Sentient Plants, sentient bacteria

Dec 28, 2010

[Link]
Unless an elaborate Sokal hoax in reverse is being played
on Research in Microbiology, a slime mold can navigate
its way around a maze. And that's not all folks: bacteria
send one another chemical signals, a phenomenon now
called quorum sensing. This is great news for objectoriented ontology. Why?
Consciousness is seen, absurdly, as a bonus prize for
being highly evolved or well organized, qualifications that
fail the anti-teleology test that any true Darwinian should
apply. As I've argued in The Ecological Thought and now
in an essay on plant sentience, both pro- and anti-AI
thinkers (and others who are indifferent) have been
looking in the wrong place for intelligence.
Object-oriented ontology holds that everything one can
meaningfully say about the sentence I am holding this
pencil in mind can also be said of the sentence This
pencilcase is holding this pencil.
Consciousness is much lower down than we have been
used to think, which is great for ethics. It's weak, not
strong; it's not necessary to have a brain to have it, and
so on.
Comments:
Jonathan Kramnick
I'm a huge fan of panpsychism, of the Galen
Strawson variety especially. But the problem here
seems to be the conflation of consciousness--"what it
is likeness"--with intentionality (aboutness, etc.).

There may be something that is like to be a pencil or

a pencil case, but I can't imagine how the one could
represent or be about the other, in the sense in
which "holding a pencil in mind" is about a pencil or
represents a pencil. There are some very good
arguments for panpsychism out there, from
Strawson, Nagel and Chalmers all the way back to
Margaret Cavendish. But I don't know of, nor can I
imagine any, good arguments for pan-intentionality.
William Flesch
Right - exactly the distinction I was groping for by
bringing in behaviorism.

William Flesch
I'm still not seeing this. I mean I get the Thomas
Nagel argument that there's no way to imagine
consciousness simply as an emergent phenomenon.
And I get the attraction of Whiteheadean
panpsychism -- me, I like the Penrose version of it.
But everything you're saying here seems consistent
with behaviorism, with consciousness doing the
same work that behavior did before, and therefore
just providing a different name for it. But the one
thing I'm sure of is that behaviorism is wrong.
Bill Benzon
for several decades. I rather like the approach
William Powers took in Behavior: The Control of
Perception (1973) but, beyond that rather subtle
model, I don't have much to say about it. As for
consciousness being a 'prize' that goes to the highly
evolved, nah. It's got a job to do and it can't do that
job by prancing around on someone's forehead as a

gold star.
I've known about bacterial communication for some
time, perhaps a decade. Learned about it from
Howard Bloom. But then lots of cells communicate,
no? Why should bacterial be any different?
You might want to read my post on the busy bee
brain:
[Link]
Think of your brain as a swarm of 600,000 bees.
Each is going about it's bee business. Each is an
agent, with its own interests. But they're all coupled
together and have to interact with one another.
Somehow you are in and around there. You aren't
one of the bees, or 10 or a 1000 of them. You're all of
them, but you don't control any of them, nor do they
control you. You are the swarm and the swarm lives
inside your skull.
William Flesch
Just to say a little more, because what slime molds
(or Pachinko games) can do is not obviously what
minds can do. I feel the pencil in my fingers. Not it's
obvious (right?) that this feeling is actually
something occurring in my brain, as can be shown by
the fact that if certain nerve pathways are blocked I
don't feel it any more. So on your account, there
would be two pencil-feeling entities: my fingers and
my brain. Maybe that's fine with you. But if I accept
that my fingers feel the pencil as you (seem to) want
them to, then the real question is, how can my brain
feel it? That is how can I feel it, above and beyond
my fingers' feeling it? I think that the slime-mold
maze navigation is just an elegant way of showing

