Light Eaters
It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents. The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close. What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities?
Stats for nerds
5recommend
11mentions
8people
2024–2026years
55% recommend45% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- This is true. Highly recommend Zoe Schlanger's "The Light Eaters" on this topic. But not a good argument for car sentience.
- Not very long ago, we thought that "life" was due to a non-material life-force thought to inhabit biological entities and thus raise what would be a biological machine to the status of living being.
The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical universe [1]. It may be hard to delineate, just as life is (debates on whether a virus is alive, etc.) but the border cases will be the exceptions.
Current research on whether plants are sentient supports this, IMO. (See e.g. "The Light Eaters" and Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, "A World Appears".)
Meditation adds to this sense. We do not control our thoughts; in fact the "we" (i.e. the self) can be seen to be an illusion. Buddhist meditation instead points to general awareness, closer to sentience, as the core of our consciousness. When you see it that way, it seems much more likely that something equivalent could be implemented in software. (EDIT to add: both because it makes consciousness seem like a simpler, less mysterious thing, but also once you see the self as an illusion, that thing that dominates your consciousness so much of the time, it seems much less of a stretch for consciousness itself to be a brain-produced illusion.)
[1] To be clear, the fact that life turned out to not be a mystical force is not direct proof, it is an argument by analogy, I recognize that.
- You might enjoy The Light Eaters, it covers latest studies on plants for consciousness. I’m still very skeptical after reading it, I.e. how to differentiate between automaton like behavior derived from genetic programming and consciousness (argued for in the book) is still not clear to me.
- If you find this interesting, I strongly recommend the book _The Light Eaters_ by Zoë Schlanger [0]. She discusses this finding as well as other sense-abilities of plants. Recent science has found pretty amazing things.
If I recall correctly: flowers are often shaped like dish antennas to collect sound vibration, and plants can distinguish the frequency of wing beats of their preferred pollinator from frequencies of other insects, and will act only for their pollinators.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Light-Eaters-Unseen-Intelligence-Unde...
- The author’s book The Light Eaters on plant intelligence is also well worth a read! Finished it a couple months ago and it was one of my favorite books this year.
- Read a lot this year — a lot more than most years. A few highlights:
The making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes was probably the best of the bunch. I read it because I see some parallels between the discovery of atomic power and the search for AGI, and wanted an insight on the ethics and decision making of the time. It didn't disappoint.
The dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow was a solid read and retelling of how civilization began and evolved.
The message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, I read in two sittings — it was that impactful. A reminder of how the oppressed becomes the oppressor again and again. "As it happens, you can See the world but never see the people in it"
Other highlights: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt; re-read Thinking in Systems by Daniella Meadows; re-read Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat Zinn; The light eaters by Zoe Schlanger; I don't want to talk about it, by Terrence Real.
