Distributed!

Old ideas refuse to die hard. 

One human being's knowledge is limited; hence bureaucratic systems fail - soviet style. But yet, Aristotle is celebrated even though numerous ideas of his turned out to be false and some outright dangerous. One thing we can learn from his failures is not to try to be super intelligent and work on everything under the sun. It is impossible for one human to do that. I think he did this to prove Plato wrong (he wasn't selected to lead Plato's academy after Plato). 

Of course, there is this other dangerous guy in recent times namely Rene Descartes!

Brain in a vat theory is wrong. Brain is not omnipotent. Evolution is frugal. It doesn't do central planning and creates redundancies. 

For starters, there are 9 times more connections from gut to brain than the other way around. The ratio of microbiome to human cell is mind boggling. Each organ inside our body has a two way connection to the brain (and other parts). And our environment affects our thinking and health. Living with non-human animals has a wonderful impact and same with plants inside the house and trees all around.  

In short, we are a complex system and the brain is just a part of it. 

I respect people who fight bad ideas of centuries.  

I refuse to read anything consciousness, intelligence et al., if they focus only on "brain" and it's "elegance"; which is 99.9% of the books and researchers. 

Brilliant interview with Botanist Stefano Mancuso; author of new book Tree Stories: How trees plant our world and connect our lives (it's released in UK but not in US yet)

You refer to your field as plant neurobiology. Is this a provocation?

At the beginning, it was not at all. I started to think that almost all the claims I was hearing about the brain were valid also in plants. The neuron is not a miracle cell, it’s a normal cell that is able to produce an electrical signal. In plants, almost every cell is able to do that. The main difference between animals and plants, in my opinion, is that animals concentrate specific functions inside organs. In the case of plants, they diffuse everything through the whole body, including intelligence. So it was not a provocation at the beginning, but there was a big resistance among my colleagues to use this kind of terminology, and so after it became a provocation.

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The idea that plants are intelligent is controversial enough, but you’ve gone one step further by claiming that plants are to some degree conscious…

It’s incredibly difficult to talk about consciousness, first because we actually don’t know what consciousness is, even in our case. But there is an approach to talking about it as a real biological feature: consciousness is something that we all have, except when we are sleeping very deeply or when we are under anaesthesia. My approach to studying consciousness in plants was similar. I started by seeing if they were sensitive to anaesthetics and found that you can anaesthetise all plants by using the same anaesthetics that work in humans. This is extremely fascinating. We were thinking that consciousness was something related to the brain, but I think that both consciousness and intelligence are more embodied, relating to the entire body.

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You argue passionately in favour of filling cities with trees. Why is this so important?

We are producing 75% of our CO₂ in cities, and the best way to remove that CO₂ is by using trees. The closer the tree is to the source of carbon emissions, the better they are at absorbing it. According to our studies, we could put around 200bn trees in our urban areas. To do that, we really need to imagine a new kind of city, completely covered by plants, without any border between nature and city.

You have a fascinating chapter about a tree stump being kept alive for decades by its neighbouring trees. What can humans learn from tree communities?

Plants are so incredibly cooperative with one another because cooperation is the most efficient way to grant the survival of species. Not understanding the strength of the community is one of [humanity’s] main errors. There was a very clever evolutionary biologist at the beginning of the last century, Peter Kropotkin, who said that when there are fewer resources, and the environment is changing, then cooperation is vastly more efficient [than competition]. This is an important teaching for us today, because we are entering a period of reduction of resources and the environment is changing because of global warming.

Max would have loved being in his Walden! 

Neo doesn't know the wild wild world except Max's Walden.