Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Ring” features quiet and heroic characters called ents that are the tree-like herders of the trees. They live and sleep long, are slow to anger, and—once awakened—talk at length. They embody the notion that everything around us is alive…and aware. And they are what immediately comes to mind when reading Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees”, the observations of tree-life from a life-long German forester. In his book Wohlleben reports his own observations as well as scientific research that have begun to demonstrate that trees communicate with one another, share resources, and warn each other of impending dangers—all without a brain.
Then today this month’s Scientific American arrives with an article titled, “Minds Everywhere” by Rowan Jacobsen. It describes research that has begun to demonstrate that intelligence, memory, and—perhaps—cognition don’t exist exclusively in the brain. Jacobsen refers to Pamela Lyon of the University of Adelaide in saying that
“…scientists’ insistence that human intelligence is qualitatively different as just another doomed form of exceptionalism. ‘We’ve been ripped from every central position we’ve inhabited,’ she points out. Earth is not the center of the universe.”
Much as Wohlleben points out about trees, Jacobsen quotes a researcher in the field of minimal intelligence at the University of Murcia in Spain,
“Plants have to plan ahead to achieve goals, and to do so, they need to integrate vast pools of data. They need to engage with their surroundings adaptively and proactively, and they need to think about the future. They just couldn’t afford to do otherwise.”
All of this brings us to the core question,
“How can something without a brain remember anything? Where is the memory stored? Where is its mind?”
Anyone who has experience with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or any of dozen’s of other diseases affecting the mind has to have realized that the real beginning place for solutions for these diseases is a basic roadmap of how the brain works. The insight into how the cosmos worked that Einstein gave us doesn’t exist yet in mapping how the brain works.
But research by Wohlleben and others may be breaking us out of the box we were in with regard to understanding the brain. Researchers in this area are especially careful not to mention the C-word, consciousness. But this research suggests that consciousness isn’t confined to the brain. Until now brain research has the very nearly invisible foundational assumption that the brain is the entirety of our memory, control, and problem-solving. The weakness of that assumption may explain why after decades of looking scientists have been unable to pinpoint where consciousness is formed in humans.
If the brainless explanations to thinking that scientists like Jacobsen and Wohlleben are bringing into focus can be generalized, we may find that the reason plants turn to the sun, understand when a shadow is coming from their own limbs, and can solve and remember-the-solutions-to problems points to consciousness as being something very different that just having a brain.
Comments by another scientist Michael Levin, a Tufts University biologist, described in the article suggested,
“…that we are all collective intelligences built out of smaller, highly competent problem-solving agents.”
If—as that quote obliquely suggests—consciousness is actually a result of the organized integration of lots of data, we will have a foundation for a new way of understanding how our brain works in a much larger world of consciousness. In a research world that is beginning to acknowledge the broader importance of other specialized cells and cell groups (e.g. the “gut biome”) as essential to consciousness, new solutions to our brain-oriented biological problems may begin to emerge.
But—if you can tolerate this journey into hypothesis just a bit more to take one more step into the realm of personal fantasy—what if the observation about consciousness being “collective intelligences built out of smaller, highly competent problem-solving agents” isn’t limited just to biology. Could it be that cities and political parties have a form of consciousness? And, if we approached them both with that understanding, could it be that would open up new avenues to how we could interact more effectively with both?