Ants and the Borg

See that line across the road just about in the middle of the photo to the left?  That's an ant trail.  It was there when I was a little girl visiting my grandparents.  It was there when my mother was a little girl and my grandmother told me it was there when she was a little girl and her mother told her it was there when she was a little girl.  So that ant trail has been in the same spot for more than a century and a quarter, and very probably a lot longer than that. 

 How much longer? Who can say, but probably a lot longer than that road has existed, centuries maybe, maybe thousands of years.  Maybe it was there before the Indians came.  If I learned that it had been there since the glaciers retreated 11,000 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised. And if, somehow, I was to learn that that ant trail would still be there when the glaciers come grinding down from the north again, as by and by they surely will, whether that's a hundred years from now or 10,000, I wouldn't be surprised, either. What is time to an ant colony anyway? We humans are like mayflies compared to colonial creatures, whether ants and termites or coral polyps.

Then there are plants.  Some years ago I came across a study of the flora of the Mojave Desert.  It mentioned that the author had found a creosote bush that was 12,000 years old.  The plant grows by spreading out in an ever-widening circle.  Underground the roots spread from the central, original plant, the above-surface parts of which may die, but beneath the surface, it lives on, essentially indefinitely.  Even a fire, which may burn off the above-ground parts of it, won't kill it because the root structure is untouched.  It can, of course, be killed.  In this case, the bush was bulldozed into oblivion to make way for a housing development.  Alive since the beginning of the Holocene, a grassland ape destroyed it to create another one of its ever-proliferating nest heaps.

Do plants think, are they sentient?  Define sentience. Is there only one type?  Is your definition valid for any life form other than hominids? How do you know?  

How about fungi? I once listened to a very -- very --  smart guy proposing and defending convincingly the hypothesis that all fungi on the planet are really just one globe-spanning life form that has been continuously alive since the first fungi evolved.  What about the oceans separating continents, and continents moving around via plate tectonics? What about islands far out in the ocean? Wouldn't that have broken apart the Ur fungi?  He had an answer to that, but I forget what it was.  

Fungi and vascular plants interact intimately with each other.  Fungi act as a communications pathway between trees, conveying information about their health, telling a tree that it is time to die -- yes! that's true -- among many other things including, no doubt, things we, as animals, could never understand, or even be aware of.

Are fungi sentient?  How about the combined creature that is a forest/fungi symbiote?    

And what about Gaia, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis' updating of Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of the biosphere as the interconnected biomass of the earth through time and distance that maintains itself through feedback loops. Is it sentient?  What experiment could we devise to prove or disprove it? What if we are just a part of Gaia's "brain," rather like our brain is made up of various parts that separately are nothing but combined are us? Or maybe we are like one of the cells in our body that, alone, is nothing but combined with millions of other cells is us and we continue to be us even as the individual cells die and others replace them, rather like bees in a hive.  The hive continues on year after year though the various bee units come into being, function for a while, then perish, each bee, aware of its impending death, leaving the hive to die alone so as not to pollute the hive with its decaying corpse.  How does the bee know it's going to die?  Or does it?  Perhaps it just begins to feel tired and so, on one of its excursions, stops to rest on a flower petal and goes to sleep, forever.  Will we ever understand these things?  Or just imagine that we do?

I recall reading, maybe in The Soul of the White Ant by Eugene Marais, speculation about social insects having a group mind, rather like that of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I watched that with my dad when I was a kid and remember him saying, "Borg, Borg, okay Borg.  But where's Warner, that's what I want to know.  What did Borg do with Warner?"  I had no idea what he was talking about but my brothers laughed.

I digress.  Where was I?  Hmm.  I forget.

 “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
―Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

 
I would take a splendid sapling in my hands, pull it back, let it fly, as it did with a will, into position again—its uprightness. One day I stopped in the exercise, the thought striking me: This is great amusement to me; I wonder if not as great to the sapling? Maybe we interchange—maybe the trees are more aware of it all than I ever thought.
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass.  

In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d ecstatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them.

I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down, and around, very curiously—with a whisper from one, leaning down as it pass’d me, murmuring out of its myriad leaves, “We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.”

I fling out my fancies toward them,
Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul,
In my soul I plainly heard the wood-spirit join the refrain,
As some old tree thrill’d with its soul:
Know I bear the soul befitting me,
I too have consciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth.

~ from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass