Planta Sapiens with Paco Calvo
Paco Calvo leads the MINT Lab and is the renowned author of 'Planta Sapiens.' Here he and Andrea explore the revolutionary concepts of plant intelligence and sentience, challenging traditional notions of intelligence and cognition by examining the biological insights gleaned from plant behavior. Calvo and Hiott discuss why this is a controversial topic and reframe it from another perspective, promoting a paradigm shift towards ecological humility and interconnectedness. This conversation underscores the importance of redefining scientific practices and education to better understand the vital yet often overlooked relationships between humans and plants (and other beings). Embracing a new perspective of our ecological allies and their intrinsic value towards a more integrated and respectful approach to nature.
#plantsapience #plantintelligence #plantasapiens #pacocalvo #cognition #mind #loveandphilosophy
00:00 Introduction and Greetings
00:35 Exploring Plant Intelligence
01:40 Rethinking Robotics with Plant Inspiration
07:32 Darwin's Observations and Plant Behavior
13:05 Challenges in Recognizing Plant Intelligence
37:00 Educational Perspectives on Intelligence
46:11 Embracing the Intrinsic Value of Nature
47:55 Rethinking Intelligence and Co-Evolution
50:08 The Interconnectedness of Life
51:41 Understanding Plant Cognition and Sentience
53:55 The Role of Science and Subjective Biases
56:28 Exploring Plant Sensory Capabilities
01:05:02 The Concept of Love in Plant Life
01:24:05 Personal Reflections and the Joy of Observing Plants
Paco Calvo and the MINT lab in Murcia: https://www.um.es/mintlab/index.php/a...
Planta Sapiens: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881080
TRANSCRIPT
Sentience of Plants with Paco Calvo
[00:00:00] People have a very strong reaction when this idea is brought up that, uh, plants could have intelligence. We keep forgetting that we might very probably be wrong as to what human intelligence consists of. Let's see what is it that unites us all in the tree of life. It's like the master key. Plants are seeded.
They don't need to be sentient. That was the Dalai Lama's approach, which means to me that was very informative because I understood that our prejudices, our biases, go way deeper. We have trouble thinking of it as nested instead of as linear. What we share is is regularities on planet Earth. The sun sets and the sun rises for any form of life.
That's news, that's information to any form of life whatsoever. Bacteria, swimming up a chemical gradient, is generating those energy flows. Yeah, [00:01:00] and that interaction is the intelligence, right? That's it, that's it.
Paco Calvo: Intelligence is flesh and bone, it has to do with Biology, not with following a recipe book,
we're navel gazing and we need to rethink everything, you know, root and branch, like, like get started from a square one because we are just not getting it.
This is not against anyone. This is against ignorance. This is all of us teaming up together against ignorance. That's what propels science. Love speaks the language of, of, of molecules. Can you truly appreciate that tree or that plant you are walking by or encountering in itself, for itself, detached from your needs?
Nothing evolves without somebody else co evolving, so everything is co evolution. Science, if it's not reductionist or mechanistic, already has the resources to feel the awe, the [00:02:00] wonder.
to Love and Philosophy. Today we are going to talk about plant cognition. And if you think you understand what that means, maybe you do, but maybe you don't. Give it a try. If it turns you off, definitely listen to this. If it turns you on, definitely listen to this.
It's with Paco Calvo, who's written a wonderful book called Planta Sapiens, it's very easy to read, but it's also just a really good book. Paco is a renowned cognitive scientist. He's a philosopher too, of biology. He's known for his groundbreaking research in plant cognition and intelligence.
And he does that in Murcia. Sorry if I say that wrong. He tries to teach me at the beginning how to say it. You'll hear as we're coming on, but I still struggle. But Murcia in Spain, where Paco leads the MINT lab, which stands for minimal intelligence lab, [00:03:00] and he focuses on what that might mean, minimal cognition. There are lots of different studies about that, but he does a lot of interdisciplinary work between the cognitive sciences and biology, and he's very interested in plant behavior, plant problem solving, decision making. Again, if all that sounds strange to you, if you're coming from human based studies of those sorts of things, then I think this might be really interesting, and his book as well.
He's looking at the complex interactions, and adaptive responses that plants exhibit, more or less, and he's really contributed to how we Talk about and think about this word cognition and intelligence, which as you know is something that's definitely part of this whole idea of navigability.
What is really wonderful about this conversation is, That we talk about rethinking cognition, rethinking what intelligence means. We talk about Darwin, why Paco loves him so much, Darwin laying in bed sick, [00:04:00] watching his plants, and how that leads to so many insights, and just that idea of observation with presence, what that means.
Paco tells this great story about the Dalai Lama, or Dalai Lama. I also probably say that wrong. Dalai Lama. When Paco was on his book tour and there was a reception that he had with the Dalai Lama, and he sort of just assumed that they would be on agreement about life being intelligent.
And you'll hear that he was a little bit wrong about that, which is very interesting. Also he studied with Some great philosophers, for one, Paul Churchland, and I was really intrigued in his book because he tells the story of something he learned from Paul Churchland, which is really wonderful and shocked me a little knowing Paul Churchland's philosophy, which is a little different than what this story, is about.
Tells us and actually it's been really helpful for me to hear that and there's lots of other interesting stories in here and Paco Himself is just a really great [00:05:00] conversation partner. So I hope you enjoy it. I'm glad you're here. Hope you're doing well wherever you're making your way I send you lots of love and if you want to support the show in any way it really helps and I really thank you And there's many ways you can find to do that.
