Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
  -Emerson

Food for thought? French bean plants show signs of intent, say scientists

...Together with Vicente Raja at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy in London, Canada, they used time-lapse photography to document the behaviour of 20 potted bean plants, grown either in the vicinity of a support pole or without one, until the tip of the shoot made contact with the pole. Using this footage, they analysed the dynamics of the shoots’ growth, finding that their approach was more controlled and predictable when a pole was present. The difference was analogous to sending a blindfolded person into a room containing an obstacle, and either telling them about it or letting them stumble into it.

“We see these signatures of complex behaviour, the one and only difference being is that it’s not neural-based, as it is in humans,” Calvo said. “This isn’t just adaptive behaviour, it’s anticipatory, goal-directed, flexible behaviour.”

The research was published in Scientific Reports. “Although the research seems sound, it is not clear that it teaches us much new about plant sentience or intelligence,” said Rick Karban, who studies plant communication at the University of California, Davis. “For more than a century, scientists have been aware that plants sense aspects of their environments and respond, and understanding how plants [do this] is an active area of current research. Whether you choose to consider these processes sentience or intelligence depends entirely on how to choose to define these terms.”

Calvo acknowledges that this experiment alone doesn’t prove intent, much less consciousness. However, if plants really do possess intent, it would make sense. All biological organisms require the means to cope with uncertainty and adapt their behaviour to pass on their genes, but the timescale on which they operate makes this particularly imperative for plants: “They do things so slowly, that they can’t afford to try again if they miss,” Calvo said.

One possibility is that this “consciousness” arises out of the connections between plants’ vascular systems and their meristems – regions of undifferentiated dividing cells in their root and shoot tips, and at the base of leaves.

In a separate paper, Calvo and his colleagues set out a theory of plant consciousness based on integrated information theory (IIT) – a leading theory of consciousness – which posits that we can identify a person’s (or any system’s) level of consciousness from the complexity of the interactions between its individual parts.

Others rebut such claims. IIT is based on an assumption that everything material has an element of consciousness, even nonliving complex systems: “It cannot have any special significance for plants,” said Jon Mallatt at the University of Washington, US. He believes claims about sentient plants are misleading, and risk misdirecting scientific funding and government policy decisions.

Calvo said he was happy to be disproved, but experimentally, rather than on theoretical grounds. In another paper scheduled to appear in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, he proposes a set of experiments which may settle the matter once and for all. “If successful, these experiments could position plants as the next frontier in consciousness science, and urge us to rethink our perspectives on consciousness, how to measure it, and its prevalence amongst living beings,” he said. The gardening gloves are off.

Birds Have a Mysterious 'Quantum Sense'. For The First Time, Scientists Saw It in Action

Mike McCrae

Importantly, this is evidence of quantum physics directly affecting a biochemical reaction in a cell – something we've long hypothesised but haven't seen in action before.

Using a tailor-made microscope sensitive to faint flashes of light, the team watched a culture of human cells containing a special light-sensitive material respond dynamically to changes in a magnetic field. The change the researchers observed in the lab match just what would be expected if a quirky quantum effect was responsible for the illuminating reaction.

This could be a game changer, proof of natural selection being able to exploit quantum phenomena...or so it seems to me?

(I do recall photosynthesis but my understanding is that while this was initially thought to be a utilization of superposition this has been cast into doubt?)

Shield Hero - To get right to it, one of the Four Saviors of the Realm hires a slave warrior because after a false rape accusation no one will help him fight the Apocalypse and he can only use his shield while in the "Matrix" of the "game" world. This slave, a cute racoon/mouse girl, grows up as she levels and becomes hot and not only forgives him for buying her but falls in love with him...and even angrily defends her initial purchase and forced conscription.

It's hard to say what to think of this. While the initial plot is like writing out some incel's wet dream, the good-aligned characters are genuinely likable and you do feel like the author was trying to talk about morally grey areas ->

Should the Shield Hero just let himself die rather than get a slave? Is initially forcing her to fight bad if they'll all get wiped out in the Apocalypse? Would it be better if there was no romantic/sexual aspect, and does that mean I am saying it is somehow more okay to inflict pain on a boy in order to make him a soldier?

I'd suggest watching the first four episodes just to gauge one's own moral reactions.

Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.

-Arthur Schopenhauer

 "This idea that we travel through our lives as a group with several people that we have this core connection to, led by perhaps one bodhisattva, working on issues within our core character through the different lifespans, returning to the bardo, and then spinning out again. Beautiful."
  -Years of Rice & Salt

I've been meaning to look again at Avenue 5...your review seems mixed...would it make sense to start in the middle of it?

I blew through the John Wick movies and have come away convinced they are a prequel or sequel to the Matrix. They seem to purposely go out of their way to suggest video games, some of which I admit can be accidental or just thematic but other things - like passerbys being so NPC-ish they don't care about the bodies - seem deliberate....

...there’s no such thing as “technology” in the singular, only technologies in the plural. The notion that technology is a single monolithic thing is a convenient bit of mystification, used to hide the fact that our society, like all others, picks and chooses among available technological options, implementing some and neglecting others. This needs hiding because most of these choices are made by influential members and groups within the political class for their own private profit, very often at the expense of the rest of the public. Wrapping the process in a smokescreen of impersonal inevitability is a convenient way to keep awkward questions from being raised via what remains of the democratic institutions of an earlier age.

Greer, John Michael. The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil . Scarlet Imprint / Bibliothèque Rouge. Kindle Edition.

"Which is greater, the tears you have shed while transmigrating across lives & wandering this long, long time — crying & weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing — or the water in the four great oceans? Which is greater, the blood you have shed from having your heads cut off while transmigrating & wandering this long, long time, or the water in the four great oceans?

From an in-construable beginning comes lifetimes of transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating and wandering on. Just as a stick thrown up in the air lands sometimes on its base, sometimes on its side, sometimes on its tip; in the same way, beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, transmigrating and wandering on, sometimes go from this world to another world, sometimes come from another world to this.

Long have you thus experienced suffering, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries — enough to become disenchanted with all fabrications, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be released."
 -Siddhārtha Gautama