Well, given the overwhelming emerging evidence of social attention and behavior in plants, and given that it makes evolutionary sense that "social attention" would provide a fitness advantage in any environment where there are other actors,
the only reason to doubt it would be an assumption that "attention to social information" can only happen in creatures with an complex central nervous systems. Which requires rather constrained definitions of "attention", "social", and "information"
ok, there is another reason to doubt it. inertia. We've been taught/told that a complex CNS is what makes intelligence, and it is hard to get away from that idea.
It is hard to extend morality between species. The idea of parents sacrificing themselves for their children seems to resonate as highly moral, and is also a common pattern in biology.
But how it plays out, from humans where the male can provide more by continuing to live and "hunt/protect/teach"-- but at the risk that the "hunt/protect" might end his life, to spiders where (some species) the male gives his body to provide nutrition for the child,
>Octopuses seem to have quite a bit of independent cognition in each of their arms, which are wrangled by the central brain.
Yes, that's inherent in the design. All grey matter (optimized for local intercommunication), no white matter (optimized for sending signals between regions).
Each arm has its own ganglion ("CPU") and the central unit struggles to keep up with these and keep them coordinated.
The promise of communism is that the worker owns the means of production, the worker, not the goverment. If the goverment owns your means of production, it's just a corpo disguissed as a country.
As someone who has lived both primarily outside and primarily inside, my preference for categories, for putting things in boxes, has a direct connection with my willingness to put myself in a box (i.e. a "room" in a "building", box in a box).
Likewise, most software/computer interfaces I know are pretty focused on putting things in boxes. For one thing, the screen is a small rectangle, and everything has to fit into a smaller rectangle in that rectangle.
Even the title "how we sort the world" implies that categories are the central element and that they can be sorted.
Nouns are the "real" thing, and verbs are transitory.
However, when you live outside, spend both days and nights without walls to encase you, my perspective flipped. Verbs became the important thing. It doesn't matter what the weather is, there is always weather, what matters is how it is changing.
A verb-centric world, where the nouns are always in transition.
Look, I like central heating and indoor plumbing. I live in a box these days. But I also remember how it was to live outside walls.
If you abstract and formalise, it's possible to divvy up the world into nouns ("being") and verbs ("becoming") transitioning between them.
On one hand, as long as we accept that chaining two compatible verbs produces another verb, it follows that chaining no verbs is the same as chaining a single verb "to remain the same", and now we don't even need nouns, because everywhere we used to have, say, an apple, we can formally use the verb "to remain an apple".
On the other hand, if we're attempting to prove things, and wish to use excluded middle or double negation elimination, it's very convenient to have explicit nouns (for which we can do so safely) rather than having almost everything we do be consequent upon taking care to manipulate only the subset of verbs which involve remaining the same.
What you are talking about here (and you articulated it well), reminds me of The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. If you haven't read it, I think it would connect a lot of dots for you and I think you would find it very interesting and very relevant to your experience.
The oak tree might grow by a few microns every day, and change in any number of other ways, but it remains an oak tree for all that. This isn't (just) a matter of words, but a matter of reality.
OTOH, if you burn the oak tree, it ceases to exist entirely.
If you say there is no unchanging entity underlying the tree's daily growth, then any predication about reality becomes impossible. All predication would be limited to the concepts we've created in our minds.
the only reason to doubt it would be an assumption that "attention to social information" can only happen in creatures with an complex central nervous systems. Which requires rather constrained definitions of "attention", "social", and "information"
ok, there is another reason to doubt it. inertia. We've been taught/told that a complex CNS is what makes intelligence, and it is hard to get away from that idea.
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