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Panic_Lobster comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Has anyone here heard of Michael Marder and his "Plant Thinking" - there is this book being published by Columbia University which argues that plants need to be considered as subjects with ethical value, and as beings with "unique temporality, freedom, and material knowledge or wisdom." This is not satire. He is a research professor of philosophy at a European university.
http://www.amazon.ca/Plant-Thinking-A-Philosophy-Vegetal-Life/dp/0231161255 and here is a review http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/39002-plant-thinking-a-philosophy-of-vegetal-life/
I don't want to live on this planet anymore
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So it's that kind of book.
Just so everyone is clear: this is the kind of "philosophy" that, in the States or the UK, would be done only at unranked programs or in English departments.
The review literally name checks every figure of shitty continental philosophy.
If I'm not mistaken, there have been some study on plant communication and data elaboration from their roots, enough to classify them as at least primitively intelligent. Anyway, since they are in fact living and autonomous being, I don't see why they shouldn't be considered subjects of ethical reflections...
If we don't say bacteria need ethical reflections, then it is very unlikely that plants will either.
Well, deciding when to stop caring at a certain complexity level is a sort of ethical reflection.
Anyway, if we care about humans and animals because they have some sort of thinking life, then if these studies are valid we should start paying attention to plants too. Of course we could simply decide we need to care on some other basis.
We can reasonably say that something has a "thinking life" if it functions as a state machine where 'states' correspond to abstract models of sensory data (patterns in external stimuli). The complexity of the possible mental states is correlated with the complexity (information content) of the sensory data that can be collected and incorporated into models.
A cat's brain can be reasonably interpreted as working this way. A nematode worm's 302 neurons probably can't. A plant's root system almost definitely can't.
Note that this concept of a "thinking life" or sentience is a much weaker and more inclusive than the concept of "personhood" or sapience.
It's too bad; a book on what plants might think or what their views might look like - a look which took the project seriously in extrapolating a possible plant civilization and its views and ethics, a colossally ambitious and scientificly-grounded work of SF - could be pretty awesome. But from the sound of that review, it's exactly where Marder falls down.
After contemplating how odd it is that people have a revulsion against weapons which use disease and poison that they don't seem to have against weapons which use momentum and in fact are apt to consider momentum weapons high status, I wondered if there could be sentients with a reversed preference.
I think sentient trees could fill the requirement. IIRC, plants modulate their poisons according to threat level.
Olaf Stapledon's 'Star Maker'. The whole thing is filtered through semi-communist theology, but its a fascinating trek through the author's far-flung ideas about all kinds of creatures and what they could hold in common versus major differences that come from their natures. One of the dozens of races he describes is a race of plant-men on an airless world that locked up all its volatiles in living soup in the deep valleys, they stand at the shore and soak up energy from their star in a meditative trance during the day and do more animal-style activity at night... his writing style is NOT for everyone nor is his philosophy but I heartily enjoyed it.
Yes! Star Maker is one of the very few books that I'd place up there with Blindsight and a few others in depicting truly alien aliens; and he doesn't do it once but repeatedly throughout the book. It's really impressive how Stapledon just casually scatters around handfuls of jewels that lesser authors might belabor singly throughout an entire book.
That book and Last and First Men and possibly Last and First Men in London are amazing. He's got paragraphs that a normal science fiction writer would flesh out into novels.
Literally in this case: the events of Last and First Men get mentioned in one paragraph of Star Maker as one race that didn't pan out and wind up becoming part of wider happenings after only lasting 2 billion years.
Speaker for the Dead?
It's been a very long time since I read that, but I don't remember thinking 'how alien!'
Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing is a fun book, if you don't mind the mushy philosophy. He calls for philosophers to stop focusing on humans and to make artifacts that explore the subjective experiences of objects. Sometimes he starts sketching out how something like that might be done or interprets an existing work along those lines (e.g. the deconstructulator), but there don't seem to be any meaty examples out there.