Whatever your way you want It's appreciated.
Paco Calvo: Paco Calvo.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, I just want to make sure I don't say something wrong.
Paco Calvo: But Paco Calvo is usually easier to, to pronounce. Murcia is way more difficult, because people say Murcia, okay, I say
Andrea Hiott: that wrong already,
Paco Calvo: murcia.
Andrea Hiott: Murcia.
Paco Calvo: Oh, that's Still wrong. No, no, that's pretty good.
Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Okay.
Paco Calvo: It's not an easy word for foreigners, for Murcia.
Andrea Hiott: No, that's a hard sound.
All right. Yes. Okay. Okay. Hi, Paco. Thank you so much for being here today.
It's really wonderful to see you.
Paco Calvo: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Andrea Hiott: So I've been reading your book. This one, Planta, Sapiens, it's so wonderful. Oh, bang! And there's so much I want to talk about in there, but I kind of want to start at the end, [00:06:00] in a weird way, with, you discuss these Expeditions to Mars and so on um, trying to sort of explore planets and so forth.
And you bring up this really interesting thing, which I'd never heard of until your book about plants inspiring some new possible ways of thinking about these things. And I just want to tell you, I was at a neuroscience conference recently and one of the questions they were talking about computation and how we think of modeling the brain, of course, and all of this and someone in the audience, one of the questions was, so all of these models are inspired by thinking of human brains, but does anyone ever think about Other forms of intelligence when they're trying to come up with computational models. So I would wonder, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that at first. Just the idea for example, maybe of, of the growbot.
Paco Calvo: Oh, I see. Well, I mean, literally you can find, sources of plant based inspiration in any walk of life, literally any field [00:07:00] whatsoever.
I mean, if you think, because to start with, just think of the morphology, the materials, the actual, you know, if you think about computation, uh, nowadays it has become fashionable to talk of, you know, To speak of, of morphological computation or the way we decentralized, uh, or outsource computational power into the periphery, into the embodiment or into the environment.
So how we outsource things out of the, you know, the, the CPU, right. That we are supposed to have, right. But we don't after all, right. So that's one of the things about plant sapiens, because, uh, you know, as you know, then having gone through I like to think that, that, that, We kill two birds with one stone, like, like we get to understand plants better for what they are in themselves and for themselves.
And at the same time, it allows us to rethink what we, you know, this distorted picture we have of ourselves. And the same happens with robots. So when we are designing our robots, our gadgets, our toys, think of a [00:08:00] humanoid, typical Japanese humanoid, or rovers exploring Mars, right? And We can't help it, but, uh, I'm pretty sure we don't do it on purpose.
We just can't help it. We can't implicitly, tacitly. So, so we, we take ourselves however tacitly as the gold standard. And sometimes we don't even verbalize it or make it explicit, but hey, if you're going to explore somewhere where your whereabouts, you got to go, you know, stand on your two feet and walk and locomote.
And, you know, to reach. Point B and starting at point A, you've got to move your body from point A to point B, right? To get there, to reach your target. And that's something it's so obvious to us that we don't even give it some thought to the very possibility that other forms of life might have evolved different ways of reaching their goals.
Right. And [00:09:00] one obvious, uh, alternative is, is growth. So plants, when we say, you know, when we say, hey, they are sessile, they are stuck, they are anchored to the, to the, to the root system and, you know, uh, We think that they've got to be a stupid somehow because they cannot locomote as if as if in locomotion itself was the mark of intelligence or the borderline in between the non intelligent and the intelligent instead of saying, Hey, isn't it amazing evolution?
How many different tricks it can play? And so to me, the example of robots, which in the book, the reader will see it's kind of towards the end of the book as an application, but it gives you a lot of food for thought to rethink many of the ways in which we approach or we appreciate our surroundings or our dealing, our interaction with other organisms, right?
[00:10:00] Biological or artificial.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, as you say, the robot normally, of course, we're thinking of how can it move from point A to point B in the way that you just laid out, but plants also move from point A to point B without leaving point A, you point out, and that's a whole, that's a whole different way to think about designing an explorative vehicle.
Paco Calvo: It's absolutely amazing. Well, think having in the case of the robots in this chapter nine of the book, uh, science playing like, like most of the headaches like engineers at, you know, at the jet propulsion lab or you name it, which any, any space agency when they have a rover, uh, exploring Mars or the moon or whatever.
They all, all their worries have to do with things that could go wrong as I locomote from point A to point B. So a crack. on the ground. Oh, don't get stuck. Watch your wheels or a sand dune. And you know, you can't keep propelling yourself or, or, or, you [00:11:00] know, a slope 30 degrees or a cliff. So anything That mean coming in trouble or, oh, I mean, for God's sake, I mean, this cost the fortune, you better keep your rover and up and running, right?
Andrea Hiott: Absolutely.
Paco Calvo: The thing is that, so this is the issue that, that we are not solving the problem by, by adding more code. So by adding more information to the algorithm. So would you are not foreseeing all those Possibilities, all those contingencies, I'm trying to solve it by including those possibilities in the recipe book that your rover is following.
You simply solve the problem by thinking of a different problem space. So if you grow in a, in a grow bot, a growing robot, a grow bot, in a grow bot, as you reach your target through growth, you don't care about the crack on the ground. You grow over the crack. So you don't create, [00:12:00] you don't care. You know, this is like a hanging bridge.
