought. It makes us act now. It evolved due to the need for instant mobility.

A tree can’t move quickly. It doesn’t need pain. It doesn’t need that kind of awareness. ITS strategy is to become strong and massive so to withstand harm rather than avoid it. Grass handles harm by being flexible and abundant; one blade dies, another takes its place, the species survives. There’s no evolutionary pressure there for the kind of awareness pain provides animals. And since all of the emotions function as contextually behavioral presets using mobility as its medium like pain, plants have no reason to evolve those either.

Those preset reactions in us, are the roots of what we call “awareness.” The stored memories of predicted contexts that allows us to adjust our reactions more or less appropriately become our beliefs. And the total structural paradigm of those beliefs along with the emotions and awareness, cause our self-awareness, and our inner life, and THAT’s what we call "consciousness."

_______________________________________________________________

If Plants Don't Think, What Are We Looking At?

Another thing people with this "plants think" idea get wrong is that plants quite literally don’t think or talk to each other. More accurately put, they react to each other through fungi. It’s the fungi doing the coordination, not the plant. So if we want to assign consciousness to something you don't assign it to the foot, you assign it to the brain, if you git what I'm sayin'. Through mycorrhizal symbiosis fungi trade their stability and ability to distribute resources for the plant’s sugar and energy. The fungi decide how nutrients, water, and chemical signals are shared. If you want to talk about something “brain-like,” it’s the fungi, not the tree. The fungi organize the forest. The plant itself just reacts.

And this kind of cooperation; one organism joining with another to create a larger, organized whole; isn’t unique to plants and fungi. It happens between animals and like with pollinators, even between animals and plants. Then there's when one plant or animal survives as a parasite of the other. Interestingly, the prevailing theory is that this is how single-celled life evolved in the first place. One simple cell drifting through the world, over time, adapts to new environments and splits into variations. Two different variations meet again, and as it happens come to work together as it helped them both survive. The ones that don’t cooperate either have to evolve differently to survive or die out, and the ones working together, integrated until eventually one cell absorbed the other. The idea is that, that's how modern cells got their inner mechanisms, like the cell's nucleus, that made them more complex cells than just the simpler walled off sectioned cells that they'd evolved from.

Were those early cells (or even the modern ones) “conscious”? Of course not. They're only cells. But can they react? Absolutely. Reaction and cooperation aren’t awareness. They’re steps toward complexity.

_____________________________________________________

The Brain Itself is Not Responsible:

The post also brought up the idea that animals without centralized brains have their own consciousness, without a brain, and yeah, I'd have to agree with that. The thing is though, the pivotal mechanism creating consciousness isn’t the brain itself. It’s the nervous system within the brain. The brain works because it’s a highly organized communication network like hardware capable of running complex, shifting contexts. That’s what lets us think and feel. An octopus, as an example, has a distributed nervous system that allows for a similar kind of complexity, even though it’s organized differently than a centralized brain with a spinal cord.

So yes, you can have a brain without consciousness, but you can’t have consciousness without a nervous system (or something equally complex to serve as the hardware) .....even an analogue machine would do the job, it just wouldn't be as quick as what animals have. Plants don’t have that. Their structure simply doesn’t allow for the kind of integrated, layered processing that consciousness requires.

______________________________________________________________

But We Aren't Plants, How Can We Know For Sure?:

And I think it important to address an argument possibly implied in all of this; the idea that plant consciousness might just be too alien for us to recognize is neither an objective position, nor is it true. That we can’t judge them by our standards because we don’t share the same kind of mind doesn't keep us from a clear analysis and comparison of the mechanisms involved. This idea contradicts itself.

Our definitions of consciousness come from us, from humans observing and describing the world. Plants aren’t taking part in that. The word “consciousness” belongs to the language of beings talking to themselves, not the plants. If you say plants have it, you’re already using the word differently than someone who says they don’t, and in a way that compares what they experience to ours. Their assumptions are in the possibility of that comparison.

It’s not that we can’t know either way, that our hands are tied and we've no choice but to remain agnostic on this. The arguments I've already made stand on their own. It’s that we’re talking about different things entirely. People who side with making the determination rest on a definition of "consciousness" that's precise enough to be used deductively, making this a 'yes' or 'no' answer, while people who side with not making that determination rest on the idea that we don't really know what "consciousness" is.

The thing is, is that while we can't know the intricate details about every last horse that exists, WE ACTUALLY DO have a clear definition of what "horse" means regardless of the infinite focus on those details, and as long as the same can be said for "consciousness", whether anything has it, will be at some point determinable. That is UNLESS, some of us are determined to keep moving the goal posts without considering the mechanism, and the definition keeps becoming blurred.

