[HN Gopher] How I Started to See Trees as Smart ___________________________________________________________________ How I Started to See Trees as Smart Author : Petiver Score : 29 points Date : 2022-05-15 05:11 UTC (17 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com) | freediver wrote: | The article provoked a thought: | | Only when you slow down to a thought speed of a tree, you can | fully enjoy the beuaty of this world. | ncmncm wrote: | When you don't need answers in a hurry, there is no need for all | the thinking bits to being one place. A lot less of that is | needed because everything doesn't need to be done all at once; | the same bits can work on different stages of a problem. It is | safer to distribute it all more or less evenly throughout the | organism. The bits can do other jobs besides, when not needed for | thinking with. There is no need to connect everything directly to | everything else; trunking and switching is more efficient. There | is no reason to think we would recognize the cells they think | with, even if anybody had bothered to look. | | A tree can afford any amount of thinking-stuff, because running | it slowly can be an arbitrarily tiny part of its energy budget: | trees can _afford to be_ very, very smart. What remains is to | find how intelligence could enable reproductively advantageous | adaptive behavior in trees. What could a smarter tree do to | outcompete rivals? | | It would be foolish to assume there are no such opportunities. | darkerside wrote: | It's an interesting thought, but not a very interesting article. | I guess I expected more. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-15 23:00 UTC)