I decided to try out the seven pointed star idea from Stephan Harding's Gaia Alchemy book, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.
Sadly, I wasn't sure if it really was seven points, but I figured it must be. The star ended up so big that I could sit in the centre to meditate.
Heard a lot of birds.
Maybe I'm not taking all this seriously enough.
I have, however, been thinking more about plants, sentience and ethics.
So, this Australian scientist discovered that mimosas have memory - they can remember and adapt behaviour based on learning. While another group of scientists discovered that plants can hear. No, they don't prefer Mozart to Bach, but they do take defensive action if they hear caterpillars munching.
Right, two things: plants are not purely reactive-in-the-moment and plants respond to what matters to them.
Now, this brings me back to my beef with sentience.
So, I believe that sentience is actually about reducing the amount of information that a being 'needs' to respond to. If you are an amoeba, there's not much you can do and not a lot matters to you. You need to eat and escape being eating. You can do that just fine based on your internal chemistry and responding-in-the-moment. If you are multi-cellular, all the cells are dealing with their own homeostasis simultaneously as well as, in time, specialising to perform actions for the whole. Once you get organs, things are a whole lot more complex - cells doing their bit for themselves, cells doing stuff for organs, organs doing stuff for bodies. PLUS there's all this external sensory information. You start centralising. But how much does the centre need to know? A lot can be achieved on its own. In an extreme form, the octopus lets its tentacles do their own thing to a great extent. In our case, no one tells the cells to monitor their own hydration. But the centre might be involved in something like saying 'produce more insulin' to a gland. But because the clumsy great body of limbs doesn't do anything about that, the brain doesn't need to make that conscious.All that's made conscious is what the whole organism can respond to - fear is conscious to make the whole body run away. All that is made conscious is the tiniest layer. We are not conscious of most that is seen, heard or smelled. Only if the system needs a BIG reaction.
Sentience is the way that the organism makes salient certain stimuli that demand a system response.
If you're a tree, and can't run away or chase, it's more parsimonious for the parts involved to do what needs to be done - roots seek water, leaves make poisons for caterpillars.
Sentience is a way of signalling to the entire system at once. That's ALL.
I am not explaining well.
Let's take another approach.
If I am harmed, sentience means that I experience pain which signals that I should perform or not perform certain actions. My blood and immune system will do their thing whatever, but the message is - 'don't tread on that cut foot'. If a tree is harmed, the sap or resin does its thing, but what else can the tree do? It isn't going to smack itself in the wound by mistake if it weren't feeling pain. So there's no need for pain. Pain serves no purpose. Short-lived insects don't tend to demonstrate pain - their system doesn't have time to heal before they'd die anyway, so, again, pain is irrelevant. Bees, though, do respond to morphine, so it seems that they may feel pain. their lifespan is long enough for healing to be the better response than making the wound worse.
Sure, it feels bad to feel pain, but it IS bad to be injured - whether you are a Poplar or a Person. You still have to use up resources to heal.
If pain is just a signal, then it seems to me that we deny the importance of pain to the non-sentient just because we privilege the sensation over harm over the actual harm.
Maybe it adds another level of badness, to feel it, but it is still bad to be injured. And maybe trees remember.
Apparently, children who were raised by wolves showed fewer signs of pain and did not seem to feel cold. Maybe, once the system knows there is no paracetamol in the cabinet and no thermostat to turn up, 'irrelevant' pain (that which is not life-threatening) ceases to be relevant. Wolves will run with the pack on three legs, with the fourth broken. I am not saying that it matters less to break the leg of a wolf than that of a human, far from it. I am saying that our focus on what we feel may be pathological. Maybe, just maybe, what is BAD is to be injured, rather than to FEEL injured.
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