To hopefully hit this point home, remember the old “how do I know your blue, is my blue?” argument? Sure, we can’t directly feel each other’s experience objectively, without tainting our perspectives with our own individual views, but what we can do is look at the mechanisms that produce them. We can see how the brain processes light, how those processes create the experience of color, and then compare those mechanisms between people. From that, we can define what the “blue” mechanism is, and how we're experiencing the same and different things when the color pops up. The same goes for consciousness. We can see the structures that support awareness, memory, and emotional integration, and plants simply don’t have them. So unless we stretch “consciousness” to mean “anything that reacts,” there’s simply no reason to say plants have it.

______________________________________________________________

The Popularity of the Idea That They Do:

So why are so many jumping on the bandwagon? It's the other "old" story. People project themselves into everything in order to understand them. It's anthropomorphism 101. Some of us can't even analyze anything without projecting our self centered human traits on to it. It's why prejudices pollute so many of the beliefs of so many of the people you see around you. Whenever you say to yourself "How can this guy be so blinded by this crazy idea?" think about what's happening here and whether there's actually anything at all pointing to the idea that plants can think.

PLANTS ARE NOT CONSCIOUS.  

This is my response to a post to a Facebook group post about the idea that plants and animals without brains have consciousness; that plants, and other life forms without nervous systems like ours, might also have it. The comment, albeit popular in a trendy sorta' way, is far from justified. Here's why:

_____________________________________

Moving the Goal Posts:

To start with consciousness isn’t being found in plants. There’s no evidence for that at all. What is happening is that the word itself is being reframed to include more physical processes than intellectual reflection. That’s not new, panpsychism has been around for hundreds of years, probably longer. What’s changed isn’t the "discovery", it’s the cultural redefining of what consciousness is. With all of the obstacles to overcome creating AIs, computer science started taking it seriously, so people stopped laughing at the idea, and that tolerance has spread to neurology and layman speculations about nature; BUT let’s be clear, there is no actual evidence for plant consciousness at all. None. There’s just a social shift to how popular culture is saying it should be defined. The problem being that simple reaction ISN'T consciousness.

When people say “plants are conscious,” what they’re really describing is what a plant does when it’s faced with something that might harm it, but that’s not awareness, it’s an evolved physical response. You grow your hair for evolutionary reasons too, but are you aware of your hair growing? Can you choose for it not to? Are you monitoring the process as it happens

__________________________________________________

What Actually is Consciousness?

Consciousness is an evolved, sophisticated result of the need for certain animals to move in complex ways for complex reasons. Take pain, as one example. Why does pain exist? Because when we’re in pain, we move away from it, QUICKLY. That’s its purpose. If you had to analyze pain before reacting, if say you leaned on a stove and had to think about whether to move or not, you’d be badly burned before you finished the thought. Pain bypasses thought. It makes us act now. It evolved due to the need for instant mobility.

A tree can’t move quickly. It doesn’t need pain. It doesn’t need that kind of awareness. ITS strategy is to become strong and massive so to withstand harm rather than avoid it. Grass handles harm by being flexible and abundant; one blade dies, another takes its place, the species survives. There’s no evolutionary pressure there for the kind of awareness pain provides animals. And since all of the emotions function as contextually behavioral presets using mobility as its medium like pain, plants have no reason to evolve those either.

Those preset reactions in us, are the roots of what we call “awareness.” The stored memories of predicted contexts that allows us to adjust our reactions more or less appropriately become our beliefs. And the total structural paradigm of those beliefs along with the emotions and awareness, cause our self-awareness, and our inner life, and THAT’s what we call "consciousness."

_______________________________________________________________

If Plants Don't Think, What Are We Looking At?

Another thing people with this "plants think" idea get wrong is that plants quite literally don’t think or talk to each other. More accurately put, they react to each other through fungi. It’s the fungi doing the coordination, not the plant. So if we want to assign consciousness to something you don't assign it to the foot, you assign it to the brain, if you git what I'm sayin'. Through mycorrhizal symbiosis fungi trade their stability and ability to distribute resources for the plant’s sugar and energy. The fungi decide how nutrients, water, and chemical signals are shared. If you want to talk about something “brain-like,” it’s the fungi, not the tree. The fungi organize the forest. The plant itself just reacts.

And this kind of cooperation; one organism joining with another to create a larger, organized whole; isn’t unique to plants and fungi. It happens between animals and like with pollinators, even between animals and plants. Then there's when one plant or animal survives as a parasite of the other. Interestingly, the prevailing theory is that this is how single-celled life evolved in the first place. One simple cell drifting through the world, over time, adapts to new environments and splits into variations. Two different variations meet again, and as it happens come to work together as it helped them both survive. The ones that don’t cooperate either have to evolve differently to survive or die out, and the ones working together, integrated until eventually one cell absorbed the other. The idea is that, that's how modern cells got their inner mechanisms, like the cell's nucleus, that made them more complex cells than just the simpler walled off sectioned cells that they'd evolved from.

