The Light Eaters:
How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
By Zoë Schlanger (Harper)
The Light Eaters (great title) is about recent developments in botany. The unifying theme is that plants are much more active and reactive members of their environment than is traditionally understood. Active how? Well…
We find ourselves, literally, in a thought experiment. If a tree falls in a forest, and the components of that forest (i.e. other trees) react to that set of phenomenon that the the falling tree sets in motion, that would otherwise be sound if an animal was there to hear it, is that sufficient to arrive at a quality that the word ‘sound’ connotes? If sound then is it hearing? Or is that to anthropomorphize?
At least since Man the Tool Maker was dropped as the signifier of human identity, the Fortress of Solitide made of intelligence or consciousness that makes humans singular is being worked at. It is eaten away from without, in terms of research on other animals. It is eaten away from within by neuroscience and behavioral research
The defining bit, culturally, is Large Language Models and generative AI. Even under an assumption that it is hokum,%20its%20effectiveness%20in%20seeming%20real,%20as%20either%20a%20person%20or%20as%20competent%20AI,%20leads%20to%20reflexive%20questions%20about%20humanity%20and%20human%20consciousness.%20If%20this%20is%20not%20intelligence,%20then%20what%20is%20it%20that%20we%20have%20been%20looking%20for?%2042 indeed.
But, okay, book review. Reduced in scope to the research, the text is full of great reporting as the author provides a survey of recent developments in botany that challenge the popular and scientific perspective of plants and plant life, instead requiring a new frame of looking at all life as inherently and complexly responsive to the world around it.
However, the messy philosophical tensions are mostly sublimated to the footnotes. Instead, the book adopts a sort of airy sense of wonder that is way too much finger and not enough moon. Most of the ideas here about plant behavior are treated as heretical, up to and including use of the word ‘behavior.’ It is an unpopular view scientifically, because it is considered anthropomorphizing. But I do think that the book addresses that question straight on, or at least recognizes the question.
What it does not tackle well is the ways that the ideas became heretical because their origin was in baseless supposition. It is easy to talk about how this ought not to be a problem for the scientific process, but that is not the social process of science. The analogy would be discovering Atlantis: there is going to be a lot of baggage there and a high burden of proof.
So, in place of some sort of bracing discussion about the nature of existence, we have interview sections like:
AUTHOR: Can plants feel emotion?
SCIENTIST: No.
AUTHOR: Are you sure?
SCIENTIST: No?
They should have sent a philosopher.
I also admit that I am much less accommodating of this after having just read Excited Delirium, or even Selling out the Spectrum in the sense of what that book was fighting against, and knowing how porous the fence is between imaginative musing and harmful pseudoscience.
I get additionally upset because there is excellent shoe-leather journalism on the part of the author in getting access to people who are wary, provoking discussion (well, ones more serious than the fake sample above), and in general doing the work of getting the goods out of researchers in a manner that makes sense. I concede that it may be an audience thing, and this is the sort of flavor to the text that moves books. But the frame device had me constantly shouting at the book at its non-question questions, so a good read but frustration on every page.
CITATION HEEDED 