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Choice. Choice. The power, right, or liberty to choose; option. Pick out or select (someone or something) as being the best or most appropriate of two or more alternatives Decide on a course of action, typically after rejecting alternatives: "he chose to go". Plants.
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Choice The power, right, or liberty to choose; option. Pick out or select (someone or something) as being the best or most appropriate of two or more alternatives Decide on a course of action, typically after rejecting alternatives: "he chose to go".
Plants A living organism of the kind exemplified by trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, ferns, and mosses, typically growing in a permanent site,.. any member of the kingdom Plantae, comprising multicellular organisms that typically produce their own food from inorganic matter by the process o
Can plants make choices? Any plant reacts to the slightest touch. In the case of about 1,000 species, thisreaction is almost instant: carnivorous plants close their trap immediately, the sensitive plants (like Mimosa) retreat their leaves, while nettles break their stinging hairs. In all the other 240,000 species, movements are slower. At the slightest touch, the plant Sparrmannia africana opens up its staminas, making crossed pollination possible
Plant senses It is now known that plants have, admittedly in different forms, the same innate abilities as those with which animals and humans make sense of their environment. They see, smell, taste, feel and even listen to their surroundings. Even as seeds, ready to germinate, it’s been proven that they are sensitive to as many as twenty different factors – like the season of the year and where the light is coming from – information they need to decide the right time to start growing!
Cells Cells are constantly making decisions about what to do, where to go or when to divide. Many of these decisions are hard-wired in our DNA or strictly controlled by external signals and stimuli. Others, though, seem to be made autonomously by individual cells and yet thousands of independent decisions add up to an apparently organized outcome.
Cells and plants If cells can make choices, does it not seem reasonable that plants do as well? Many people talk to plants. No one suggests that the plant actually understands the words, but many scientists believe plants understand the emotive quality of a voice and react in important ways. Including staying alive when before they were clearly dying. A choice?
Assume that plants don’t make choices. Do humans? Couldn’t one argue that every choice we make is an illusion. That it’s a result of complex relationships between nature and nurture rather than an example of free will? If we don’t have free will, aren’t we just elegant rocks? And around and around we go. The reason that philosophy and religion are taboo in discussion about artificial life.
From Alive! “We’ve built something that shows some promise.” “What?” “Given you’ve read up on all this, we began with a kind of Conway matrix, but three dimensions instead of two. And the rules are different, because the objects in the squares don’t just live and die by their number of neighbors, but they move around inside the grid. They can even procreate. And group as in nodes in a network. Most importantly, though, they have internal structure.”
“Being?” “Something very simple. Two bytes. Two binary numbers. One of them is an index, and the other an affinity. In other words, the first is a kind of identifier that can, when procreating, divide just like DNA in a living cell. The second is the key to it. This byte indicates what kinds of DNA that the first byte has affinities for.” He looked confused.
“Important to remember. These bytes are not just numbers that translate into a single Arabic numeral. They’re on-off switches. So each byte represents a rather complex entity that when combined creates possibilities of highly complex behavior. Not the same as with Holland, but similar. So, you see, we have inner structure and outer environment. And we have grouping and replication. All the initial agents or objects are set with random binary bytes so the results of each initial population will turn out quite different. And if we change the environmental rules, a whole new situation results. The combinatorial possibilities are incredibly large.” “Sounds like you know what you’re doing.”
“May sound that way, but we actually have no idea what we’re doing. In fact, I can’t imagine us knowing less about the eventual outcomes. All we know is that with the speed of today’s computers we can run thousands of evolutions, if you want to call them that, in very short times.” “And what do you expect will happen?” “So far, only blobs of goop, signifying nothing. But remember, if we could predict, then we’d have created a tool, not life.”
“I don’t really understand how you expect these things to eventually be able to choose. That’s the word you used, isn’t it?” “You have to know about complex adaptive systems to understand that.” “I do. From the reading you gave me.” “Then tell me about them.” “A system that has a large number of components, often called agents, that interact, adapt, or learn.” “And?” “And what?”
“Some examples.” “Stock market. Ant colonies. Weather. Immune system. The brain. Any group-based behavior such as a political party or a society. Everyone doing something without a leader. No one actually in charge.” “Remind you of anything?” “Sure. What you’re doing.”
“Exactly. Like electricity. At one time we never had it. Now we take it for granted. Lots of people doing different things, from digging up fossil fuels or building dams to those filling out forms and sending out bills. Extremely complex. In fact, no one has ever been able to accurately model the whole thing. And certainly no one is in charge. In a sense, though, we all are. Each of us plays a role just by having needs. For us it’s the lights up there on the ceiling. For others it’s paying the bills, or getting the life insurance they want.” “So you’re hoping that a complex adaptive system will emerge out of the mess you’re creating.” “That’s about it. But nothing so far. And maybe nothing forever. Or maybe the computer science building will just get up and walk to South Dakota tomorrow. All by itself. Just because it chooses to do so.”
Or maybe it’s two words Enjoy.
Marilyn Monroe’s lines in the Misfits Maybe all there really is is just the next thing.