Were those early cells (or even the modern ones) “conscious”? Of course not. They're only cells. But can they react? Absolutely. Reaction and cooperation aren’t awareness. They’re steps toward complexity.

_____________________________________________________

The Brain Itself is Not Responsible:

The post also brought up the idea that animals without centralized brains have their own consciousness, without a brain, and yeah, I'd have to agree with that. The thing is though, the pivotal mechanism creating consciousness isn’t the brain itself. It’s the nervous system within the brain. The brain works because it’s a highly organized communication network like hardware capable of running complex, shifting contexts. That’s what lets us think and feel. An octopus, as an example, has a distributed nervous system that allows for a similar kind of complexity, even though it’s organized differently than a centralized brain with a spinal cord.

So yes, you can have a brain without consciousness, but you can’t have consciousness without a nervous system (or something equally complex to serve as the hardware) .....even an analogue machine would do the job, it just wouldn't be as quick as what animals have. Plants don’t have that. Their structure simply doesn’t allow for the kind of integrated, layered processing that consciousness requires.

______________________________________________________________

But We Aren't Plants, How Can We Know For Sure?:

And I think it important to address an argument possibly implied in all of this; the idea that plant consciousness might just be too alien for us to recognize is neither an objective position, nor is it true. That we can’t judge them by our standards because we don’t share the same kind of mind doesn't keep us from a clear analysis and comparison of the mechanisms involved. This idea contradicts itself.

Our definitions of consciousness come from us, from humans observing and describing the world. Plants aren’t taking part in that. The word “consciousness” belongs to the language of beings talking to themselves, not the plants. If you say plants have it, you’re already using the word differently than someone who says they don’t, and in a way that compares what they experience to ours. Their assumptions are in the possibility of that comparison.

It’s not that we can’t know either way, that our hands are tied and we've no choice but to remain agnostic on this. The arguments I've already made stand on their own. It’s that we’re talking about different things entirely. People who side with making the determination rest on a definition of "consciousness" that's precise enough to be used deductively, making this a 'yes' or 'no' answer, while people who side with not making that determination rest on the idea that we don't really know what "consciousness" is.

The thing is, is that while we can't know the intricate details about every last horse that exists, WE ACTUALLY DO have a clear definition of what "horse" means regardless of the infinite focus on those details, and as long as the same can be said for "consciousness", whether anything has it, will be at some point determinable. That is UNLESS, some of us are determined to keep moving the goal posts without considering the mechanism, and the definition keeps becoming blurred.

To hopefully hit this point home, remember the old “how do I know your blue, is my blue?” argument? Sure, we can’t directly feel each other’s experience objectively, without tainting our perspectives with our own individual views, but what we can do is look at the mechanisms that produce them. We can see how the brain processes light, how those processes create the experience of color, and then compare those mechanisms between people. From that, we can define what the “blue” mechanism is, and how we're experiencing the same and different things when the color pops up. The same goes for consciousness. We can see the structures that support awareness, memory, and emotional integration, and plants simply don’t have them. So unless we stretch “consciousness” to mean “anything that reacts,” there’s simply no reason to say plants have it.

______________________________________________________________

The Popularity of the Idea That They Do:

So why are so many jumping on the bandwagon? It's the other "old" story. People project themselves into everything in order to understand them. It's anthropomorphism 101. Some of us can't even analyze anything without projecting our self centered human traits on to it. It's why prejudices pollute so many of the beliefs of so many of the people you see around you. Whenever you say to yourself "How can this guy be so blinded by this crazy idea?" think about what's happening here and whether there's actually anything at all pointing to the idea that plants can think.

PLANTS ARE NOT CONSCIOUS.  

This is my response to a post to a Facebook group post about the idea that plants and animals without brains have consciousness; that plants, and other life forms without nervous systems like ours, might also have it. The comment, albeit popular in a trendy sorta' way, is far from justified. Here's why:

_____________________________________

Moving the Goal Posts:

To start with consciousness isn’t being found in plants. There’s no evidence for that at all. What is happening is that the word itself is being reframed to include more physical processes than intellectual reflection. That’s not new, panpsychism has been around for hundreds of years, probably longer. What’s changed isn’t the "discovery", it’s the cultural redefining of what consciousness is. With all of the obstacles to overcome creating AIs, computer science started taking it seriously, so people stopped laughing at the idea, and that tolerance has spread to neurology and layman speculations about nature; BUT let’s be clear, there is no actual evidence for plant consciousness at all. None. There’s just a social shift to how popular culture is saying it should be defined. The problem being that simple reaction ISN'T consciousness.

When people say “plants are conscious,” what they’re really describing is what a plant does when it’s faced with something that might harm it, but that’s not awareness, it’s an evolved physical response. You grow your hair for evolutionary reasons too, but are you aware of your hair growing? Can you choose for it not to? Are you monitoring the process as it happens

__________________________________________________

What Actually is Consciousness?

