[HN Gopher] How I Started to See Trees as Smart
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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.
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