the previously unexpected but still explicable things

slime molds do. This is, let's say, a natural form of AI.
Is it real intelligence, let alone consciousness? Well
the experiment just doesn't show it is, any more than
Turing showed a Tinker Toy computer could be
conscious. Slime molds are weird, yes, but there's
plenty of explanation for their "behavior" from
standard evolutionary biology. They're not that
different from ant-colonies.
Timothy Morton
...guys, sorry to break it to you but my argument is
the inverse of panpsychism. I'm saying that
consciousness is like a pencil, not that a pencil is
conscious.
William Flesch
Can you explain the difference? I think it can't be the
opposite of panpsychism, because you seem to be
saying that whatever minds have, so do pencils.
Right? And if by definition (more or less) minds are or
have psyches, so are or do pencils.
Jonathan Kramnick
Yeah, doesn't make any sense to me either.
Panpsychism is an argument, and as Nagel and
Strawson demonstrated, I believe, a very powerful
one. Without further clarification, consciousness is
like a pencil is obscure in the extreme. Moreover,
"sentient plants, sentient bacteria" just *is*
panpsychism, so I'm not sure where the demurral is
either.
Timothy Morton
Consciousness, I claim, is far lower down than we
think it is. So much so that it's really just a kind of
default state. Panpsychism, sure, but I'm not a

panpsychist. I'm an object oriented ontologist. The

argument is an adaptation of Heidegger's tool
analysis. In the exact same way that a pencil
comprehends a table, I comprehend the pencil. No
mystery. The mystery is added by anthropocentrism.
The trouble is, we humanists have been brainwashed
by teleology. We think consciousness is some bonus
prize for being highly evolved. This is nowhere near
Darwin. So when someone suggests that
consciousness is very basic (an idea, by the way,
shared by Buddhism), we have trouble with it.
Jonathan Kramnick
We're arguing past each other and from different
philosophical traditions. The idea that consciousness
is "much lower down" is the point of most
panpsychism, whether that of Galen Strawson today
or Margaret Cavendish in the seventeenth century.
My earlier point was that in using words like
"comprehend" you had in fact a somewhat more
inflationary idea of consciousness than you admit,
since "comprehension" is an intentional state--a
state of aboutness--not an experiential state or a
state of *qualia* in the language of consciousness
speak.
I come at this from the consciousness problem in
analytic philosophy--think David Chalmers not Martin
Heidegger. There consciousness is very low down, as
you say, and not at all a bonus prize for being highly
evolved. You might enjoy Evan Thompson's Mind in
Life if you haven't picked it up already. He combines
analytic philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and
Buddhism.
I don't know much about object oriented ontology,

although I like very much work on the ontology of

objects, including especially Peter Van Inwagen's
Material Objects, Trenton Merricks's Persons and
Objects, and Ted Sider's Four Dimensionalism. I've
written some about this stuff myself in eighteenthcentury literary culture.
Anyway, I've enjoyed this exchange and am always
curious to learn more.
Lee Konstantinou
I will admit to having little familiarity with either
panpsychism or OOO, so these comments may strike
initiates as completely beside the point, but I know a
bit about linguistics and cognitive psychology from
my undergrad days, and so I don't understand why
anyone should feel disdain toward the idea that
consciousness is a "bonus prize" "bestowed" by
evolution upon humans, mammals, and brain-stembearing organisms.
After all, the notion that species have different
capacities as a result of evolution entails no
teleology. As far as I am aware, I don't have flippers
or a blowhole. That I don't is neither good nor bad.
What basis might a dolphin philosopher have for
claiming that flippers or blowholes go "all the way
down," that rocks and trees have flippers and
blowholes?
We don't know very much about consciousness, but
why shouldn't we think of consciousness as we think
of any other capacity of organisms? What's so
strange about saying that there is a notion of
"experience" relevant to dogs and humans that
doesn't apply to trees and coffee mugs?

Timothy Morton
Hey I just found this nice transcript of a significant
chunk of Maturana:
A cognitive system is a system whose organization
defines a domain of interactions in which it can act
with relevance to the maintenance of itself, and the
process of cognition is the actual (inductive) acting
or behaving in this domain. Living systems are
cognitive systems, and living as a process is a
process of cognition. This statement is valid for all
organisms, with and without a nervous system.
I haven't thought all the comments through yet. One
thing that occurs to me is that we're still not ready to
admit how non-teleological Darwinism is (why Marx
liked him). Adaptationism for instance, is
problematic not because it's Darwinian but because
it's nothing like Darwinism. In Darwinism, things
happen for no reason, not even including sexual
selection, which is sub-Kantian purposelessness.
AI theory is wrong not because it attributes
consciousness to software, but because it thinks that
consciousness is a bonus prize for being complex.
Cladistically speaking most slime molds are easily as
complex as us.
William Flesch
I still feel like you're trying to have it both ways.
As far as Maturana's definition of "cognitive system"
that's pretty much the definition of a cybernetic
system, the way Weiner was thinking about it half a
century ago. It's one of the places where AI comes
from.
As far as Darwin being non-teleological, yes, but

