We have quick muscles, so we do computation to decide how to organise those muscles.
Trees do not have quick muscles, so they don’t need that kind of computation.
Trees need to decide which directions to grow, and which directions to send their roots. Pee on the ground near a tree and it will grow rootlets in your direction, to collect the minerals you give it.
Trees need to decide which poisons to produce and where to pump them. When they get chewed on by bugs that tend to stay on the same leaf the trees tend to send their poisons to that leaf. When it’s bugs that tend to stay nearby the tree sends the poisons nearby. Trees can somewhat sense the chemicals that distressed trees near them make, and respond early to the particular sorts of threats those chemicals indicate.
Is all that built into the trees’ genes? Do they actually learn much? I dunno. I haven’t noticed anything like a brain in a tree. But I wouldn’t know what to look for. Our brains use a lot of energy, we have to eat a lot to maintain them. They work fast. Trees don’t need that speed.
I don’t know how smart trees are, or how fast they learn. The esperiments have not been done.
I don’t know how moral animals are that we share no common language with. Those experiments haven’t been done either. We can’t even design the experiments until we get an operational definition of morality.
What experiment would you perform to decide whether an animal was moral? What experiment would show whether an intelligent alien was moral? What experiment could show whether a human imprisoned for a vicious crime was moral?
If you can describe the experiment that shows the difference, then you have defined the term in a way that other people can reproduce.
We have quick muscles, so we do computation to decide how to organise those muscles.
Trees do not have quick muscles, so they don’t need that kind of computation.
Trees need to decide which directions to grow, and which directions to send their roots. Pee on the ground near a tree and it will grow rootlets in your direction, to collect the minerals you give it.
Trees need to decide which poisons to produce and where to pump them. When they get chewed on by bugs that tend to stay on the same leaf the trees tend to send their poisons to that leaf. When it’s bugs that tend to stay nearby the tree sends the poisons nearby. Trees can somewhat sense the chemicals that distressed trees near them make, and respond early to the particular sorts of threats those chemicals indicate.
Is all that built into the trees’ genes? Do they actually learn much? I dunno. I haven’t noticed anything like a brain in a tree. But I wouldn’t know what to look for. Our brains use a lot of energy, we have to eat a lot to maintain them. They work fast. Trees don’t need that speed.
I don’t know how smart trees are, or how fast they learn. The esperiments have not been done.
I don’t know how moral animals are that we share no common language with. Those experiments haven’t been done either. We can’t even design the experiments until we get an operational definition of morality.
What experiment would you perform to decide whether an animal was moral? What experiment would show whether an intelligent alien was moral? What experiment could show whether a human imprisoned for a vicious crime was moral?
If you can describe the experiment that shows the difference, then you have defined the term in a way that other people can reproduce.