It’s good to know that I can visit my local wood if I need a power tree. This is a Sweet Chestnut and that fallen branch visible in the cover picture has been grown around, absorbed into the two trunks that grasp it. This tree must have been coppiced seventy or more years ago and now has all these trunks around the central stool.
I find it beautiful.
If trees are conscious, then is the consciousness of this tree one or eight? Or like an octopus with the mind encompassing many parts. Parts that can act independently or together? Are the parts, like the hemispheres of the brain, in some kind of constant battle for supremacy – as is seen in some split-brain patients – or do the parts always simultaneously hold on to the sense of also being one?
This makes me wonder about whether individualism is a far out way or being, rather than the norm. Maybe there are degrees of differentiation and that we humans are a pole apart from many other creatures in our focus on the individual as the centre of meaning.
Evolution regards individuals as expendable; we regard them as the focal point for moral considerability… from our individual perspective as individuals. We are trapped in that paradigm as much as in the anthropocentric one. What if there were a consciousness that did not regard itself as individual but as part-of-a-whole. Let us imagine a flock of starlings in which each brain has 483,000,000 neurons. In the flock, of at least 500 birds, each starlings around her. All the birds are, when in the flock, synchronised. Given neuro research suggesting that those close to each other synchronise heart-rate and brain waves - and that these birds are already synchronising wing beats – it seems plausible to imagine, as in ant colonies or slime mold, an emergent group dynamic that could lead to the sense of being part. Indeed, there is evidence of such experiences in humans. In that state, and that is a straightforward example, could not the flock matter more than the bird?
I found this in an article on the Country Life website:
In a paper published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, [Giorgi] Parisi looked at how the speed at which one starling flew affected the velocity of the rest. He discovered that the behaviour of one animal affects and is affected by that of all the others in the group, no matter how large or small the group is. A starling changing speed will trigger a corresponding change in the speed of the other birds in the group. Acting as a group they have a wider perception range than they would have as individuals.
Drawing upon an analogy from ferromagnetism, Parisi observed that a magnet’s particles showed perfect interconnection at a precise, ‘critical’ temperature. Starlings’ murmurations were just such a critical system and were formed when conditions and group dynamics were optimal.
It took a further paper from Parisi and his team, published in 2012, to explain how a single bird could spark a change in movement in a formation that was busily responding to the actions of others and how that reaction could cause such a speedy response within the group. Rather than looking at speed, which was the focus of the earlier paper, they looked at how a bird’s change of direction could affect those around it.
What they found was that one bird’s movement affected those of just seven of its immediate neighbours, but that the movement of each of its neighbours affected a further seven in its immediate vicinity, and so on, producing a compound effect throughout the flock. The result is a twisting, ever-changing formation where some parts move at one speed in one direction and others at different speeds in other directions. When a single starling changes direction or speed, the whole flock responds through the ripple effect of the power of seven, making it appear as if the information or a command has been passed through the flock in real-time.
The power of seven or eight… birds, limbs, trunks… maybe this is the number that matters more than one.
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