For the sake of argument, how would you even determine a tree is conscious or not?
Take an oak tree, there’s an oak in Berkshire that’s probably around 1,500 years old. From its perspective of time, it’d be this moving, writhing thing as it grows its branches and roots in all directions and we’d be moving so fast we’d be beneath its notice; basically what fruit flies are to us. The thing operates on a totally different timescale to us, and while we might not consider a single tree relevant here a forest does form a chemical network where nutrients may be shared with neighbours; while neither is likely to possess any kind of consciousness we would understand as such, I would sooner look for it in trees or mycelium than I would in great piles of linear algebra.
For the sake of argument, how would you even determine a tree is conscious or not?
Take an oak tree, there’s an oak in Berkshire that’s probably around 1,500 years old. From its perspective of time, it’d be this moving, writhing thing as it grows its branches and roots in all directions and we’d be moving so fast we’d be beneath its notice; basically what fruit flies are to us. The thing operates on a totally different timescale to us, and while we might not consider a single tree relevant here a forest does form a chemical network where nutrients may be shared with neighbours; while neither is likely to possess any kind of consciousness we would understand as such, I would sooner look for it in trees or mycelium than I would in great piles of linear algebra.