You know, if you, if you need to swim across the river to get to the other bank, you care about this, the stream, the strength of the waterfall, right? But, but if, if you get across, across to the other river bank as a hanging bridge, you don't care about the stream of water. You just hang over it. It's a
Andrea Hiott: wonderful way to learn from plants.
It opens up all kinds of other possibilities. Also, I bring it up not only because I think it's spectacular, but also because it speaks to a lot of these issues of when we think about what intelligence is or cognition is, we often think of it as you were already sort of bringing up. as somehow being able to move or something involved with movement and I kind of wonder about the difference between growth and movement to be very honest with you because well we could get into that a little bit later, but now I want to think about in that context that we just kind of laid out this wonderful beautiful [00:13:00] Uh, idea of Darwin watching his, was it cucumber plants and the tendrils, right?
Because this is kind of a wonderful example of what, of this growth that plants do. The way, and the way that we might rethink something like a bot on Mars. The way that a plant can reach out and with its tendrils and explore, uh, is just spectacular. So, yeah.
Paco Calvo: No, I was gonna say, but you see, I mean, even in the case of Darwin, you know, you've seen there is a lot of Darwin in the book, right?
Yeah, I
Andrea Hiott: think I fell in love with Darwin a little bit in your book. I've read so much Darwin, by the way, let me say, I mean, as a neuroscience and philosopher, Darwin is everywhere, but your book, I felt your love for him. This is love and philosophy. So I can use that word. I hope it's okay.
Paco Calvo: Definitely. It's my hero.
I mean, even when I was, uh, writing the book, uh, I, this all started in sabbatical in Edinburgh and I was writing just In front of, in these cafes, uh, in the old town, just opposite where he was lodging as a, uh, medicine student in his [00:14:00] early 20s or late teens, right? Oh, that's
Andrea Hiott: wonderful. Yeah, I felt that, that space, being in the space, and you wanted to end it kind of where he was walking and, you know,
Paco Calvo: Absolutely.
Absolutely. Speaking of movement. Yeah, yeah. No, no, I was just going to mention in relation to Darwin and the, the cucumber tendrils and everything that to me, what's, what's truly amazing about what Darwin was able to do is something I keep telling my students nowadays, I mean, 2024, because we are so obsessed with thinking, Hey, if only you have the right tools.
We would all be able to appreciate what we are missing, right? Like, oh, yeah, yeah, sure. This is, this is just a matter of budget, of equipment. Give me the, give me the right observation tool and I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'm pretty sure I will spot it, right? And no, we keep missing it. In our lab, we time lapse plants, right?
So we, we, we've got to time lapse, we've got to time lapse them. We're not, we've got to speed them up. Because the timescale in which they grow. They're growing behavior. The time [00:15:00] is scaling, which it happens. And our time scale of observation are so different that we need to accelerate them through time lapse photography.
So we take a picture every minute, every five minutes, whatever, like four days, weeks, months. Then when you assemble the footage, you say, Oh my God, now I see what's going on here. Right. But that's, there is a danger here. And it's that we become mentally lazy. It's as if you could simply, you know, my students think, Oh, you know, that's, that's pretty easy.
I mean, on a Friday evening, you set the, you know, the settings of your time lapse camera. Okay, off you go for the weekend. Come back on Monday, assemble the footage. Oh, wow, look, popcorns. And then just watch the cucumber doing its thing, right? No. Even watching time lapse footage of plants doing their stuff, you will still miss it if you are not in the right frame of mind.
So that's why it's so important to do, first of all, prior to using time lapse [00:16:00] equipment, to do what Darwin was doing, because he was observing plant behavior to the means in plant time. So in its own time scale, so rather than accelerating plans, he was decelerating himself. So to me, that's the right way to do it, to get started.
Of course, then you need to do time lapse, right? But at least to get started that way, to train your eye, to be in the right frame of mind. And that's what Darwin was able to accomplish. So to me, it's still amazing that. So many people nowadays still miss plant intelligent behavior, and they even complain that we are anthropomorphizing plants by time lapsing them.
Some plant physiologists, you know, they complain along those lines, right? Like, I beg your pardon? And when you're studying hummingbird flying behavior and you use speed cameras, are you anthropomorphizing hummingbirds? I mean, we, we need these tools right to, to, to, to [00:17:00] flesh out the behaviors. But what Darwin was able to do to the naked eye, it still shocks me.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I'll let people read the book to really get the full story. But I guess we should say for people listening. So he was, he was sick, right. And he's in bed and the plants were kind of in front of him. So in a way, life sort of slowed him down.
Paco Calvo: And
Andrea Hiott: so he was just really. mesmerized by them. There's a wonderful quote in there.
I'm not sure I remembered exactly, but that he was, he was fascinated by his tendrils or something. And it was just watching the, the move and, and sort of, as you say, when you slow down and actually observe something, It does open up in a different way.
Paco Calvo: There is something more genuine, something that you do get to achieve that you just don't, cannot reach otherwise.
So there is something to it. And it's real scientific
Andrea Hiott: practice. I think Darwin, I mean, we won't do the whole thing about Darwin, but he's a great example of that in the way that he took time.
Paco Calvo: Yeah, absolutely. And [00:18:00] nowadays, that's an issue. I mean, today, it is fast science and, you know,
Andrea Hiott: yeah, we've gotten really, you know,
Paco Calvo: We really need to slow down.
Away from
Andrea Hiott: that. We've forgotten how important that is.
