Last week I briefly described some of my attempts to approach nature with fewer anthropocentric preconceptions and anthropomorphic metaphors, in order to better understand what surrounds me. I've always had some trouble understanding "understanding". As I have mentioned, too often people equate "understanding" with simple belief in a satisfying "explanatory" story, based on little or no actual evidence - or maybe just something they were told by someone they admire. I'd like to avoid that, so a better approach seems to combine as much evidence-based plant physiology and ecosystem science as possible with a critical awareness of potentially misleading metaphor.

That may be easier said than done, but we should at least know that we are not "trying to think like nature", or "discover nature's secrets". (It would not be a good start to suppose that nature "thinks" or "has secrets".) Forests, like other natural processes, include vast numbers of organisms that are mostly invisible to humans observers. They all interact in complex ways, and relatively few of them have been studied. The natural time frame of many forest processes is also extremely difficult for humans to comprehend - beyond occasional wonder that some tree is "thousands of years old". And the trees that preceded that one? And everything else that has come and gone since? In one sense, a forest could be considered a living invitation to learn more about what we call time. For those who could spare the time to take advantage of it.

Of course, underneath a forest is the geology it rests on. Everything is growing in soil that was once rock - rock that may have originally come from half way around the world millions of years ago, long before the more recent ice ages. The present forest is the result of many processes acting over a very long time. So when I look up into the canopies of centuries-old trees in a forest, I can't help but think about what we call time in relation to what we call "natural processes". The present forest that I can very briefly experience is the embodiment of change at multiple physical and temporal scales that I can only barely begin to contemplate. And I don't know, but I suspect that the forest isn't at all interested in me.

 
When I walk into a forest and find a place to sit quietly, surrounded by trees, undergrowth, and various shapes and sizes of woody debris, I try to set aside prior assumptions and expectations regarding the surroundings. When I do this, I avoid imagining slow-motion competition and struggle for "resources", or how the plants might be "thinking". I try to imagine the forest over long stretches of time, and to not think of some species "crowding out" others. If some of the leaves on the undergrowth are a bit ragged from having been been chewed by insects, I see that as part of natural processes that require insects, and not as "blighted" leaves. Maybe leaves don't always have to look "healthy" to us (and if they did, something essential might be missing).

Generally, I am most impressed with how different the trees and plants are from humans (and from human concepts). This actually seems somehow reassuring. Do I really need to figure out what the forest "means" to me, or to humanity? Plenty of other smarter people have been doing plenty of that. Oh, but the forest is feasting on the sun's energy and procreating...and isn't that what humans and other creatures do too? Broad similarities, right? (Okay, very broad, but seeing patterns is what we're good at, no?)

Leaves, for example, seem very different from the energy-extracting structures in animals. The metaphors we automatically tend to employ when looking at forests and nature strike me as being largely misleading. We do have to rely on some familiar concepts to think about even the most mysterious subjects, but we could also realise that that is what we are doing, and then try to create some unfamiliar concepts that are less misleading.

 
I have been wondering lately (not for the first time) how we might think about other organisms without blindly applying concepts we mostly use to describe human actions and behaviours.

People sometimes say that trees and other plants "compete" with one another. Do they "struggle" to secure space and light? Sometimes other people suggest that plants actually "cooperate". There's a lot of conceptual space between those opposites, but even more completely outside them. Obviously humans compete, and sometimes cooperate, but the various meanings of that usage seems completely inadequate when applied to natural processes involving other plants and animals.

Do trees "know" things? What could that possibly mean? Trees seem to be fully engaged in their environments, but what sense of our concept of knowledge would apply to their existence?

Do other creatures, let's say plants, strive? In what sense could they act with a human sense of purpose? It seems to me that too often we apply words related to concepts with deep roots in human experience without noticing how that clouds our observation and understanding of nature.

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that when humans contemplate nature they resort to using language that is soaked with anthropocentrism.

The word "intelligence" can mean a confusing range of things and can be used for many purposes. For example, there has been speculation about the intelligence of dinosaurs based on anatomical analysis of their fossilised braincases, and there are common claims about the "intelligence" of computers running "AI" programs, based on "performance" on specific tasks - tasks set up by humans.

It seems to me that something called intelligence must be the result of lived experience. It can't be packaged or delivered to order like isolated "facts". It is acquired by living organisms in the course of their lives as a result of many interrelated processes. It is necessary attribute for them to function effectively (well, to exist) in their particular environment.

It is now becoming fairly common to read criticisms of "AI"-infested computers that explain that they cannot "know" or understand anything, but can only regurgitate some computed selection of material they have been trained on. Contrary to some claims, this is not at all what humans do in the process of learning whatever they learn. Humans don't ingest vast databases of text or images and then statistically associate tokens with the highest probabilities of forming a historically commonly occurring sequence. What makes sense to a human depends on many other factors, and includes much that is in no existing database.

Whether some dinosaurs were more "intelligent" than modern crocodiles or maybe less "intelligent" than modern birds doesn't seem as important as asking why humans seem so obsessed with - and confused by - such questions. "Are plants intelligent?" "How can they think without a brain?" "Are insects intelligent?" "But their brains are so small." The implicit subtext is usually just: "How much are these things like us? Sometimes it's anthropocentrism all the way down.