Consciousness is an evolved, sophisticated result of the need for certain animals to move in complex ways for complex reasons. Take pain, as one example. Why does pain exist? Because when we’re in pain, we move away from it, QUICKLY. That’s its purpose. If you had to analyze pain before reacting, if say you leaned on a stove and had to think about whether to move or not, you’d be badly burned before you finished the thought. Pain bypasses thought. It makes us act now. It evolved due to the need for instant mobility.

A tree can’t move quickly. It doesn’t need pain. It doesn’t need that kind of awareness. ITS strategy is to become strong and massive so to withstand harm rather than avoid it. Grass handles harm by being flexible and abundant; one blade dies, another takes its place, the species survives. There’s no evolutionary pressure there for the kind of awareness pain provides animals. And since all of the emotions function as contextually behavioral presets using mobility as its medium like pain, plants have no reason to evolve those either.

Those preset reactions in us, are the roots of what we call “awareness.” The stored memories of predicted contexts that allows us to adjust our reactions more or less appropriately become our beliefs. And the total structural paradigm of those beliefs along with the emotions and awareness, cause our self-awareness, and our inner life, and THAT’s what we call "consciousness."

_______________________________________________________________

If Plants Don't Think, What Are We Looking At?

Another thing people with this "plants think" idea get wrong is that plants quite literally don’t think or talk to each other. More accurately put, they react to each other through fungi. It’s the fungi doing the coordination, not the plant. So if we want to assign consciousness to something you don't assign it to the foot, you assign it to the brain, if you git what I'm sayin'. Through mycorrhizal symbiosis fungi trade their stability and ability to distribute resources for the plant’s sugar and energy. The fungi decide how nutrients, water, and chemical signals are shared. If you want to talk about something “brain-like,” it’s the fungi, not the tree. The fungi organize the forest. The plant itself just reacts.

And this kind of cooperation; one organism joining with another to create a larger, organized whole; isn’t unique to plants and fungi. It happens between animals and like with pollinators, even between animals and plants. Then there's when one plant or animal survives as a parasite of the other. Interestingly, the prevailing theory is that this is how single-celled life evolved in the first place. One simple cell drifting through the world, over time, adapts to new environments and splits into variations. Two different variations meet again, and as it happens come to work together as it helped them both survive. The ones that don’t cooperate either have to evolve differently to survive or die out, and the ones working together, integrated until eventually one cell absorbed the other. The idea is that, that's how modern cells got their inner mechanisms, like the cell's nucleus, that made them more complex cells than just the simpler walled off sectioned cells that they'd evolved from.

Were those early cells (or even the modern ones) “conscious”? Of course not. They're only cells. But can they react? Absolutely. Reaction and cooperation aren’t awareness. They’re steps toward complexity.

_____________________________________________________

The Brain Itself is Not Responsible:

The post also brought up the idea that animals without centralized brains have their own consciousness, without a brain, and yeah, I'd have to agree with that. The thing is though, the pivotal mechanism creating consciousness isn’t the brain itself. It’s the nervous system within the brain. The brain works because it’s a highly organized communication network like hardware capable of running complex, shifting contexts. That’s what lets us think and feel. An octopus, as an example, has a distributed nervous system that allows for a similar kind of complexity, even though it’s organized differently than a centralized brain with a spinal cord.

So yes, you can have a brain without consciousness, but you can’t have consciousness without a nervous system (or something equally complex to serve as the hardware) .....even an analogue machine would do the job, it just wouldn't be as quick as what animals have. Plants don’t have that. Their structure simply doesn’t allow for the kind of integrated, layered processing that consciousness requires.

______________________________________________________________

But We Aren't Plants, How Can We Know For Sure?:

And I think it important to address an argument possibly implied in all of this; the idea that plant consciousness might just be too alien for us to recognize is neither an objective position, nor is it true. That we can’t judge them by our standards because we don’t share the same kind of mind doesn't keep us from a clear analysis and comparison of the mechanisms involved. This idea contradicts itself.

Our definitions of consciousness come from us, from humans observing and describing the world. Plants aren’t taking part in that. The word “consciousness” belongs to the language of beings talking to themselves, not the plants. If you say plants have it, you’re already using the word differently than someone who says they don’t, and in a way that compares what they experience to ours. Their assumptions are in the possibility of that comparison.

It’s not that we can’t know either way, that our hands are tied and we've no choice but to remain agnostic on this. The arguments I've already made stand on their own. It’s that we’re talking about different things entirely. People who side with making the determination rest on a definition of "consciousness" that's precise enough to be used deductively, making this a 'yes' or 'no' answer, while people who side with not making that determination rest on the idea that we don't really know what "consciousness" is.