Paco Calvo: Absolutely. Uh, and plants,
Andrea Hiott: it's another thing plants could probably teach us, actually. Ah, yeah, definitely.
Paco Calvo: Definitely. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: But, but just to get to this, so that opens up something that I really want to talk about a lot, which is people have a very strong reaction, a lot of people, when this idea is brought up that, uh, plants could have intelligence.
Okay. So you, of course, wrote a whole book laying out. ways of doing that. For example, with the tendrils moving, I mean, we're already talking about that as a kind of intelligence, but you show in a way, you show many ways, uh, for example, through that they have to make choices and decisions and so on, how this relates to the way cognition has already been studied in human ways.
But what, what's very interesting too, is that people are so reactive about that, that, uh, when you hear a plant is cognitive, Either it's fascinating when there's also people who are completely [00:19:00] fascinated by it Uh, and it draws them in and then there are other people who really are turned off by it and uh, even Even a bit like feels like a violent thing to them but I think and I want you to talk about this, but I feel like that's coming because These words we locate them with our assumptions as human just by default.
We So when we hear plant cognition, we we are Not we, but yes, we, like the big we, it's, it's like, okay, then that must mean that plants have what, what is a human cognition or a human intelligence. This is the part that seems very hard to, and nuanced, and of course you do a wonderful job in your book, but to realize that That's not what you mean when you say plant intelligence, it's not, the plant is a different embodied creature, it is a different embodiment, and so its intelligence will not look like human intelligence.
Paco Calvo: Yeah, well there are two issues here, you're absolutely right, but there are two issues here, one is that sure, we should, we should try to assess any organism's form of [00:20:00] intelligence in its own terms. So you don't compare one to the other, you just do, I mean, I, you know, I, I give these talks to secondary school kids and I ask them always who do you think has better eyes, eyesight, better sight, right?
An, an earthworm or an eagle? And they all go, an eagle, an eagle. I say, hold on a sec, who can see better underneath the leaves?
And they say, Hey yeah, sure. I mean, then this, you know, shakes all their, their convictions because they are, uh, they are assuming that, uh, an earthworms. The way they see the world, which by the, they don't even have eyes. Just an eye spot. Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. detect light grad gradients. It's a degraded form of vision compared to the eagle.
Instead of thinking, Hey, this is the best adaptation they have provided [00:21:00] the needs they do have, and they don't, they don't have the need of the eagle to, to. identify a rabbit and plummet from 200 yards. So, so we, we keep missing the point that it's not about comparing ones against the others, as if there was some measuring rod and we were providing the gold standard, right?
With that being said, mistake number two, Is to show even if you get here and say, okay, sure, let's, let's, let's just value, uh, everyone's unique form of intelligence. We keep missing, we keep forgetting that we might very probably be wrong as to what human intelligence consists of. Because even if we tell them apart and say, hey, let's talk about plant intelligence or plant sapiens and homo sapiens and don't go nuts about it, because we don't mean to say that plant sapiens.
Equate equates homo sapiens say hold on a sec. In a sense. I do mean to imply that [00:22:00] one equates the other ones. We have revised what we truly mean by human intelligence. So the problem is that. Human intelligence is not what computational neuroscience or cognitive psychology tells you it is. So we are obsessed with the computer metaphor.
We are obsessed with the brain mind divide as if this was a matter of, you know, checking out the mental software running on your neural hardware. Right. And that is so deeply rooted that metaphor, the computer metaphor that we go through undergrad education in psychology, neuroscience, in computer science, and we don't think twice about what we truly mean by that.
I mean, Is somebody sitting at the wheel in my brain? How do you mean? So we keep forgetting that there is not a little homunculus doing the cognizing, the driving, the navigation when I navigate my surroundings, right? So, [00:23:00] because that is, that to me distorted metaphor is so deeply rooted, that is what makes people, you even said violently, like, like very, very strongly opposed.
I'm sure you
Andrea Hiott: felt it more than. Oh,
Paco Calvo: absolutely. You can't imagine. I mean, they're like, I couldn't tell you the type of things that some people tell me by email right now. I can,
Andrea Hiott: I can imagine because it's almost a reactive, . People have
Paco Calvo: the feeling that, that by, by, by discussing plant intelligence, we are taking something that belongs to us.
So, so that's, so one thing that I, uh, when we put these two things together and we think of intelligence as a continuum and not as a binary black or white thing, uh, even a continuum is the wrong approach because in with the idea of a continuum, we can think of minimal intelligence as opposed to full fledged intelligence.
And no, it's not that. So to me, my approach is to think, Hey, [00:24:00] let's see. What is it that unites us all in the tree of life? It's like the master key. So I would like to think that we are trying to search for the master key, some master key that unlocks any branch in the tree of life. Right. So to do that, uh, to me, uh, the idea is to get started the other way around from the bottom up, not from the top down.
So when you get started from the top down as we are sapiens and then provide the gold standard, and then what do we usually do? Either we go for, you know, mammals because they have a neocortex or primates. Even those more open minded try to extend it as much as possible, but always within the animal kingdom.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, starting with what could possibly be a brain or something. Right, right.
Paco Calvo: And you know what? What's really funny? That this happened to me, that's, that's not in the book, because that happened afterwards, precisely when I was on tour, like, like, uh, Uh, promoting the book and I [00:25:00] was having this, this, uh, reception with the, uh, Dalai Lama.
