The self-awareness of the forest

Abstract

Systems Thinking theorist J. P. Monat has hypothesized that human-level organismal self-awareness will emerge spontaneously in a well-connected neural network as the number of interconnected nodes exceeds ∼70 billion; he speculates that computer networks may achieve self-awareness as the number of nodes approaches this figure. Forests have historically not been perceived as interconnected networks of trees; recently however, researchers have described the “wood-wide web” in which underground fungi interconnect large numbers of trees and plants via chemical and electrical signals. Some of earth’s forests number many billions of trees, and some of the world’s prairies and seagrass meadows also contain billions of individual plants. These plant ecosystems may thus be self-aware, and in fact there may be a multitude of self-aware plant-based ecosystems on earth already. The speed of signal transmission via fungi within each ecosystem is much slower than that in humans, and therefore their organismal self-awareness may be of a different nature than the self-awareness that we associate with humans and upper primates. However, the possibility that our plant systems may be aware of the environmental insults that are being wrought upon them should make us reconsider our anthropocentric activities, as well as the possibility that humanity may need to collaborate with other intelligent non-human earth-based life forms to ensure mutual survival.