The secret life of trees

[Magical Realist]

I found this on Mark Ruffalo's facebook page. Very interesting stuff:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/26...c1fdb6faf8

"The average tree grows its branches out until it encounters the branch tips of a neighboring tree of the same height. It doesn’t grow any wider because the air and better light in this space are already taken. However, it heavily reinforces the branches it has extended, so you get the impression that there’s quite a shoving match going on up there. But a pair of true friends is careful right from the outset not to grow overly thick branches in each other’s direction. The trees don’t want to take anything away from each other, and so they develop sturdy branches only at the outer edges of their crowns, that is to say, only in the direction of “non-friends.” Such partners are often so tightly connected at the roots that sometimes they even die together."

[C C]

Trees clumsily "detect" these environmental states and respond to them in a quasi-regulated manner, minus the full-blown sensory system and discriminating intelligence of a primate body. The indirect process of "detection" can be construed as a precursor of "sense" and the "identification via physical response" as a primitive forerunner of "understanding". All accomplished by structural interactions within the tree.

In this way we can grasp how at the more complex and specialized level of a brain there is an "outer relations slash outer appearances" way of explaining consciousness by classifying it as just more of the mechanistic connectivity (spatial and dynamic organizational capacity) already instantiated throughout the universe. This is what science can easily deal with in terms of physical composition, since there are the cosmic building-block tendencies of structure and motion (change) to assemble up from.

However, when it comes to the inner characteristic of consciousness -- the ability of those outer or extrinsic relationships it corresponds to, to be shown as anything in themselves (never mind also being shown as something very different from their outer appearances or technical descriptions) -- there are no prior building block properties to assemble up from. Matter outside the skull lacks the ability to manifest itself at both micro and macro stratums, but suddenly acquires that ability in the skull simply from the extrinsic relationships of cellular structure and the changes of electrochemical action being arranged in unique, intricate patterns for conjuring that previously non-existent capacity. Ergo, the label of brute emergence.

Charles Peirce: "Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness." --Man's Glassy Essence

Although Peirce's take on it above is arguably apt, it seems tentatively crouched in either panpsychism or the panphenomenalism of positivists in the 19th century. "Physical stuff" is treated as maybe having the power to manifest itself in general back then, rather than suddenly acquiring that remarkable power in the skull (as popularly regarded in the anti-panpsychic climate of today).