Do plants have feelings? How blind are we to their own internal experiences? Perhaps they offer an untapped opportunity to reconsider how we understand ourselves. What about bees? Do we appreciate their unique cognitive abilities, both as a group and as individuals? Their brains may grant them a kind of consciousness akin, or not, to ours. And, what about cells? How does bioelectricity contribute to their collective problem-solving?
Plants can be knocked out using the very same drug that your vet might use to put your pet to sleep. Although demonstrations of “plants under anaesthesia” provides the perfect blank slate from which to begin to view plants in an entirely new way, this just the beginning. Take sleep; do plants sleep? Or can plants suffer from jet lag? Most people would assume I am talking metaphorically in my hot off the press Planta Sapiens. And yet, planta sapiens is not unlike Harari’s Sapiens, if you see what I mean.
Most of us are aware of the hive mind—the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness.
Each of us takes a remarkable journey from physics to mind: we start as a blob of chemicals in an unfertilized quiescent oocyte and becomes a complex, metacognitive human being. The continuous process of transformation and emergence that we see in developmental biology reminds us that we are true collective intelligences – composed of cells which used to be individual organisms themselves. In this talk, I will describe our work on understanding how the competencies of single cells are harnessed to solve problems in anatomical space, and how evolution pivoted this scaling of intelligence into the familiar forms of cognition in the nervous system.
This talk is about the radical idea that if there is anything uniquely human about our minds, it doesn’t actually matter. Our desire to feel special, better-than, and different-from other forms of intelligent life is not inspiring, beneficial, or supportive of transformation or self-transcendence. In contrast, the ability to love all that is, exactly as it is without suffering is rare among humans and apparently more common among non-humans.
Slime molds are remarkable single cell organisms that belong to the Amoebozoa, a kingdom usually considered to be a sister group to fungi and animals. Slime molds are model organisms to study problem-solving in aneural biological systems. Although they lack the complex hardware of a true brain, they live in a complex ecological niche and face the same decision-making challenges that animals are faced with: they must feed, mate and adapt to changing conditions.
Contemporary physical cosmology describes a universe wherein the emergence of biological organisms can only be a fluke accident. Worse, the very scientific minds who claim to have discovered the laws of physics are forced to explain away their own conscious intelligence as an anomaly so vanishingly improbable in an otherwise dead, dumb cosmos that it requires the invention of an infinite number of unobservable multiverses to explain it (or rather, to explain it away).
People half our age will someday soon confront us with two questions: when you were my age, did you know what was happening (or what could happen)? And so, what did you do?
The most bearable answer: we had no idea. The state of the world would then seem more tolerable if failure by naive ignorance was actually the case. But was it? If it wasn’t, this would entail a kind of intolerable inheritance. We’d quickly become the ancestral monsters no one would claim as their own. It’ll be a psychic DNA whose indelible stain won’t be amenable to cosmetic fixes.
Griefwalker is a National Film Board of Canada feature documentary film, directed by Tim Wilson. It is a lyrical, poetic portrait of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with dying people. The talk will be in English. Italian subtitles are made by Giulia Sbernini, who will also be in attendance.
The fifth conversation in this series will be on Tuesday May 23, 2023 with Graham Hancock. Our conversation will orbit around “humanity’s ancient past”.