DGA wrote:undefineable wrote:Malcolm wrote:Trees exhibit both discrimination and knowledge hence, they have minds, as do other plants.
To show this, the patterns of electrical signals in trees would have to bear some relation to the pattern of electrical signals in human brains
while those humans are engaged in tasks involved in disrimination and knowledge.
Until [or unless this is!] that time, who knows?
This looks like a very narrow redefinition of sentience. According to the redefinition you offer here, a mind is only a mind when it corresponds in some way to the physical structures of the human organism.
Squid, octopi, and cuttlefish are sentient, but their nervous systems diverge widely from that of any mammal, including homo sapiens. Some are very clever animals indeed.
So here I go again asking for clarification. What is the difference between "mind" or "sentience" on one side, and "brain" or "central nervous system" on the other?
Yes. That's pretty much the key issue that this research is throwing up. Ultimately, it's going to start being obvious that things like "brain" and "central nervous system" are one manner amongst many in which sentience is instantiated. That rubs a lot of people the wrong way, because human superiority is posited on humans being a better outcome than any other and we obviously like that idea, and never need much convincing about it and we don't like the opposite of it. This view was ultimately embedded in the idea of an "evolutionary ladder", with humans at the top, which contributed to the public acceptance of evolution. (Even at the time, though, people disagreed with this. If I remember correctly, Darwin himself thought it was a misrepresentation.)
Stephen Jay Gould wrote on this many years back, if you want background. He also wrote on IQ, as part of the same broad thesis around human self-aggrandizement, in The Mismeasure of Man. Very worthwhile reading.
https://books.google.co.za/books?id=tSD ... or&f=false
(Sorry about the long link. I'm typing on my phone.)
The idea that humans are a pinnacle of some sort is hard to escape in any culture. But then, the sun also seems to orbit the earth, and the earth itself seems flat in everyday experience, and rods in water seem to bend, and the moon seems to hide from the sun, and lightning seems to come down, rather than up, and so on. There are many things that accord with common sense assumption on the face of it, but have no evidence behind them and are actually entirely wrong.
Amongst Western Buddhists, at dharma centers, I've often seem this cultural truth get mixed up with the idea of a precious human life, as though a precious human life were precious because it was human and therefore better. Actually, traditionally, a precious human life is only precious if it's been exposed to dharma. It's not inherently precious. (I'd go further, and say that precious human life is precious because of our capacity for abstraction, too. Without that, we'd never be able to start practice, because the premises of dharma go wholly against common sense prima facie and it's only through a scaffolding of abstraction that we might be convinced that our experience actually isn't proof of what we think it is. The same thing, therefore, that makes our blindness particularly convoluted and woven into itself, is an aid to clearing a way our of our own undergrowth. But that's a personal opinion - traditionally, it's that a human met the dharma.)
I basically understand why non-Buddhists have difficulty with this. Culturally, we've been telling ourselves specialness stories for millennia. Over the last couple of hundred years, this has taken the form of specialness being located in the complexity of the human nervous system, which is exclusively related to human minds. This research and the direction it goes in undermines that, hence the kinds of reactions we see. It seems to indicate that the complexity of human nervous organisation is actually what it appears to be -complexity - and not a prerequisite for mental activity. What we we call mental activity may be widespread, but very differently instantiated and experienced.
It's strange to me, though, that Buddhists have difficulty with this idea. If you're a Buddhist, specialness stories notwithstanding, you have been exposed to the idea - glossed - that minds give rise to bodies. That is, it is a common theme in many schools, whatever you think of it, that the mind does not arise from the central nervous system, but that the central nervous system, as an expression of karma, arises from the mind. The "mind" is source in many texts. So you shouldn't be particularly attached to the causative necessity of a central nervous system. If anything, you'd be attached to the causative necessity of a mind, and interested in being able to
distinguish mind from central nervous system. I would have thought that Buddhists would be quite excited about being able to divorce"mind" from organs. (I'm using "mind" here in all sorts of loose, casual ways, just for the sake of conversation.) Obviously I was wrong
Even more damning, I would have thought, is that being a Buddhist really requires you to accept that everything you know is wrong. All dharmas are conditioned (despite how they seem), all conditioned dharmas are suffering ( despite everyday experience), actions taken in your own interest (and therefore in line with millennia of evolutionary imperatives) will necessarily fail, etc. The basic premise of dharma, is "you're thoroughly wrong". So once you're over that hurdle, it seems quite odd that the possibility of plant sentience would the thing that stuck. But ok.
DGA, sentience and cognition would - very broadly - be the capacity in living things to register environmental information, and the capacity to distinguish some of that information as boundaried, as belonging together, respectively. Brains and central nervous systems would be some of the ways, amongst many, that sentience and cognition are enacted or embodied.
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(Typed on the phone, so there are likely to be a lot of typos.)
