The Intelligent Plant

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_pollan?currentPage=all

by mercer • 12 years ago

47 8 12 years ago

smoyer3• 12 years ago

As a former embedded systems engineer, robotist and active systems architect, I always look forward to good stories about factory automation. I think in many ways, factories were the prototype for the "Internet of Things".

This story, while interesting, is about flora and should have been much shorter for the amount of information conveyed.

unwind• 12 years ago

In other words, you mis-parsed the "plant" in the title to mean "factory". I think you could have said that more succinctly, too. :)

smoyer3• 12 years ago

Correct on both accounts ... and when I realized what the article was about, I still read it! Since I was already laughing at myself, I chose to phrase it in a way that shared some humor with you (I hope).

Papa Hemmingway would not approve of most of writing!

ssdfsdf• 12 years ago

I love this. It makes perfect sense to me that intelligence need not be rooted in one physical object, the brain. Rather it is a property of certain kinds of system, regardless of any particular instantiation.

Why are people so conservative in their thoughts, so dismissive of new ideas? I adore new ideas, revel in them. What is wrong with these people, that they are so readily dismissive. How can they be so crudely obtuse? To argue that the same behavior in an animal as a plant should have different terminology is a non-sense. It is so obviously a non-sense that one must doubt their motivation.

smoyer3• 12 years ago

I agree whole-heartedly ... but 90% of the researchers in any field only want to see studies that strengthen or extend their existing mental frameworks because it's a lot more work to fix the framework of knowledge they've built over the years.

I've seen behaviors that looked intelligent in some very simple algorithms ... why wouldn't biology be able to create chemical versions of those algorithms?

zxcdw• 12 years ago

Is Conway's Game of Life form of intelligence in the same sense that a plant can be "intelligent" for making seemingly optimal "decisions"?

Whatever the answer is, it's almost certainly a different kind of "intelligence" what we as humans seem to have. But, what if we apply this same "algorithmic intelligence" to a sophisticated enough neural network (or similar algorithmic construct) which simulates a human brain which is something we consider "truly intelligent", is this network intelligent, despite it being "merely" algorithmically intelligent like the Conway's Game of Life? And if not, what is "intelligent", if the output of the network (akin to human brain) shows intelligence?

The bottom line is, that we need to be very rigorous with what we mean by different forms of intelligence -- it seems to me that "intelligence" is merely an umbrella term for various kinds of optimal/meaningful behavior. (I've seen people argue that nature itself is "intelligent" because for example water finds the most optimal course over the shurface which it flows and so forth)

11001• 12 years ago

To anyone who is actually interested in the subject, I highly recommend this excellent free class: https://www.coursera.org/course/plantknows

andrewflnr• 12 years ago

If you don't want to read the whole thing, do be sure to skip down to the bottom where they talk about cooperative networks of trees. IP over fungus, anyone?

The Intelligent Plant

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