that's not enough. Things happen for no reason as

far as the production of what's selected. But things
keep happening for a reason: namely the reason that
they were selected for in the first place.
I don't know what you mean about sexual
selection -- I assume you mean that sexual selection
is without purpose. But then the question is: what
does a reason mean? and what does purpose mean?
Whose reasons? whose purposes?
Plants. Yes their cybernetic. No, they're not
cognitive.
I don't think "cladistically speaking" does the work
you want it to. They're as adapted as we are, yes.
But that's not the same thing. I assume you mean
coffee cups are as complex as we are too. But then
the word has no meaning. And yet I assume you
don't quite mean that, since your adverb "easily"
suggests understatement, hinting that 'the cool thing
about slime molds is they may be more complex
than we are,' which suggests you want to use the
word, at least polemically. And they're not more
complex than we are. If you'd admit any grading of
complexity, we're more complex than they are. If
you won't, then it's a useless term.
Which is fine -- I'm happy to say that some
organisms, people included, while no more
"complex" than other organisms, do this amazing
thing called thinking and being consciously aware of
our own thinking, and others, slime molds included,
don't. The only way anyone has ever been able to
reconcile our material and our conscious existence
without appealing to God is through panpsychism. I
doubt that reconciliation is right. I think probably the

best description of the problem is to say that

consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, and we
don't have a clue as to how it emerges. But that's a
description of the problem, not of its solution -- like
saying Ambien works because of its dormitive
powers.
But either consciousness emerges or there's
panpsychism. Or both: I think that's what Penrose is
trying to think through. It's fine not to be interested
in consciousness. Most people aren't, most of the
time. But if you are interested in it, it's a hard
problem. Probably impossible. Ignorabimus. (Kant
says he can't even imagine how a living God could
cope with finding himself a conscious being: "I am
from eternity to eternity, but whence then am I?" He
calls this a question that like the question animating
the First Critique one can neither put aside nor
answer. It looks to him like God can't put it aside or
answer it either.)
Or you know what?, what if we said everything is
conscious, where consciousness means responsive to
the environment (maybe neutrinos aren't, or not
much), but the real problem then is subjectivity. Do
slime molds have that?
Jonathan Kramnick
Sorry, missed this when I wrote my response
below, but you phrase the consciousness problem
the way I at least understand it. The ongoing talking
past each other here seems to me to consist in a
failure to distinguish cognition qua information
processing, intentionality qua aboutness, and
consciousness qua qualia/"what it is likeness."
Jonathan Kramnick

You are of course free to disagree, but it would be

helpful for me at least if I understood what you were
disagreeing about (in your Strawson aside for
example). I'd really like you to define your terms
more rigorously. As such, the idea that
"consciousness isn't all it's cracked up to be" may
not be that original and has much in common with
certain kinds of panpsychism. What exactly do you
mean by "consciousness"? How is it distinct from
"cognition"? You seem to be conflating different
mental state terms, as Billy and I pointed out earlier
with respect to the confusion of consciousness with
intentionality. There is again an extensive literature
on all these questions that can't (on my view) just be
swept under the rug. In this case, it's not entirely
clear to me that Maturana argues that a cognitive
system (as he defines it) is conscious, in the sense of
qualia having, experience-bearing, having
"something that it is like to be it" and so on. There
may be cognition without consciousness, a point that
is basic to Maturana and Varela, and explored at
some length recently by Thompson, and a point
central as well to most forms of AI (computers
"cognize" without qualia all the time). Anyway, I
could understand your point much better if the
philosophical terms were carved more clearly. There
is a sort of revisionary zest to saying that
consciousness is low down, not evolved, not just a
property of animal life and so on. I am prepared to
believe all of that. I do in fact believe all of that but
only in the context of a theory in which I understand
what consciousness means.
Timothy Morton
By the way, I loved your new essay on Carroll et al.
Those guys are even more wrong than your

