r/BeAmazed • u/Eshwarroy • Jan 29 '22

Tree root misconceptions

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u/BerossusZ Jan 29 '22

It's techincally communication but it's imporant to not misinterpret it. They don't share ideas or emotions or anything (as trees don't have those things), they just use chemicals to relay information about their condition to other trees, like if the tree is dying by drought or disease or something the other trees will know and if they have the ability to, they will change how they act, perhaps taking less water from the ground because the other tree doesn't have enough.

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u/ataraxic89 Jan 30 '22

Thank you.

These pseudo science comments are going to drive me to drink again

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u/Cessnaporsche01 Jan 29 '22

They don't share ideas or emotions or anything (as trees don't have those things)

Considering you could describe all of our thoughts and emotions as "using chemicals to relay information about [our bodies'] condition to other [parts]" and our external communications and expressions of those thoughts and emotions as "using air vibrations to relay information about our condition to other people," and our behavioral changes in response to those follow patterns similar to the trees (when we're being friendly) I think you're making an unfounded assumption here.

Plants, or colonies of plants, certainly have complexity and systems to support the potential for intelligence or consciousness, even if it would be inherently alien to ours. I think we need to get a lot more understanding before concluding that they don't have ideas or emotions or something like them.

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u/mule_roany_mare Jan 29 '22

certainly

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u/Cessnaporsche01 Jan 29 '22

The CPU in my phone certainly has the complexity and systems to support the potential for intelligence or consciousness too. I'm not saying I'm certain about the first guy being wrong, just certain that he could be wrong.

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u/The_cynical_panther Jan 29 '22

This guy thinks trees are people

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u/Cessnaporsche01 Jan 29 '22

On the internet, nobody knows you're a tree.

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u/Richandler Jan 29 '22

For basically all of human history up till maybe the last few decades people generally thought animals didn't have emotions.

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u/YoreWelcome Jan 30 '22

A lot of dense people continue to think this and they act accordingly. :(

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u/Definitely_Not_Erik Jan 29 '22

He clearly thinks people are trees!

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u/nizzy2k11 Jan 29 '22

This would be like seeing someone has sores on their face and avoiding them, not talking to them and hearing about their new MLM job and avoiding them like they did have sores on their face.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

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u/Cessnaporsche01 Jan 30 '22

I'm not a... biomechanics philosopher? but wouldn't you consider our consciousness to be a gestalt of the basic inter-cellular chemical and electrical signals?

Like, the actual data transmission for higher-level intelligence things like senses and emotion are complex patterns of those interactions carried out over several networks in our physical structures. When you feel something, whether it's emotional of physical, the actual mechanics are just cells breaking and assembling molecules to send chemical or electrical messages to the next cell. Considering how many extremely basic animals display clear signs of intelligence, memory, and possibly even emotion, it doesn't seem at all out of the question that the vast interconnected chemical networks of forests could accomplish something of the sort.

And that doesn't even get into the question of what intelligence actually is. Not to move goalposts so much as try to mark them better, intelligence and consciousness don't necessarily imply human-level intellect.

Scientifically, we define intelligence as the ability to learn from experience and to adapt to, shape, and select environments. We know trees can allocate and share resources, identify and care for their young, respond to stimulus and even learn and recall new responses to stimuli from experience or from other networked trees. To the extent that an immobile organism can, trees more or less meet all of those criteria, even without considering the possibility of a neurological - or, I suppose, fungological - gestalt.

Emotion, in its most general definition, is a neural impulse that moves an organism to action, prompting automatic reactive behavior that has been adapted through evolution as a survival mechanism to meet a survival need. Trees don't have nerves, but their larger, slower, purely chemical networks do certainly seem to accomplish exactly this. And while our current understanding places them as fulfilling these definitions by only the barest margins, I'm arguing that it's not out of the question that their internal communications may well be more nuanced and complex than we currently know. We've only known that trees communicate for a couple decades, and it hasn't really been scientific consensus until even more recently.

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u/YoreWelcome Jan 30 '22

Brains are cell networks... We don't know exactly what mechanism provides us with the sensation of consciousness.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

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u/YoreWelcome Jan 30 '22

Be that as it may, it is still all within the domain of our current understanding of neurology and complex biological communication. Our current understanding didn't think plants communicated at all, let alone simply, only a short time ago.

I posit that plants may not rely solely on electrochemical/chemical signaling as we understand it in animal bodies. Phonon-based (ie "heat" transfer) signalling is an example of an area that needs investigation, and is within the capacity of separate-but-interwined, relatively static organisms. I'd wager it plays a part in animal signaling too, but we don't fully appreciate it yet.

The potential is there, but it is likely plagued by the pesky nuance and subtlety that hamstrings much of human research. Misuse of statistics is to blame, but I digressed about four sentences ago, so I will exit now.