Meanwhile, you show a 2-year-old human one cat, cast all the shadows you want, and the toddler will recognize that kitty. A computer has to see, say, a million pictures of cats before it can recognize one, and even then all it takes to trip up the algorithm is a shadow. Programmers train the neural networks, telling them when they’re right and when they’re wrong, whereas living systems figure things out for themselves, and with small amounts of data to boot. Rather than dealing in symbols and algorithms, neural networks represent data in large webs of associations, where one wrong digit doesn’t matter so long as more of them are right, and from a few sketchy clues- stripe, rustle, orange, eye-the network can bootstrap a half-decent guess- tiger!Īrtificial neural networks have led to breakthroughs in machine learning and big data, but they still seemed, to Calvo, a far cry from living intelligence. Courtesy of Universidad de Murcia.Ĭalvo went to the University of California San Diego to work on artificial neural networks. THE PLANT WHISPERER: Paco Calvo once studied artificial intelligence to determine whether it could help unlock secrets of cognition. “My hunch was that there was something really wrong, something deeply distorted about the very idea that cognition had to do with manipulating symbols or following rules,” Calvo says. While a computer’s reasoning is only as good as the data you feed it, a human can intuit a lot from just a few vague hints-a skill that surely helped on the savannah when we had to recognize a tiger hiding in the bushes from just a few broken stripes. Humans are good at something else: noticing patterns, intuiting, functioning in the face of ambiguity, error, and noise. Computers are good at logic, at carrying out long, precise calculations-not exactly humanity’s shining skill. Computers manipulate their representations according to logical rules, or algorithms, and brains, by analogy, were believed to do the same. Just as computers represent data in transistors, which can be in “on” or “off” states corresponding to 0s and 1s, brains were thought to represent data in the states of their neurons, which could be “on” or “off” depending on whether they fire. When he began studying cognitive science in the 1990s, the dominant view was the brain was a kind of computer. As a philosopher, he was busy trying to understand human minds. Let’s rethink our whole theoretical framework.”Ĭalvo wasn’t into plants, either. If the stuff that plants do deserves the label ‘cognitive,’ then so be it. Maybe that’s not how our intelligence works, either. “That’s framing the problem from the wrong perspective. “When I open up a plant, where could intelligence reside?” Calvo says. ![]() Cognition boils down to the firings of neurons in our brains. That theory goes by names like “cognitivism,” “computationalism,” or “representational theory of mind.” It says, in short, the mind is in the head. It’s easy to dismiss such claims because they fly in the face of our leading theory of cognitive science. ![]() I was, according to Paco Calvo, guilty of “plant blindness.” Calvo, who runs the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the University of Murcia in Spain where he studies plant behavior, says that to be plant blind is to fail to see plants for what they really are: cognitive organisms endowed with memories, perceptions, and feelings, capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future, able to sense and experience the world. ![]() To understand how human minds work, he started with plants. But what never occurred to me, not even once, was to wonder what the plants were thinking. Bushwhacking through my apartment, I worried whether the plants were getting enough water, or too much water, or the right kind of light-or, in the case of a giant carnivorous pitcher plant hanging from the ceiling, whether I was leaving enough fish food in its traps. When the pandemic hit, I brought more of them home, just to add some life to the place, and then there were more, and more still, until the ratio of plants to household surfaces bordered on deranged. During the day, its leaves would splay flat, sunbathing, but at night they’d clamber over one another to stand at attention, their stems steadily rising as the leaves turned vertical, like hands in prayer. Had something scurried? A mouse? Three jumpy nights passed before I realized what was happening: The plant was moving. The night I brought it home I heard a rustling in my room. I was never into house plants until I bought one on a whim-a prayer plant, it was called, a lush, leafy thing with painterly green spots and ribs of bright red veins.
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