argument suggeststhey're not even good

Darwinists! (They are adaptationists, see above.)
I'm coming to talk at your school on 2.25, maybe we
can meet up.
Timothy Morton
You said it Lee. It's nowhere near strange enough
that we assume that there is a notion of
"experience" relevant to dogs and humans that
doesn't apply to trees and coffee mugs. It's
reasonably well established that plants cognize. You
may not like this but let's leave them out of this for
now and concentrate on coffee cups.
What your claim does is to smuggle some ontic
contraband into an ontological domain. One just
can't assume that since We know what
consciousness is (though elsewhere in your
comment I think you say we don't know much about
it), we know where to put itand furthermore that
we know the difference between life and non-life, a
difference that Darwinism itself deconstructs.
As far as Strawson and so on go, I'm free to disagree.
I'm free to make the far simpler claim that
consciousness isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Timothy Morton
Thank you for asking me to clarify. It's very helpful
for me.
I love Evan's stuff although I'm not totally into some
of the systems theory stuff. And I'm writing a book
about Buddhism so thanks for that Jonathan. I am for
the record a connectionist AI-er. But I think you guys
might have assumed I am a 100% Maturana-ist

because I quoted him. I just like that quotation.

William can you explain the "two ways" thing? I'm
not getting it yet. I feel that what I'm saying is
almost stupefyingly simple, but that you just
disagree. The Darwin thing is another issue so for
that I shall merely refer you to The Ecological
Thought.
And you shall just have to accept that thousands of
plant biologists do now do research on plant
cognition. Saying that they're cybernetic but not
conscious without supplying your own definition of
the differencewhile expecting me toisn't quite
cricket.
I accept neither term of your either/or choice
(panpsychism or emergence). Happily, there is at
least one more option: object-oriented ontology. I
base my argument not on Strawson or Chalmers but
on Graham Harman's analyses of Heidegger et al. in
several wonderful books. The piece I'm thinking of
right now that's most directly relevant to what I'm
saying here is Zero Person and the Psyche in the
collection Mind that Abides. There he argues against
Chalmers's and Strawson's reductionisma
reductionism that is the basis of their panpsychism.
Jonathan, the trouble with framing it as a question of
meaning (e.g. what does consciousness mean?) is
that this conversation then becomes about
epistemology, not ontology. Those are very separate
domains that can get into trouble with each other. I
prefer the ontological one.
But for now: consciousness is what apprehends,
grasps, intends, comprehends, whatever you want.

It's what pencils do. It's far lower down, and in a

different way, than any systems theory AI or any
Chalmers style panpsychism. Qualia, what is it like
to be etc. (re: Jonathan's comment above)? Not
relevant, which is why I didn't use those terms. Why
not relevant? Because they assume what we are
trying to decide on: consciousness.
If you like, I'm almost an eliminationist here: I'm
saying that consciousness is not some special
supervenient fact, nor does it reside in some
mysterious dimension outside the physical universe,
even if that is a kind of panpsychist dimension. But
I'm not really an eliminationist if that means I think
that consciousness emerges from some lower level
interactions. It's just that we have a lot of ontic
prejudices about consciousness, and we smuggle
them into discussions of it all the time.
What a pencil does when it rests on a table is at least
as interesting as what Strawson says about
consciousness. I'll be talking a bit more about this in
my next-ish book, Realist Magic. Object-oriented
ontology does in fact provide many arguments for
pan-intentionality, Jonathan. This is my claimyou
got it! It's just that OOO is very new, so you may not
be familiar with it yet. As far as aboutness goes,
no, that's not it. Intentionality doesn't mean that. It
means immanence. It's a common mistake.
In a nutshell: the causality fish eats the
consciousness fish (like the Darwin fish eating the
Jesus fish!).
So if intentionality is common to pencils and slime
molds, it's not surprising that slime molds cognize.
But asking me to parse out the terms too much