The thing is, is that while we can't know the intricate details about every last horse that exists, WE ACTUALLY DO have a clear definition of what "horse" means regardless of the infinite focus on those details, and as long as the same can be said for "consciousness", whether anything has it, will be at some point determinable. That is UNLESS, some of us are determined to keep moving the goal posts without considering the mechanism, and the definition keeps becoming blurred.

To hopefully hit this point home, remember the old “how do I know your blue, is my blue?” argument? Sure, we can’t directly feel each other’s experience objectively, without tainting our perspectives with our own individual views, but what we can do is look at the mechanisms that produce them. We can see how the brain processes light, how those processes create the experience of color, and then compare those mechanisms between people. From that, we can define what the “blue” mechanism is, and how we're experiencing the same and different things when the color pops up. The same goes for consciousness. We can see the structures that support awareness, memory, and emotional integration, and plants simply don’t have them. So unless we stretch “consciousness” to mean “anything that reacts,” there’s simply no reason to say plants have it.

______________________________________________________________

The Popularity of the Idea That They Do:

So why are so many jumping on the bandwagon? It's the other "old" story. People project themselves into everything in order to understand them. It's anthropomorphism 101. Some of us can't even analyze anything without projecting our self centered human traits on to it. It's why prejudices pollute so many of the beliefs of so many of the people you see around you. Whenever you say to yourself "How can this guy be so blinded by this crazy idea?" think about what's happening here and whether there's actually anything at all pointing to the idea that plants can think.

PLANTS ARE NOT CONSCIOUS.  

This is my response to a post to a Facebook group post about the idea that plants and animals without brains have consciousness; that plants, and other life forms without nervous systems like ours, might also have it. The comment, albeit popular in a trendy sorta' way, is far from justified. Here's why:

_____________________________________

Moving the Goal Posts:

To start with consciousness isn’t being found in plants. There’s no evidence for that at all. What is happening is that the word itself is being reframed to include more physical processes than intellectual reflection. That’s not new, panpsychism has been around for hundreds of years, probably longer. What’s changed isn’t the "discovery", it’s the cultural redefining of what consciousness is. With all of the obstacles to overcome creating AIs, computer science started taking it seriously, so people stopped laughing at the idea, and that tolerance has spread to neurology and layman speculations about nature; BUT let’s be clear, there is no actual evidence for plant consciousness at all. None. There’s just a social shift to how popular culture is saying it should be defined. The problem being that simple reaction ISN'T consciousness.

When people say “plants are conscious,” what they’re really describing is what a plant does when it’s faced with something that might harm it, but that’s not awareness, it’s an evolved physical response. You grow your hair for evolutionary reasons too, but are you aware of your hair growing? Can you choose for it not to? Are you monitoring the process as it happens

__________________________________________________

What Actually is Consciousness?

Consciousness is an evolved, sophisticated result of the need for certain animals to move in complex ways for complex reasons. Take pain, as one example. Why does pain exist? Because when we’re in pain, we move away from it, QUICKLY. That’s its purpose. If you had to analyze pain before reacting, if say you leaned on a stove and had to think about whether to move or not, you’d be badly burned before you finished the thought. Pain bypasses thought. It makes us act now. It evolved due to the need for instant mobility.

A tree can’t move quickly. It doesn’t need pain. It doesn’t need that kind of awareness. ITS strategy is to become strong and massive so to withstand harm rather than avoid it. Grass handles harm by being flexible and abundant; one blade dies, another takes its place, the species survives. There’s no evolutionary pressure there for the kind of awareness pain provides animals. And since all of the emotions function as contextually behavioral presets using mobility as its medium like pain, plants have no reason to evolve those either.

Those preset reactions in us, are the roots of what we call “awareness.” The stored memories of predicted contexts that allows us to adjust our reactions more or less appropriately become our beliefs. And the total structural paradigm of those beliefs along with the emotions and awareness, cause our self-awareness, and our inner life, and THAT’s what we call "consciousness."

_______________________________________________________________

If Plants Don't Think, What Are We Looking At?

Another thing people with this "plants think" idea get wrong is that plants quite literally don’t think or talk to each other. More accurately put, they react to each other through fungi. It’s the fungi doing the coordination, not the plant. So if we want to assign consciousness to something you don't assign it to the foot, you assign it to the brain, if you git what I'm sayin'. Through mycorrhizal symbiosis fungi trade their stability and ability to distribute resources for the plant’s sugar and energy. The fungi decide how nutrients, water, and chemical signals are shared. If you want to talk about something “brain-like,” it’s the fungi, not the tree. The fungi organize the forest. The plant itself just reacts.