And, and, and I was, that's kind of,
Andrea Hiott: sorry, we have to pause for a minute. You're having a reception with the Dalai Lama.
Paco Calvo: Yeah. Well, we were having this meeting in Dharamsala. Oh,
Andrea Hiott: okay. Wow. Wonderful.
Paco Calvo: A group of Buddhist monks. So, so the Dalai Lama, uh, he was uh, receiving us like the Western scientists, uh, one morning.
So they, you know, the organizers, they said, Hey, if you have a book or something, you can bring a copy with you and give it as, you know, as a present to the Dalai Lama. So I brought the copy of Planta Sapiens with me and handed it to him and said uh, naively, Out of, you know, mere ignorance, uh, I was thinking, well, sure, I mean, this thing that we were talking about, like, being on the same page, something that unites us all, I'm pretty sure, like, like, the Dalai Lama will, will be with me, I mean, will be on the same [00:26:00] page, as opposed to this, you know, worse than, uh, reductionist plant physiologists that don't get it, that they think this is just a matter of, of unearthing molecular mechanisms or whatever, that the Dalai Lama should, I mean, pretty sure.
So I, I handed the copy to him of plant sapiens and I said, because plants are sapient or I said, plants are sentient. I told him, I think, and then he went like raising his eyebrows. He said, no way. He said only animals. can be sentient. And you know what? He gave me a copy of a book of his, like, from 2012, I think.
I haven't read it. So I read his book, on the way back, uh, flying back to Spain.
Andrea Hiott: And
Paco Calvo: I found this quote in his book, and it was just what we were talking about robots. It was about locomotion. And he was explicitly saying that animals need to be sentient because they locomote. So he [00:27:00] was identifying, connecting far too, uh, straightforwardly, uh, in sentience to locomotion.
Plants are sessile. They stay seeded. They don't need to be sentient. That was the Dalai Lama's approach, which means to me that was very informative, because I understood that our prejudices, our biases, go way deeper, because for us, it's too easy to blame Western mechanistic reductionist science, and think that that other traditional knowledge or other cultures have a more, and no, I realized, to me, this was good news in a sense, it was good news, like, as in saying, hey, There is something way deeper than simply Western scientists doing their mechanic mechanistic, you know No, so I think it's something very intriguing It's it goes way deeper.
So I learned from that conversation
Andrea Hiott: That's a wonderful wonderful story because it's [00:28:00] also Helps us like bring empathy into this because it's not that the people who react violently or even in that case It wasn't a violent reaction, but an immediate no, right? That actually yeah Oftentimes it just comes because people care so deeply about trying to understand mind and cognition and they've gone so deeply into it and into the literature or their whole lives are kind of based on doing a certain kind of Neuroscience or or it's because they've cared so much about it that and they've tried to build up a narrative You And it's usually this linear narrative and it's usually in the way you were describing of the top down, bottom up, as if it can only be one way or the other.
We, we have trouble thinking of it as nested instead of as linear,
Paco Calvo: that there might
Andrea Hiott: be nested ways of thinking about it, you know, so I just, I don't think it comes from, it comes from a place that people care so much and the reason I think it gets so passionate, you, you would know more about this, but it's because there's such hard questions.
If you do give. intelligence to plant within that linear framework. In [00:29:00] general, it's hard, but because then it becomes like for the Dalai Lama, as you were telling that story, I was thinking, well, then his, his approach to you bring it up in the book in terms of pain and emotions and suffering and stuff and stuff like this.
But if you're going to fit plants into that linear model, then the questions become, almost impossible to answer. But what you're saying is we need to rethink all of that.
Paco Calvo: Absolutely.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Paco Calvo: So, you know what I think this is something which this is in the book. When I say, remember, I say, Hey, what counts is not what's inside the head, but what the set is inside of.
This is a motto from ecological psychology.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. You talk a lot about the relationality and the context and environment.
Paco Calvo: But to me, when we. Apply this other bottom up approach, and this thing I was telling you about, about finding or looking for this master key. Right? That, you know, that gets to open any branch in the tree of life.
Think about it. If, if we put it this [00:30:00] way, things are way simpler, I think we make it far too complicated because we are starting, you know, wrong footed. So if we don't think what's inside the head, but what the head is inside of, what are we sharing? We think that we need to be sharing brain tissue, locomotion, no, no, no.
What we share. Is regularities on planet Earth. So, the sun sets and the sun rises for any form of life. That's news. That's information to any form of life whatsoever. So, we have all evolved adaptations that tune to environmental regularities that are all informative to any form of life. If you think about circadian clocks, that's crystal clear.
I mean, sure, we all need to tick to the planetary cycles, so the day night cycle, and you see the circadian clocks in plants are the very same thing as in animals. [00:31:00] It could be so narrow minded to say, hey, but plants don't have a, a suprachiasmatic nucleus. You know, where you have the, the master clock, so you see the light goes through your optic nerve then hits, so you have your master clock and then that, that puts in sync or your peripheral clocks.
So, the way you explain circadian clocks in neuroscience. Uh, that's a disfavor if it is supposed to help understand what unites us all by focusing on neural tissue alone, as if you couldn't tell time without the neural tissue. So what counts is not the material substrate, the implementation that allows you to tick, but rather regardless of the type of implementation, the fact that we all have feedback loops In our molecular clocks in any form of life whatsoever, because the sun [00:32:00] sets and the sun rises, and that's news that on evolutionary time, you need to care about because predators come out.