(cognize, intend etc.) is loading the dice against my

argument already. Maybe the problem is that we're in
a pickle about consciousness precisely because we
do too much parsing. Like I say, we usually end up on
the planet Epistemology that way, and we know our
way around it too well.
You are free to disagree. What do you think
consciousness is?
Jonathan Kramnick
Thanks Timothy, not least for the heads up for your
visit. It's a depressing testimony the right hand of
Rutgers not knowing what the left is doing that I had
no idea you and Ursula were coming through next
month. I'll be there and am looking forward. I'm sure
we'll get a chance to chat then.
As for the current discussion, your response clarifies
much but also leaves me to wonder whether our
terms are compatible.
To be more specific, I am all for keeping
epistemology separate from ontology and, like you, I
am more interested in ontological questions than
epistemological ones. But when I asked what you
meant by consciousness I wasn't posing an
epistemological query--such as "how do you know
that consciousness arises from x?" Rather, I was just
asking for a definition. That's not an epistemological
question, or at least not on my understanding of the
term. On my understanding, when I ask "what is x?" I
am asking an ontological question. When I ask "how
do I know what is x?" I am asking an epistemological
question.
You've defined consciousness in a way that is

different from the philosophical tradition I'm most

familiar with. That tradition defines consciousness as
what it is like to be in a certain mental state, as
experience or "qualia" and so on. Your definition of
"what apprehends, grasps, intends, comprehends"
and so on would, on this view, be much closer to
intentionality. The distinction between consciousness
and intentionality I refer to here is commonplace.
See for example this entry in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
[Link] You may disagree
with the distinction, but in doing so you are, I think,
departing from common academic usage. I think
you're also departing from common academic usage
when you say that it is a mistake to define
intentionality as aboutness. Is that not pretty much
the exact definition from Brentano to Searle and
beyond? These departures lead I think to some of the
"talking past each other" I observed a few comments
ago.
I'm a little puzzled, too, that you find it easier to
imagine apprehending, grasping, and
comprehending as lower down than simple
experience or qualia or what it is likeness or
phenomenal consciousness (whichever you prefer).
Again, I think the current state of play is to put qualia
lower down than apprehendings or comprehendings,
unless I'm misunderstanding what you are referring
to, which I may well be. Anyhow, I find it much easier
to imagine that there is something that it is like to be
a pencil or a slime mold or for that matter an
electron than that a pencil or a slime mold or an
electron apprehends or comprehends things. Perhaps
our intuitions just run in different directions, but
presently I'm trying to figure out if we're on the same
page.

Thanks finally for the kind words in re the CI piece. I

agree entirely about the adaptationism bit. I tried to
say something about that in the beginning discussion
of Gould and Lewontin, but I'm sure not clearly or
forcefully enough.
Timothy Morton
Yeah, that's a common misunderstanding of
Brentano. "Intention" means that consciousness has
an immanent object.
Looking forward to seeing you if you can make it!
I'm very happy you put that essay together.
Bill Benzon
I enjoyed your CI piece as well. If you look toward
the bottom of this page you'll find links to a bunch of
blog posts I've written criticizing literary Darwinism:
[Link]
The most substantial is an essay-review in which I
compare Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees with
Gottschall and Wilson, The Literary Animal, and find
Moretti more interesting (and more evolutionary,
though cultural evolution, not biological):
[Link]
In a somewhat different vein, here's a post where I
suggest that Carroll's adaptionist account of art
(which he's taken from E O Wilson) "is dodgy biology
and seems to be based on the Judeo-Christian myth
of mans expulsion from Eden."
[Link]
Here's a review of Brian Boyd's The Origin of
Stories:

[Link]
Timothy Morton
Great stuff, Bill. I shall read this. People have no
idea how anti-teleological Darwin was. He's quite the
post-Darwnist!
Marx liked him for this reason, sending him a
fan letter and volume 1 of Capital.
In no sense are humans the summit of anything.
And a lot of what we have, from the way our ears
look to what we find sexually attractive, has no
reason whatsoever, apart from the fact that someone
happened to reproduce before they died. Survival
simply means not having died before you passed on
your genome.
Sexual selection, William, was Darwin's answer
to racist biology. Racist biology is teleological for
obvious reasons. Darwin argues that there's no
earthly reason why I'm white. Someone just
happened to have sex with someone who was that
colorthey may have had no other choice...hence
sub-Kantian.
Jonathan I used Dawkins (!) because he's so
hardcore, for this very reason. Some people have a
nagging suspicion that Gould put that stuff in there
because it was pc and he was quite left wing. But
with Dawkins, you know you're getting the ugliest,
most utilitarian take on it. He calls out adaptationism
all over the place.
Jonathan Kramnick
Hi Bill,

