Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [49]
Chapter 10
MYSTERY JELLY
After traveling to Japan, I began searching for natureâs chi-sei, or capacity to knowârather than intelligence. I wanted to know how nature knows.
Bees handle abstract concepts, slime molds solve mazes, and dodder plants gauge the world around them. These species demonstrate a capacity to know, but they do not speak in human tongues and cannot tell us about their knowledge. Their capacity to know remains elusive. Humans, on the other hand, are good at talking. And we are also a natural species. Homo sapiens sapiens has a brain remarkably similar to those of other mammals. In fact the human brain has the same basic architecture as all vertebrate brains. In the absence of barriers between humans and other species, it dawned on me that I could approach natureâs capacity to know by considering how humans know.
Descartes could place only one thing above doubt, namely his own existence as a thinking subject. âI think, therefore I am,â he wrote. This prudent stance inspired me to focus on how I know.
I thought of myself as an organism. The word comes from the Greek organon, meaning tool. As an organism, I am a kind of tool. And I have organs, which are also kinds of tools. My heart pumps, my kidneys filter, my hands grasp and look like tools. But does this mean that humans are machines?
Descartes thought so. He described the human body as a machine made of separate mechanical parts. He compared nerves, muscles, and tendons to rubber tubing. Writing in the midâseventeenth century, he likened lungs to windmills and described the nervous system as a network of fine nets that starts in the brain and spreads from there to the rest of the body. In his book The Treatise of Man, he wrote: âAll the functions I have attributed to this machine, such as the digestion of meat, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the members, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by the external sense organs of light, sounds, smells, tastes, heat, and all other such qualities, the imprinting of the ideas of these qualities in the organ of common sense and imagination, the retention or imprint of these ideas in the memoryâ¦follow naturally in this machine entirely from the disposition of the organsâno more nor less than do the movements of a clock or other automaton, from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels.â
I mulled this over and went running in the woods near my home. Autumn colors, yellow and red, were blending in with the greenery. I visualized myself as a kind of machineâa butterfly machine moving through the landscape, perceiving colors through my eyes. I jumped over fallen trunks and branches strewn across the path. I knew my eyes had fewer photoreceptors than those of a butterfly, but I could see well enough to run through the forest without falling down. I knew of no human-made machine capable of doing this.
Since Descartes, the mechanical view of living beings including humans has enjoyed popularity among scientists and philosophers. But living beings differ in fundamental ways from the mechanical devices built to date. We can reproduce ourselves and we can grow and transform ourselvesâwhile computers, toasters, and automobiles are incapable of such feats. When my parentsâ ovum and sperm fused, they formed a single cell. This fertilized egg gradually grew into a human-shaped embryo through a series of duplications, at first into undifferentiated and nonspecialized cells, then into cells as diverse as neurons, blood cells, and skin cells. As my embryo transformed itself in this way, I came into being, a transformer from the get-go. Now, decades later, my body continues to repair its wounds and still becomes more resistant as I use it. In all of this, I am like countless other organisms and unlike the overwhelming majority of human-built devices.