You need to go hunting. You need to hide. Temperature goes down relative humidity. So all these environmental parameters. Correlate with those day night cycles. How come a form of life is gonna be, is, is gonna ignore such regularities being so powerful and so informative. So when you read in those terms, it could be the other way around.
It could be a miracle if some form of life. Good and tune to those regularities. So when you put it in terms of the environmental regularities themselves, you don't care whether I use neuronal tissue or non neuronal tissue to de to to deliver the goods. It's just a matter of being in sync with those planetary cycles.
Andrea Hiott: Absolutely. I love that you bring up regularities because this is how I think of it too. I mean, this is a research channel. That's how it started. And so, I mean, but, but the way I've come to think of it and [00:33:00] what I was so excited about in reading your book because you open up a lot of things connected to this is that Yeah, starting in so called bottom, at the, at the bottom, bottom up I want to come to why I think that's a little problematic in a minute, but if, if you just think of any body, right, that's, comes into this encounter, this world, it's all about making its way through those regularities.
Now. I think of it in terms of making way and navigability, and that sounds like what we were talking about at the beginning, where something has to move from A to B. But what I'm trying to do, and I think it's very close to what you've already done in a way, is rethink what we mean by, what that means to, to navigate, or to make way.
I don't use navigate all the time because it does connect so much to this idea of movement in the way that Dalai Lama meant it. And, and for good reason, because It does explain a lot. But if you think of, you talk about landscape in your book too, but I try to think about different kinds of landscapes, different kinds of spaces.
And in that [00:34:00] sense, a plant is definitely moving through a space, a landscape an encounter its life in the same way that all everyone means by movement of cognition in terms of animals and plants.
Paco Calvo: Plants are perceiving affordances. So they are perceiving their own possibilities of interaction with the surroundings.
They do it through growth, but what counts is those encounters. Exactly,
Andrea Hiott: with those regularities of the environment.
Paco Calvo: Yeah, absolutely. It's shaping
Andrea Hiott: it, and it's being shaped by it in the way that we
Paco Calvo: That's it. It's got to be reciprocal. And, and, and, and as we say in ecological psychology, the unit of analysis It's the plant environment system as such.
If you detach it and you think of the organism, plant or human, or you think of the environment, you, you miss the plot. It's got to be the system as such, the plant or animal environment system as such. Then is when you get to see how you are generating information by either locomoting or growing. But the fact that, so now if I, if I, if I get closer to the webcam and you see my face, You see, [00:35:00] you see my image expanding in your retina.
Now if I move away, you see my image shrinking in your retina. So these patterns of expansion and contraction is what's informative. If, put it this way, if plants Were not able to generate these flows of energy in this case an optic flow, but could be any energy form whatsoever So gradients and you know relative rates of change right in this So if plants were not able to generate these energy flows, they couldn't be intelligent I don't know of any form of life that doesn't generate those energy flows.
Bacteria swimming up a chemical gradient is generating those energy flows. And that interaction
Andrea Hiott: is the intelligence, right? That's it. That's it. It's not that they're intelligent and they do that. That is the intelligence which then builds into what we think of as human.
Paco Calvo: It's emergent. So it's an emergent phenomena out of the interaction itself.
So [00:36:00] you cannot, that's what I meant about the, The cognitive science, you know, approach like, like, you cannot try to find what's being stored somewhere in your brain. I mean, it's about the interaction itself. It's always emergent, dynamical. So
Andrea Hiott: exactly. This is why I think the bottom up is right. The way you're describing it.
I think cognition starts with whatever life, any life that's making its way through any space. Right. I think intelligence and cognition start there, although they're nothing like what we as humans experience as. Thought and cognition. But the problem is that because we are where we are as humans, and we can even think of ourselves as kind of life at a certain sensory point, and at this kind of sensory point, we have this idea of thought in this very traditional way where we imagine there's kind of this, it feels like there's something in our heads where we see images or we hear words or whatever.
And so that just in an everyday assumed sense is what we think is cognition. And then, so that's why a plant couldn't possibly be having [00:37:00] this, uh, experience, right? And people don't think about all that, but it, it results in a violent reaction when you say plants have intelligence. But it's
Paco Calvo: funny, you see, this violent reaction is funny because, believe it or not, even the Dalai Lama was open to the very possibility of AI sentience.
So that some future AI. I love
Andrea Hiott: that you bring that up. Yeah. Isn't that funny that we can give it to AI, but not plants?
Paco Calvo: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I'm not kidding. So the Buddhist monks in this meeting, they were open to the possibility of, of a future AI giving rise to the emergence of sentience, their own form of sentience.
And all these Western scientists attending the meeting, they did agree as well. They all, they, nobody, nobody dares to say, Hey, how could. And AI possibly, but we don't know. They remain a skeptic in an open sense, like saying, well, we don't know. We'll, we'll, we'll see what the future. As for us, I will see in 10, 20, [00:38:00] 50 years time, future AI, we don't know how sophisticated it's going to be.
And they don't realize that is meaningless to me, because that sophistication is sophistication that only has to do with algorithms and intelligence is flesh and bone. It has to do with biology, not with following a recipe book. So it's not about the algorithm, it's about the implementation. I couldn't
Andrea Hiott: agree more.
It's just, I think, I guess what I was trying to say is since most of us began in that place, it feels linear. So when we say bottom up, the way it's heard is that there's a plant and then it evolves into a human. And I don't actually think of it like that. And I don't think you do either. I think it went more as nested.