Thanks for these citations. I wish I had read

them before the article. The piece on Carroll and
Wilson was especially interesting. I've always found
his criticism oddly religious seeming in its intense
moralism, and that has always seemed ill at ease
with ostensibly Darwinian secularism.
Bill Benzon
Yes, Jonathan, Carroll is an intensely moral
critic. & he seems to want biology to provide a
backstop for moral reasoning.
Timothy Morton
...I mean, really!
William Flesch
Jonathan, can I ask for clarification? Nagel writes,
very convincingly to my mind, that it isn't like
something to be an electron. The central claim of
the paper is this, I think:
But no matter how the form may vary, the fact
that an organism has conscious experience at all
means, basically, that there is something it is like to
be that organism. There may be further implications
about the form of the experience; there may even
(though I doubt it) be implications about the
behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an
organism has conscious mental states if and only if
there is something that it is to be that organism
something it is like for the organism.
OTOH he does think that things can be in
intentional states without its being like something to
be them.

Jonathan Kramnick
As for Nagel, I wasn't thinking of the Bat essay
so much as the brief section on panpsychism in The
View from Nowhere and the longer treatment in the
chapter on panpsychism in Mortal Questions (which
incidentally follows the reprint of Bat). He's
interested in just exploring the problem from a more
less agnostic posture. But I was thinking really more
of Strawson's "realistic monism," essay reprinted and
expanded in Consciousness and its Place in Nature,
which presents a thorough-going, the basic units of
matter are experience-bearing, experience-having
argument. Great stuff.
Timothy Morton
My suspicion is that intentional objects are a
primitive phenomenon found in all experience, and
do not first arise in higher forms of consciousness.
(Graham Harman)
By primitive experience Harman means what
happens to a pencil when it's resting on a table. I'm
out as far as this post, but I'll post some more on this
as it affects my book.
William Flesch
You quote Harman on intentional objects as "a
primitive phenomenon found in all experience,"
which seems trivially true -- that seems to be more
or less the criterion for somehing's being an
experience -- but then are you truncating when you
quote the phrase "primitive experience" or is that
from Harman too? Because that would be where your
claims seem implausible to me (if you're really not
arguing for pan-psychism).

Timothy Morton
Nope.
William Flesch
So whence the phrase and the idea of
"primitive experience"? That doesn't seem to be
what Harman is talking about. I don't see how
pencils have it.
Bill Benzon
[T]he processes of human consciousness differ only
in degree but not in kind from the processes of
choice between quantum states which we call
chance when made by electrons. Quoted in this
blog post:
[Link]
William Flesch
That book, Disturbing the Universe, was very
important to me when it came out, and I've since
met Dyson a couple of times and corresponded with
him a little. One daring thinker, and usually thrilling,
despite his global warming skepticism. The point he's
making in the speculation you quote is somewhat
Penrosian. He's not saying that electrons make lowlevel conscious choices and human consciousness is
a higher level reflection or epiphenomenon of that.
(That would be closer to Penrosian panpsychism.)
He's speculating that "human consciousness... is an
active agent forcing the molecular complexes to
make choices between one quantum state and
another." We observe ourselves thinking and that
observation does what observation does: collapses
the electrons into making choices. Otherwise,

remember, they don't. So it's not that everything is

conscious, it's that consciousness affects everything.
I grant that the distinction is necessarily very slight,
but Dyson just doesn't think pencils are conscious. It
is true that he thinks quantum theory requires
consciousness (as observation) for anything to
happen, and in this sense he's what he calls an
animist, a panpsychean. But the levels on which
consciousness operates are for him all quantum, and
the mind interacts with quantum effects in a way
that pencils don't. He's close, as he says, to making
an argument for the existence of God as the
consciousness which made quantum theory what it
is. It's an appealing argument, but....