How I Started to See Trees as Smart

Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by ncmncm on Sunday May 15, 2022 @06:02PM (#31391594)

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.

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Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by mellavora on Monday May 16, 2022 @03:34AM (#31394434)

I've been thinking about plant intelligence for over a decade (and have a neuroscience-related Ph.D.), yet never took it down the path of computation efficiency/time/energy tradeoffs as you have done. Thank you for this new perspective, including its obvious conclusion:

> trees can afford to be very, very smart.

Hopefully I can use some of my perspective to address your follow-on question:

> What could a smarter tree do to outcompete rivals?

This may represent a limited understanding of Darwinian evolution.

Trees have an economy, sharing resources with each other and with other living things.

Tree also are (more or less) fixed in place, thus these economic games are repeated games with known participants.

They thus have a vested interest in maximizing the wealth of the community, rather than their individual wealth. They may (and studies suggest they do) have a preference for supporting their offspring over other trees, but not to the point of killing the community their offspring will also depend on.

Where I am going with this. Repeated economic games are not zero-sum; the pie can get bigger. "Competition" in this setting does not look like competition in a zero-sum "I have to beat the other guy" game.

What trees can do with their intelligence is learn how to build long-term stable and nuturing communities which generate substantial wealth for many members. And that this is a logical local (perhaps global) optimium.

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Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by ncmncm on Monday May 16, 2022 @04:01AM (#31394559)

I wrote something along those lines, then replaced it with what I did post, just for brevity. You said it better than I would have.

Mutualism is a well-proven successful strategy. There does seem more scope for intelligence in crafting positive-sum arrangements than in simply competing. (Arguably our own brains hypertrophied in response to sexual selection of better storytellers, with other results secondary.)

http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf

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Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by popcube on Monday May 16, 2022 @04:13AM (#31394613)

usually, we just presume the strategies were stored in genetic level.

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Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by ncmncm on Monday May 16, 2022 @04:39AM (#31394732)

We can presume, but Nature keeps her own counsel. Anywhere there is any scope for intelligent behavior and capacity to exercise it, we should expect to see nature explore that, sooner or later. I know no reason to think that could not have been done yet.

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Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by falling_ on Monday May 16, 2022 @05:55AM (#31395157)

There is some scope for winged humans, and hypothetically some capacity to exercise it. Nature did not explore this route. The opportunity cost of exploratory settling into a non-preferred niche usually outweighs the benefits of that exploration simply due to the scarcity of available resources to buffer against the opportunity cost.

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Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by ncmncm on Monday May 16, 2022 @10:57AM (#31398356)

But, as noted, for this case there is very little in the way of cost.

Nature did, in fact, explore the winged-bipeds body plan to full fruition twice, once in mammals, and did winged quadrupeds before and again in mammals. She is progressing on a another as I write this. And, humans did end up conquering the air without growing wings. Nature isn't picky about methods.

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Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by triyambakam on Monday May 16, 2022 @02:34AM (#31394151)

Eloquently said!

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Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by emmelaich on Monday May 16, 2022 @03:05AM (#31394285)

If trees could speed up their activity a thousand-fold, they might be as smart as us.

I know, definitely not, but it's a thought I amuse myself with.

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Re:How I Started to See Trees as Smart by mellavora on Monday May 16, 2022 @03:36AM (#31394448)

Even more amusing to consider directional of change.

If we assume trees are smarter than us, and speeding it up 1000 times brought them down to our level...

and conversely, if we could learn to think slower, would we be smarter?

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