“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, January 29, 2011

Leaflittering on Plant Sentience

Leaflittering's blog, which I need to look at some more (it's very beautiful), has this great post up on the theme of plant cognition. Here's an exemplary line:

our familiarity with our own familiar traits and their familiar effects makes imaginable alternatives seem alien


Yes. It's what Nick Bostrom calls an observation selection effect. It's a refusal to think past correlationism, I reckon.

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