There's all kinds of many different kinds of possible intelligences as life. Absolutely. But it starts from the very beginning in terms of like the bottom of whatever, whatever you want to define as the first kind of life probably. Yeah. But [00:39:00] not in this form that we experience. I guess
Paco Calvo: even, even the actual way we visualize the tree of life is distorted.
It is, yeah. Because any, I mean, evolution, we see it as if, you know, any species, uh, animal or non animal. Uh, uh, we see it as a, an impoverished, uh, stage. As if they hadn't reached their goal in evolutionary terms, as if they were, you know, impoverished versions compared to us. We are at the pinnacle. And this is the Aristotelian approach.
That's that
Andrea Hiott: linear thing. That's why top down, bottom up, I think we even have to leave that in a way because it just people then lock into that. And it's not like that. It's not like that. It's not that there's a plant to a human, to an AI. And that's why the AI seems like it would be more easy to.
Understand because it's built in that line so that it comes after us and we don't know how it will happen But at least it's like sharing all these kind of things that we associate Which it's a confusion, right? It's a it's a confusion for me that I think [00:40:00] It helps, I think, I don't know, to think of affordances like, if you think of an embodied thing like a plant or an insect or an animal or a human, then there's a, there's a kind of trail or a path of affordances that re, that reflect only that body, right?
Especially if that's what an affordance is. But when you think of an AI or any kind of tool or machine, the affordance is always
Paco Calvo: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, no, definitely. So, so put it, the example again, going back to the robots that's a vicarious exploration of Mars, right? So, so, so we want to see Mars through the rover's eyes and we don't get it that that's in principle impossible because the possibilities of interaction being perceived, the affordances being perceived relate to the body scale of interaction.
And so. Yeah. What you are able to do as a rover on wheels. The type of interactions you can engage in because of the body [00:41:00] plan that you have and the scale of interaction allows you to see one thing and not other things. So we speak of this room as if it was the room in which we can all inhabit like you or an ant or a giraffe or an elephant or a plant.
As if the room, no no, it's a different room for every single organism.
Andrea Hiott: Absolutely, yeah. In
Paco Calvo: semiotics, we know that. That's biosemiotics. It's meaning
Andrea Hiott: making. And there's plenty of experiments using our tools, our AI, such that we understand that a bee has a different phenomenology than a
Paco Calvo: fox, than a human. I cannot translate from one to the other.
It's just, no, no, eyes translation.
Andrea Hiott: You can, you can understand that they're dealing with the regularities and with a pattern that's similar, but it doesn't mean the body is similar or the experience is similar, but there's, That's why there's something about the regularities, like we are all dealing with irregularities of our environment with a similar pattern, but the way we, what those regularities are in [00:42:00] specific and what the body is in specific and what the environment is all goes into is kind of whatever this is we're trying to assess, I guess.
Paco Calvo: And you see, in well, if you remember in the book, uh, I speak in the, in the epilogue. I mean, you know, one of my, one of the issues that keep me awake at night is education. Like, because I think that most of it is not about scientific facts. So it's not, I mean, it's not as in, as in, hey, We need to replicate these experiments, or we need to get more robust data, and if we get that data, more robust data, or better experiments, or better working hypothesis, and test them, taking them to the bench, as if we needed more solid science, which of course we do.
It's not just about that, because if we don't rethink education, we won't be able to take to the bench, Alternative hypothesis. So most of this, of this thing we are talking about doesn't even have to do with [00:43:00] plants. It has to do with, with the overall vision that we have, right? And the problem is not about plant biology, even though we have a lot of skeptics in this field, like these violent responses you were mentioning.
In psychology, undergrads studying psychology for majors, they are never exposed. Throughout their careers, Gibsonian ecological psychology, for example, they are only taught cognitive psychology. And the same happens in cognitive neuroscience. In some course, if you are lucky enough to have one professor who has an inclination, and they might mention Gibson or affordances in two or three classes, but not as in Your curriculum, academically speaking, is not envisaging the academic curriculum as trying to walk you through all those alternatives.
So, even when you are thinking, hey, we are doing the [00:44:00] best possible science, we can, all the alternative hypotheses that you are able to envisage belong to the same problem space. And thereby, You are making inferences to the best explanation by discarding some alternative hypothesis and landing on others in this narrow position in which you are, yeah, sure, that's, I mean, that's a good way to test your hypothesis, but, but there is all this region of logical space that you have not navigated because you cannot simply don't even think that it exists.
doesn't have to do with the scientific method. It has to do with education.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And actually I see this as very much connected to what you're opening with in terms of thinking, rethinking intelligence and the way it's example of it as plants in a way, because in the same, in the same way we were talking about it, it's not linear.
And there's not only one path. If you're going to explore a landscape or a [00:45:00] space, depending on your body and depending where you are and depending what tools you have and depending, all these things, right? It's going to be different how you explore and get to whatever the goal is, even if it's the same goal for, and so, but in science, we think.
There can only be one way like and if you find the way that's the way and then you don't have it's very hard for us to hold the nestedness in the same way I think that
Paco Calvo: it's hard for us to hold that there's different kinds of intelligences that plants can be intelligent in a way that's different than humans, but it's nevertheless a similar pattern.
Andrea Hiott: Do you know what I mean?