And this kind of cooperation; one organism joining with another to create a larger, organized whole; isn’t unique to plants and fungi. It happens between animals and like with pollinators, even between animals and plants. Then there's when one plant or animal survives as a parasite of the other. Interestingly, the prevailing theory is that this is how single-celled life evolved in the first place. One simple cell drifting through the world, over time, adapts to new environments and splits into variations. Two different variations meet again, and as it happens come to work together as it helped them both survive. The ones that don’t cooperate either have to evolve differently to survive or die out, and the ones working together, integrated until eventually one cell absorbed the other. The idea is that, that's how modern cells got their inner mechanisms, like the cell's nucleus, that made them more complex cells than just the simpler walled off sectioned cells that they'd evolved from.

Were those early cells (or even the modern ones) “conscious”? Of course not. They're only cells. But can they react? Absolutely. Reaction and cooperation aren’t awareness. They’re steps toward complexity.

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The Brain Itself is Not Responsible:

The post also brought up the idea that animals without centralized brains have their own consciousness, without a brain, and yeah, I'd have to agree with that. The thing is though, the pivotal mechanism creating consciousness isn’t the brain itself. It’s the nervous system within the brain. The brain works because it’s a highly organized communication network like hardware capable of running complex, shifting contexts. That’s what lets us think and feel. An octopus, as an example, has a distributed nervous system that allows for a similar kind of complexity, even though it’s organized differently than a centralized brain with a spinal cord.

So yes, you can have a brain without consciousness, but you can’t have consciousness without a nervous system (or something equally complex to serve as the hardware) .....even an analogue machine would do the job, it just wouldn't be as quick as what animals have. Plants don’t have that. Their structure simply doesn’t allow for the kind of integrated, layered processing that consciousness requires.

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But We Aren't Plants, How Can We Know For Sure?:

And I think it important to address an argument possibly implied in all of this; the idea that plant consciousness might just be too alien for us to recognize is neither an objective position, nor is it true. That we can’t judge them by our standards because we don’t share the same kind of mind doesn't keep us from a clear analysis and comparison of the mechanisms involved. This idea contradicts itself.

Our definitions of consciousness come from us, from humans observing and describing the world. Plants aren’t taking part in that. The word “consciousness” belongs to the language of beings talking to themselves, not the plants. If you say plants have it, you’re already using the word differently than someone who says they don’t, and in a way that compares what they experience to ours. Their assumptions are in the possibility of that comparison.

It’s not that we can’t know either way, that our hands are tied and we've no choice but to remain agnostic on this. The arguments I've already made stand on their own. It’s that we’re talking about different things entirely. People who side with making the determination rest on a definition of "consciousness" that's precise enough to be used deductively, making this a 'yes' or 'no' answer, while people who side with not making that determination rest on the idea that we don't really know what "consciousness" is.

The thing is, is that while we can't know the intricate details about every last horse that exists, WE ACTUALLY DO have a clear definition of what "horse" means regardless of the infinite focus on those details, and as long as the same can be said for "consciousness", whether anything has it, will be at some point determinable. That is UNLESS, some of us are determined to keep moving the goal posts without considering the mechanism, and the definition keeps becoming blurred.

To hopefully hit this point home, remember the old “how do I know your blue, is my blue?” argument? Sure, we can’t directly feel each other’s experience objectively, without tainting our perspectives with our own individual views, but what we can do is look at the mechanisms that produce them. We can see how the brain processes light, how those processes create the experience of color, and then compare those mechanisms between people. From that, we can define what the “blue” mechanism is, and how we're experiencing the same and different things when the color pops up. The same goes for consciousness. We can see the structures that support awareness, memory, and emotional integration, and plants simply don’t have them. So unless we stretch “consciousness” to mean “anything that reacts,” there’s simply no reason to say plants have it.

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The Popularity of the Idea That They Do:

So why are so many jumping on the bandwagon? It's the other "old" story. People project themselves into everything in order to understand them. It's anthropomorphism 101. Some of us can't even analyze anything without projecting our self centered human traits on to it. It's why prejudices pollute so many of the beliefs of so many of the people you see around you. Whenever you say to yourself "How can this guy be so blinded by this crazy idea?" think about what's happening here and whether there's actually anything at all pointing to the idea that plants can think.

My Journey with Claude Code. The more I use Claude Code, the more impressed I become.

I keep throwing progressively harder problems at it, and whenever the problem is conceptually tractable, it can usually just solve it. Not with hacks or brittle workarounds, but by actually engaging with the structure of the problem.

I decided to push it further by combining two difficult problems.

Difficult in the sense that either one would likely take me years to complete properly on my own let alone together whether the interaction between the two is a kind of complexity in its own right.

With the exception of one genuinely catastrophic error that required intervention to recover from, the tool has kept going, iterating, and making real progress.

What stands out most is that it seems to understand what progress actually is.

It does not treat the number of passing tests as a sacred metric. It is willing to break tests if that moves the system forward in a deeper, more honest way. That is something many humans struggle with.

