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A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

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Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

#51

Post by arketyp »

powerapple wrote: post #39

what's the definition of language? You can communicate emotion through sound/voice, is it considered as language? Language is what makes human superior intelligently. It is the software makes us a computer rather than calculator. Language is where we store knowledge. A language needs to be able to store logic as well as data, and it needs to have a written form so that the knowledge can be stored for a very long time…

This is how a title like this fails to make impact. Whether it's information theory, semiotics or grammatology, language is soon reduced to the merest coding of information, implicit or explicit, as any medium of sense (or non-sense). I could argue an algorithm is, by virtue of its operation, a language exchange. The universe too.

One should perhaps ask if there is something akin to grammatical structures in this system of roots and fungi.

Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

#52

Post by dumb2223 »

close04 wrote: post #45
jpttsn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cats, birds, and pigs are in turn happy to eat humans when convenient.

I think he mean the main difference would be that animals mostly kill (probably applies to most of their other actions) out of need (protection, food). Humans destroy things because they can many times. Sometimes it's not about needs ... unless for example you consider greed to be a need.

Learning English: They kill out of need, out of seems to me more like without. They kill without need. In Spanish we should say they kill because of need. How "out of" became because?

Anyway, if you are out of luck I hope it is not because you are lucky.

Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

#54

Post by theNewMicrosoft »

kulu2002 wrote: post #10

Jagadish Chandra Bose[1] was one of the earliest Indian scientist who proved Plant perception[2] experimentally [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose#Plant_re... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_(paranormal)

r/plantneurobiology

Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

#55

Post by TeMPOraL »

wild_preference wrote: post #46
TeMPOraL wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. This "harmony" is really just interlocking loops of unconstrained growth, followed by running out of resources, and starvation while the food supply regenerates. It only looks pretty if you ain't looking very carefully. In fact, human beings seem to be the only ones observed with a capability for restraint . We're not very good at prac…

Your definition of restraint seems based on that one example. What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? Or the restraint any animal takes through a farming process like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism ?

Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird, so I'll raise you that for harmony :). And I'm a cat owner. RE ants, I'm not a biologist so I won't speculate how exactly that relationship came to be, but it doesn't seem to me that there was any meeting of minds involved - I would guess evolutionary feedback loops again.

I made a pretty generalized argument, but the point is, what we observe as harmony in nature - the balance between predator and prey, the various species of animals and plants (and bacteria and viruses) living next to each other - is a dynamic process that involves lots of blood, death and starvation. The order in nature isn't negotiated - it's an aggregate of countless number of conflicts.

Related, recently on HN, "Trillions of Viruses Fall from the Sky Each Day": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636. The money quote from the article is mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575.

"One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily."

That's nature's harmony at work.

Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

#56

Post by [deleted] »

dumb2223 wrote: post #52
close04 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he mean the main difference would be that animals mostly kill (probably applies to most of their other actions) out of need (protection, food). Humans destroy things because they can many times. Sometimes it's not about needs ... unless for example you consider greed to be a need.

Learning English: They kill out of need, out of seems to me more like without. They kill without need. In Spanish we should say they kill because of need. How "out of" became because? Anyway, if you are out of luck I hope it is not because you are lucky.

[deleted]

Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

#57

Post by close04 »

dumb2223 wrote: post #52
close04 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he mean the main difference would be that animals mostly kill (probably applies to most of their other actions) out of need (protection, food). Humans destroy things because they can many times. Sometimes it's not about needs ... unless for example you consider greed to be a need.

Learning English: They kill out of need, out of seems to me more like without. They kill without need. In Spanish we should say they kill because of need. How "out of" became because? Anyway, if you are out of luck I hope it is not because you are lucky.

Well... "out of necessity" is actually an idiom, meaning "because you have to". Since need and necessity are very similar in meaning I assume this is a correct statement. But I'm not a native English speaker this may of course be a common mistake.

Regardless, I hope the idea stands.

Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

#58

Post by sametmax »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #42
some_account wrote: post #23

Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to ea…

> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. This "harmony" is really just interlocking loops of unconstrained growth, followed by running out of resources, and starvation while the food supply regenerates. It only looks pretty if you ain't looking very carefully. In fact, human beings seem to be the only ones observed with a capability for restraint . We're not very good at prac…

> Have you seen a pack of animals or plants jointly deciding to voluntarily forgo extra food

Actually, the only animals I know to become obese are humans, and animals that are attached to humans.

You may say it's because they don't have an unlimited supply of food, but actually, many animals do, or used to have before we destroyed it.

Of course, they don't really forgo extra food, they use it to multiply their number instead of providing more to an individual. So it's not real restrain.

Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

#59

Post by Uberphallus »

dumb2223 wrote: post #52
close04 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he mean the main difference would be that animals mostly kill (probably applies to most of their other actions) out of need (protection, food). Humans destroy things because they can many times. Sometimes it's not about needs ... unless for example you consider greed to be a need.

Learning English: They kill out of need, out of seems to me more like without. They kill without need. In Spanish we should say they kill because of need. How "out of" became because? Anyway, if you are out of luck I hope it is not because you are lucky.

"out of" just means "from" in many cases, you can switch them and be understood even if it may sound weird. The parent is an example, here's another:

Where are you from? / Where are you out of?

Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to

#60

Post by TeMPOraL »

close04 wrote: post #50
TeMPOraL wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about tendencies. Intelligence is about being better at getting what you want. A lion wants to eat impala. A smart lion would figure out how to breed them in captivity, and it's only a small step from there to factory farming.

How many smart lions would kill every impala and then wonder if they can switch to grass? :) Farming is after all pretty sustainable. But how about the things that aren't? We're over-exploiting basically every limited resource we have. Ironically we kind of ignore the unlimited ones, like wind, solar, etc. We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes thi…

> How many smart lions would kill every impala and then wonder if they can switch to grass?

Probably a few, then they'd figure out the concept of saving something for later, just as human farmers did countless of centuries ago :).

> We're over-exploiting basically every limited resource we have. Ironically we kind of ignore the unlimited ones, like wind, solar, etc.

A nit, but the reason we're "kind of ignoring" renewables is because fossil fuels are better. They're much more energy dense. They're easier to handle (just burn to release energy; meanwhile, photovoltaics is a very advanced piece of technology, and we most likely wouldn't have it if we didn't start with fossil fuels). They can be processed for other things - e.g. lubricants, plastics. Fossil fuels are absurdly useful. That's why they're so popular. But we're slowly getting there with renewables, not that both the tech and the will to use it seems to be here.

> We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes this destruction is totally gratuitous and avoidable. Save for those who really need a couple more millions of $ to "survive".

Here's the thing - it's a social problem at this point. Something I believe smart lions would face too. We've spawned an economy that makes us do these things to survive, even though at least some of us individually realize they're monumentally stupid. Those are hard problems, because they involve getting a lot of people to agree to something that isn't in their immediate short-term interest.

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