As I continue to explore plant signaling, bioacoustics, and other apparently intelligent plant behaviors, it would help to investigate our ability to understand and translate intelligence in other species and orders of life in general. What can we know of other animals’ minds? Can we imagine what it’s like to be a tree?
As we’ll see, various thinkers have argued that bats, lions, elephants (and presumably many other animals), all experience the world so differently from us that their subjective experiences are inherently untranslatable into our terms. Meanwhile, others have argued that oak trees can know the status of research grants on other continents. Or not. Let me explain.
In 1974, Thomas Nagel published “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel’s central claim is that we cannot reduce the subjective experience of being a particular thing to an objective description of the physical phenomena that produce that subjective experience. He uses bats as his prime example. Bats are mammals, in the same class of animals as humans, yet they perceive and navigate the world very differently from us. Most bats, specifically the Microchiroptera, emit high-pitched noises and interpret the echoes from these noises to determine the location, density, velocity, and size of objects in their environments. The embodied experience of envisioning the world through these methods creates a subjective experience so alien to ours that we are unlikely to ever have more than a faint guess as to what it’s like. We can measure the frequencies they emit, dissect their ears, and describe the mechanisms involved, but there will remain an experience of what it’s like to be a bat these physical explorations will never uncover. There is a “what it’s like” to be a bat, or anything else, and this subjective experience of being a particular thing, Nagel argues, is what constitutes having conscious mental states.
This untranslatable subjectivity arises from forms of embodiment. Several decades before Nagel began thinking about thinking about bats, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” The embodied experience of being a lion and the ideas and desires this embodiment generates will create unique experience of the world. The shared perspective it takes to share a language won’t exist between people and lions. Alternate embodiments create alternate modes of being that will remain beyond translation. If a lion speaks to us, we won’t have words for what they’re saying.
Should we give up trying? Or it still worth the effort? The roboticist Rodney Brooks, in “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” writes that “it is unfair to claim that an elephant has no intelligence worth studying just because it does not play chess.” Different embodiments generate different subjective experiences of being and ways of acting and perceiving that we will never understand. But, perhaps paradoxically, the inherent unknowability of other intelligences should not stop us from trying to understand them. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz urged us to allow the deeply different to become deeply known without becoming any less different. He was writing about an anthropologist’s investigation of other cultures, but the advice is still useful as we explore intelligent behaviors in other species as well. So how do we know deeply without abandoning difference?
As we interact with the natural world, there are two distinct forms of anthropocentricism to avoid. The first is well known and very obviously dangerous and destructive. When we view the natural world as a lesser, passive thing that is there for us to do things to, and see humans as the main characters on the planet, we are unlikely to treat the natural world respectfully. This is probably what the word “anthropocentric” means to most of us. But there is another kind. When we level all consciousnesses and intelligences to one universal mind and assume every organism that adapts and reacts to its environment in clever ways must be thinking thoughts we can know, understand, and translate, then we crush the difference that is so essential for the world to function. If we make everything “just like us,” then we miss the wonderful cacophony of intelligences and modes-of-being-in-the-world that make the world as interesting as it is.
It’s a similar point to the one I made last week when I argued that musicians who seek the most truly “natural” sounds and attempt to reduce what is permissible and proper in music—be they 432 Hz stans or just intonation bros.—neglect the full range of the natural world. Similarly, imagining that everything capable of imagining does so just like us is a failure of the imagination. The actual range of embodied intelligences and approaches to being in the world is so much more interesting than insisting that everything that thinks must have a quasi-human mind.
Let’s return to humans to make an analogy. There are organizations acting on the supposed behalf of autistic people whose main goal is finding a “cure” for autism. Many autistic people find this tremendously insulting and argue that we don’t need to make sure everyone thinks the same “normal” way. Rather, we need to create a world that makes room for many ways of thinking.
Monica Gagliano, who did the initial study on corn and sound I’ve replicated, as well as numerous other experiments in plant bioacoustics, wrote a memoir called Thus Spoke The Plant. She recounts various experiences where plants telepathically gave her life advice. When she communes with the socoba tree, it assures her that everyone she’s ever encountered has played a purposeful and perhaps preordained role in her life story. “See those you thought were out to hurt you? They played their assigned roles with great perfection and infinite patience, for your benefit alone.” Plants, or at least this socoba tree, believe everything happens for a reason, and the people who hurt you were “infinitely patient” while they did it, performing a role for the good of all, or at least for Monica Gagliano. I’ve heard people say this sort of thing, and I always respectfully disagree. And if a tree says it, I still disagree. Some things are truly senseless and happen for no good reason at all and most (and probably all) hurtful acts never needed to happen.
Later in the book, Gagliano is worried that her research grant in Australia won’t come through. A group of oak trees in North America tells her, “You need not worry about those boring details. We are well aware of your needs, and every single one of them has already been taken care of.” Not only do trees possess quasi-human consciousness, language, and telepathy, but they know about the status of grant applications on other continents.
I love her scientific work, but there is a real danger in flattening all forms of intelligence and embodied modes of being into one single mind, especially one so concerned with human concerns. We can accept that there are forms of intelligence all around us that are deeply different, and can study and know them, while still allowing them to remain fundamentally different. We shouldn’t imagine that every organism that displays intelligent and adaptive behavior is just like people. The whole world is alive and adaptive and intelligent—even the roots of plants. But when we listen in, we should listen to the plants, lions, or elephants, rather than hear our own voices, thinking our own thoughts.