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Bro, not only are they sentient, the trees fucking hate us. Allergies aren’t just something that happens as a quirk of evolution. Those trees are filling the air with their jizz in a coordinated effort to take us out bro. The trees are trying to kill us bro.
Yes. Is that dent where Vader’s executor crashed into it?
You still deliver…
Pew pew
M Night Shyamalan did a documentary on this I think
As an asthmatic hay-fever sufferer, fuck yeah - you’re onto something!
There’s a theory that allergies are getting worse due to an imbalance of gender selection when planting trees in urban environments. Here is some additional context.
I’m sorry to say that that is most likely a myth that scientists have been hyping each other up about.
https://www.sciencealert.com/does-a-vast-network-of-fungi-connect-forests-heres-what-we-know
I just want to point out that this source indicates researchers reviewed 1500 papers on the topic and found that unsupported claims had doubled.
However, they never indicate the number or give a percentage of those 1500 papers that featured unsupported claims.
So is it doubling from 2 to 4, or from 700 to 1400? Because that’s a major difference.
This is a problem with AI articles on science. They skim other AI articles and repeat without bringing all the important facts with them. Then we get dozens of results for one claim about science, with only maybe one or two original sources.
Then the idea spreads through reddit or whatever forum you prefer.
We know trees share resources, that they have been demonstrated to signal pain and danger to other plants, that they signal food availability to pollinators via electromagnetic fields. We have had hard evidence for all of this.
Yes? Hard evidence? Where?
It’s an interesting hypothesis run amok because a core group of biologists WANTED it to be true so badly.
There’s a GREAT episode (ep. 425) from the In Defense of Plants podcast that covers the misinformation and misunderstanding perfectly.
Consider that human neuron makes around 7000 connections, while plant cells via plasmodesma may make from 1k to 100k connections.
We have such a human-centric and focused interpretation of knowing, and what qualifies as intelligence. Something that these recent series of advances should impress upon you is that maybe, complexity alone is enough. Obviously whatever we’ve built out of silicon isn’t something we’d describe as intelligence. But the hint that maybe just ‘having a preposterous number of connections’ might be sufficient for emergent properties like reason and memory and identity.
So then what about plants? Discount the incredible relationships they make with fungi. Just plants are foreign enough to us to maybe give you a bit of caution. They are easy to take for granted because they are so ubiquitous. Internally they’re as networked as you or I. They’re constantly gathering information about the world around them. What does a plant know of the wind or the sun? Where would a plant put its ‘self’ if it had one?
Probably not in my butt, but that’s where it’s going! ;)
We have such a human-centric and focused interpretation of knowing, and what qualifies as intelligence.
This has been my response to all of the bullshit alien claims recently. It’s always some kind of very human-centric idea of a bipedal being using a second thing as a vehicle. Just that entire concept is so human-centric.
If extraterrestrial ilfe exists, it’s not going to resemble humans. Unless it’s literally our cosmic ancestors or some shit.
If complexity alone is enough, then why wouldn’t silicon brains connected to multiple external sensors be enough? The computer scientist are even starting to experiment with bio fuel cells that convert light to energy, and using fuzzy logic for AI networks. Our brains are giant fuzzy logic processors.
It’s a start: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-8922-1
Honestly I’ve come to the conclusion that most “things” are more intelligent ( or even just worthy of moral worth ) than we usually give them credit for.
This is partially why most veganism arguments that try and say that we shouldn’t kill and eat animals and instead we should kill and eat plants usually fall on deaf ears for me just because it makes an implicit assumption that plant life is worth less than animal life ( I’m not saying this is not true but that is the exact same argument meat eaters make with animals. )
There are other reasons why veganism is good for the planet however ( like it being easier to sustain and lower carbon emissions ) but I think that it is better to come at this whole situation with the attitude of how do we live in harmony with the life around us whether that be human, animal, plant, etc.
This is partially why most veganism arguments that try and say that we shouldn’t kill and eat animals and instead we should kill and eat plants usually fall on deaf ears for me just because it makes an implicit assumption that plant life is worth less than animal life
Animals don’t create biomass from thin air though. They have to eat a lot of plants to grow.
the production of 1 kg of beef requires 8 kg of feed and 14.5 thousand liters of water. For 1 kg of pork, 3 kg of feed is needed and nearly 6 thousand liters of water
Eating plants directly instead of feeding them to animals is clearly much more efficient, requiring much fewer animal deaths as well as plant deaths to sustain a human.
If plants are sentient, the moral argument for veganism is even stronger.
Eating plants directly instead of feeding them to animals is clearly much more efficient, requiring much fewer animal deaths as well as plant deaths to sustain a human.
That is why in my third paragraph I mentioned that it was easier to sustain in the long term.
If plants are sentient, the moral argument for veganism is even stronger.
In my view this just feels like justifying a less deadly mass killing for a more deadly mass killing. They both have their consequences.
For example I think it is just as bad that due to our consumerist society we have to over harvest the land that we work on and grow plants in ways that make them more vulnerable to disease and other things that they would be less susceptible to if we didn’t try to optimize their production. This is something that wouldn’t change if we all suddenly became vegan we would also need to change our culture of consumption.
And this is why again my argument is not that we should just try and find an optimal utilitarian equation of how many lives are worth killing to sustain society but instead find a way to live that doesn’t over exploit the ecosystem that we live in and doesn’t go out of its way to do unnecessary harm to life.
For some updated information on the continued research into plant communication, I would suggest a video by Anton Petrov
Mindblowing Video of Plants Talking to Each Other In Real Time
This is basically the storyline of a new book I just read - The Canopy Keepers by Veronica Henry
My kind of lady
Merlin Sheldrake be like ⬆️
His face says “your tits aren’t big enough for me to put up with all this screaming.”
