You know you have mastered a language when you start dreaming in it. I sometimes joked that if I start dreaming in python or arabic, then I know I’m there.
Funny enough, today I had a dream in arabic (very simple but meaningful words). I’m definitely super not there, but it is motivating.
I have always been fascinated with the “mind”, in humans or animals or lately - l learned - even in plants (though it’s debatable depends on the definition of “consciousness”). Every creature has a mind of its own.
Speaking of the topic of “definition of consciousness” - I’m again going to ramble about Ender’s Game.
In the books, through a series of interstellar traveling and “new life form discoveries”, the author discussed the concept of ‘what passes as intelligence to us heavily depends on our ability to understand that intelligence’.
In another word: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are”.
I thought of that phrase often when I read about things like “plants’ consciousness”. Apparently the humans’ threshold to judge whether something is “conscious” is if it acts in an anticipatory way. This does make sense in some ways. It’s like a hard-coded program cannot be considered to be “dynamic and adaptive” vs unsupervised learning process.
But what if - to plants - we are a bunch of dumb enemies who cannot understand their messages for thousands of years? What if even within their reactive behaviors and signaling, they are actually conscious of what is happening to them?
What if they have been talking about very important things through their root-communications, and we are just too dumb to understand?
Pretty sure trees scream when we chop them off too. We just can’t understand them.
What if our subconsciousness is equivalent to plants’ form of consciousness? What if human brain’s in coma is similar to how a plant experience life? What about our brain in the state of dreaming?
In dreams, we don’t exactly ‘anticipate’, do we? We simply experience the dream as it happens, but everything felt real, and we react to it emotionally.
Anyways, I will leave the debate to vegans and scientists. At least for now I know plants do speak, and that is already quite fascinating, and that we know nothing.
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…and have extra coffee budget, you can buy me one too! Just so I can occasionally be surprised about a surplus in bank statement, and in case AI sends me to unemployment.
Thanks again, and please tell a few friends if you feel like it.