Yeah, everybody’s talking about consciousness and intent like it’s some binary thing, you cross some threshold of complexity and bam, suddenly your behaviour has escaped cause and effect, simply because it’s not obvious how A has led to Z.
When informed that Simard also detects a spiritual aspect in forests, Fortey sounds appalled. “Spiritual?” he says, as if the word were a cockroach on his tongue. “Oh dear, oh dear, well there’s nothing to be said about that. Look, trees are networkers. They do communicate in their own way. What worries me is that people find this so appealing that they immediately leap to faulty conclusions. Namely that trees are sentient beings like us.”
Said the dude inescapably bound by determinism and the initial conditions of the universe.
If you want to not be a fancy robot, you have to subscribe to some sort of metaphysics. Which of course, is no guarantee you’re not just a mistaken robot.