The mere fact that it can reason about progress at all, rather than optimising a superficial proxy for it, is pretty remarkable

And to think the tool over past few months has seen pretty consistent improvement at the cadence of weeks with no end in sight.

Will software development be unrecognisable a year or even 6 months from now, I do not know.

Severance is great, but it gets one thing weirdly wrong. (Very mild) Spoilers for season 1 of Severance ahead.

First, if you haven't seen Severance, I recommend it! Bookmark this, go watch season 1, form your own opinions, and come back to chat.

Ok, people who have context for what I'm about to say, read on!

I couldn't finish the show the first time I tried. I got about half way through, but the fundamental horror of the protagonists' situation was simply too disturbing for me. Friends would say "Oh it's so great, it's so funny and weird. What a thought provoking idea!" 

And I'd be sat there barely able to breathe at the idea that someone's life could be an unbroken experience of being at work, in a windowless building. 

Based on these conversations, I genuinely think many people aren't actually fully imagining what's happening to the characters. It might also be because I was working as a full time employee, in front of a computer all day, during that first attempt.

Second attempt, I managed to dial down my vicarious horror enough to get through the season, and it is a great show.

Now the part I think the writers get wrong. 

I think, in one important way, they also failed to fully empathize with the situation. 

Mark, the main character of season 1, is presented as having chosen to become severed and work at Lumen as a way of dealing with and escape from the grief of the loss of his wife.

Superficially, this makes sense. It's a common trope, and makes psychological sense to me, that people often deal with grief by pouring themselves into work. So that, for at least those hours of the day, you have a distraction from the pain.

But getting severed would actually have the opposite effect. It would remove that tool from your life. It would mean you had one less way to escape the grief. Rather than waking up filled with grief, then going to work, and getting a few hours of relief, before going home and picking up the grief, you would wake up with the grief, head to work, and then immediately be coming home where your grief filled existence could continue, uninterrupted.

You might argue that it was Mark who missed this, when he made the choice, and now he's dealing with the consequences. But that's not in the text. What's in the text is just the implication that getting severed was Marks strategy for dealing with the grief, with no exploration of the fact that actually that's a horrible strategy. 

Thoughts? Counterpoints? What did you think of the show?

(ps, I'd just like to say how delighted I am that the generated images are now optional 🙏)

Severance is great, but it gets one thing weirdly wrong. (Very mild) Spoilers for season 1 of Severance ahead.

First, if you haven't seen Severance, I recommend it! Bookmark this, go watch season 1, form your own opinions, and come back to chat.

Ok, people who have context for what I'm about to say, read on!

I couldn't finish the show the first time I tried. I got about half way through, but the fundamental horror of the protagonists' situation was simply too disturbing for me. Friends would say "Oh it's so great, it's so funny and weird. What a thought provoking idea!" 

And I'd be sat there barely able to breathe at the idea that someone's life could be an unbroken experience of being at work, in a windowless building. 

Based on these conversations, I genuinely think many people aren't actually fully imagining what's happening to the characters. It might also be because I was working as a full time employee, in front of a computer all day, during that first attempt.

Second attempt, I managed to dial down my vicarious horror enough to get through the season, and it is a great show.

Now the part I think the writers get wrong. 

I think, in one important way, they also failed to fully empathize with the situation. 

Mark, the main character of season 1, is presented as having chosen to become severed and work at Lumen as a way of dealing with and escape from the grief of the loss of his wife.

Superficially, this makes sense. It's a common trope, and makes psychological sense to me, that people often deal with grief by pouring themselves into work. So that, for at least those hours of the day, you have a distraction from the pain.

But getting severed would actually have the opposite effect. It would remove that tool from your life. It would mean you had one less way to escape the grief. Rather than waking up filled with grief, then going to work, and getting a few hours of relief, before going home and picking up the grief, you would wake up with the grief, head to work, and then immediately be coming home where your grief filled existence could continue, uninterrupted.

You might argue that it was Mark who missed this, when he made the choice, and now he's dealing with the consequences. But that's not in the text. What's in the text is just the implication that getting severed was Marks strategy for dealing with the grief, with no exploration of the fact that actually that's a horrible strategy. 

Thoughts? Counterpoints? What did you think of the show?

(ps, I'd just like to say how delighted I am that the generated images are now optional 🙏)

looks like I've been wrong and spreading misinformation about the disproven "triune brain theory".

The final—and most important—problem with this mistaken view is the implication that anatomical evolution proceeds in the same fashion as geological strata, with new layers added over existing ones. Instead, much evolutionary change consists of transforming existing parts. 

- From https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721420917687#con1

I have definitely made this mistake, many many times.

I'm not sure yet the implications of recognizing instead that "all vertebrates possess the same basic brain regions, here divided into the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain;" in some ways it seems like a nuance, but in other ways I think it'll shift how I see things and talk about things. 

more quotes in case you don't read the article:

neural and anatomical complexity evolved repeatedly within many independent lineages

the correct view of evolution is that animals radiated from common ancestors (Fig. 1c). Within these radiations, complex nervous systems and sophisticated cognitive abilities evolved independently many times. For example, cephalopod mollusks, such as octopus and cuttlefish, possess tremendously complex nervous systems and behavior (Mather & Kuba, 2013), and the same is true of some insects and other arthropods (Barron & Klein, 2016; Strausfeld, Hansen, Li, Gomez, & Ito, 1998). Even among nonmammalian vertebrates, brain complexity has increased independently several times, particularly among some sharks, teleost fishes, and birds (Striedter, 1998).

The idea that larger brains can be equated with increased behavioral complexity is highly debatable (Chittka & Niven, 2009). 

Internal Representations: Do you think in words, pictures, smells, something else? When I was 17 I had a conversation with my friends Dave S. and Kirky that blew my mind. It was in that conversation that I discovered some people have a continuous internal monologue.

Prior to that conversation, I was aware of internal monologues from movies and novels, (I was reading a lot of Stephen King and he uses them liberally).

I'd always assumed this was just a kind of narrative convention. Of course people don't actually think in words. You just have to write it like that to make it work in a movie or a novel.

But then I had that convo with Dave and Kirky and they both insisted that they literally had a voice talking to them in their head pretty much all day.

I don't think in words. I also don't think in images, at least not very clearly. I'm somewhere around the middle of this scale



But "the middle" here still feels pretty impoverished, and I certainly don't do most of my thinking in a primarily visual way.

I'm also certainly not enlightened. I'm thinking much of the day, just like almost everyone else.

The most natural way to describe my experience of thinking is "I think in thoughts," but that's a bit circular. My thoughts are something like shapes in some abstract space, something like feelings, sometimes with a bit of fuzzy visual information, sometimes with a bit of language. There's a thing in NLP call Visual-Kinetic Synesthesia which is probably closish to the mark.

So, it's always gratifying when I hear someone else describe something similar, like in this passage from a recent substack article

In the 1940s, when the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked good mathematicians how they came up with solutions to hard problems, they nearly universally answered that they didn’t think in words; neither did they think in images or equations. Rather, what passed through the mathematicians as they struggled with problems were such things as vibrations in their hands, nonsense words in their ears, or blurry shapes in their heads. - Henrik Karlsson

This passage, and the article, sort of implies that this mode of thinking is especially smart. For the record, my guess is that's not true. Perhaps different modes are better suited for certain kinds of tasks. I'm not even convinced of that. I'm a little above average at math, but my strongest talents are linguistic, which would naively make you guess that I thought primarily in words. And there are brilliant visual artists who are fully aphantasic.

I'd love to hear from you about your experience of thinking, especially the internal sensory experience.

How is AI being used in legit positively transformative ways? I'm curious to hear about folding proteins, curing cancer, or personal examples like a recent I heard from @brian of Claude helping him get better at yoga.

My feed is mostly filled with things that feel like unconscious optimization processes run amok. More AI marketing slop, selling AI tools to be better at marketing AI tools, and weird recursions like that, and I'd love to get more of the optimistic, positive alternatives.

I practice Secure Detachment. 

For me, detachment is not about being desireless or divorced from the world and others, it's about being aware of and in relationship with reality and the world.

I have egoic desires--I desire to have a thing, to go to a place, to be with a person. All day I have these desires, and I mostly just completely indulge them. Egoic is not a swear word, it's just an awareness of self-interest and preference. I have every right to pursue my preference. My life is for me. My body is for me. My experiences are for me.

And, in right relationship with reality and the world, I pursue my preference with abandon. That is, I abandon the idea that my preference is correct or righteous, or that violations of my preferences are evidence of something going wrong in the world. I pursue my preference simply--it's just what I want to do. I'm always doing something!

My preferences are sacred to and for me, and I have every right to use my time, energy, and attention in ways I prefer at all times.

AND it is correct and true and simply reality that the world does not conform to my preferences, that I will not be given my way, that in thousands of ways each day my preferences will be violated and this is a feature of reality, not a bug. I can have the right to have what I desire and not the ability to have it! This is simply a truth in the world.

I am detached from the outcomes of my egoic desires, because that is part of who I want to be. Who I want to be--that is the authentic desire which ideally gives rise to the forms of my egoic desires, if all's in integrity.

Who I want to be in the world is my deeper desire, and it applies as I receive my egoic desires and as I perceive myself deprived of those egoic desires. Who do I want to be while I get what I want? Who do I want to be while I don't get what I want?

Who do I want to be in this world which has so much to offer, so much that is inside my preferences and SO MUCH MORE that is outside my preferences? Who do I want to be in this world which was not designed for me, but is habitable and maybe even enjoyable, to the extent that I curate it?