Paco Calvo: Yeah, definitely, definitely. We see we put it all under as if it belonged to the same, you know, in one basket, it will even. When you are critical about plant intelligence, those skeptics, even when they criticize the very idea of plant intelligence, they miss it completely by discussing plant intelligence as if All plants share one form of intelligence,
Andrea Hiott: right?
I love that you bring that up in the book that you can't speak of.
Paco Calvo: I mean, how do you mean plants,
Andrea Hiott: right? You have to look at [00:46:00] each individual.
Paco Calvo: So when people say are plants intelligent, if I ask someone, are plants intelligent, intelligent, they would go yes or no. But very few people ask which plant are we talking about?
So if I ask, are animals intelligent? Everyone would say, who do you have in mind? A dolphin? A termite? I mean, who are you talking about? Before answering, a dolphin, oh, wow, an elephant, uh, mosquito. But in plants, we don't even picture the idea that different plants might exhibit different smarts.
Andrea Hiott: And even someone who would say, yes, animals are intelligent will then say, well, a dolphin would be intelligent in a different way than a bee or, and so forth.
Paco Calvo: But plants, so you see, when a plant physiologist criticizes the very idea of plant intelligence by simply saying physiology explains it all, like [00:47:00] photosynthesis or this or that, and that's the best proof, the best way to show that they are not getting at the heart of the question because Who cares if, first, some of them cannot do photosynthesis, some of them don't have chlorophyll, they have parasites, and they have to suck up sugars from, from host trees or whatever.
And so any, any, any example you provide, there will be, you know, uh, counter examples, but In the end, it's about, hey, what are your problems? Your, your problems, the ones you have to deal with.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, what's your goal? What's your challenge? What's the body?
Paco Calvo: Not just the different species, but the different individuals belonging to the same species.
I mean, remember in, in plant sapiens, I speak of, of, of domesticated versus wild plants, right? Yeah. That's wonderful. Or do you, do you need to, you know, to, to, to [00:48:00] oil your machinery, to get your, all your smarts at their best because nobody's, there is no agriculture, nobody's going to be there looking after you.
So
Andrea Hiott: it's wonderful the way you began the book too. I think that speaks to this though, the Delphic kind of conversion moment. If you want to tell it, you can or, or, or not, people can just read it, but there's this kind of know thyself right in Delphi. And I was recently there maybe like a year ago, so I could imagine it very well when I was reading it.
And, uh, yeah, and, and this, you talk about, I think you have this wonderful phrase of thinking into other organisms or the experiences of other organisms, thinking into that. And in a way I feel like even with what you're talking about with education now on this. And what we were talking about with Darwin and his bread, bed, not bread, Darwin and his bed watching the, uh, the vines.
There's some kind of way in which
Paco Calvo: we've arrived at a moment ecologically where we, we have to maybe observe in a different way and rethink. What a [00:49:00] self is in terms of knowing self, what that means, rethinking what intelligence is,
Andrea Hiott: I mean, I feel like you're bringing that up and starting us in that place.
Paco Calvo: Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: yeah,
Paco Calvo: yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, remember, I mean, this is not spoiler because in the preface I use the expression like navel gazing, right?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, right.
Paco Calvo: We're navel gazing and we need to rethink everything, you know, root and branch. Like, like, get started from square one because we are just not getting it.
Even, even, so to me, look, uh, sometimes I'm even more worried about those who think They are sensitive enough or, or they already appreciate plant life than about those that don't, because the skeptics can be skeptical and you know why, and it's just a matter of, you know, as we said of education, whatever, but sometimes the ones who already think they do, uh, appreciate plant life and they are, you know, [00:50:00] they might be doing it for the wrong reasons.
And that's more difficult to identify because they already think they are on the same page. So that
Andrea Hiott: observation isn't happening actually, it's, it's, it's a similar, like you've latched into the linear story and you just kind of go without. Yeah.
Paco Calvo: Yeah. Yeah. Already. Yeah. That's, that's it. That's it. So you, you don't get to see the, Hey, I started wrong for it.
Right. So to me, the example is I think of, of environmental studies, right? So many people who are very sensible, uh, you know, to all the. climate crisis, all the mess we are creating and everything. And they speak, they still speak of plants as resources. Then we speak of, you know, I love
Andrea Hiott: that part of the book too, the way you show that way of thinking of, of it.
Paco Calvo: Yeah. So even, even then, so know yourself, are you? Are you sure you know yourself? So we should be rethinking ourselves the way we think. [00:51:00] We appreciate plans, which might be for the wrong reasons. Yeah, and
Andrea Hiott: the way we just assume what they are when we're walking around and
Paco Calvo: being in the world with them. Yeah, that's it.
So, so is it possible? There's something
Andrea Hiott: wonderful about that, by the way, which your book also does. There's a, it opens up something for you too, if you take the moment to do that, I would say. Your life expands in a nice way.
Paco Calvo: Well, I'm glad you say that. I mean, I, I, I hope it does help in that sense as well.
I mean, I think so.
Andrea Hiott: You see the world as more alive as it is.
Paco Calvo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to me. To me, I would like to think, you know, that this is a work in progress as, as in myself. So every day I need to remind myself, Hey Paco, hold on a sec. When you are, you know, encountering or, you know, walking through your, my garden, whatever, going for a stroll in the forest, whatever, you name it.
And can you truly appreciate that tree or that plant you are walking by or encountering in itself, for itself, detached from your needs? Can we [00:52:00] truly care for them, truly forgetting about our needs? Because even when you are into environmental science and concern and all this, it looks to me that we are not truly getting there, like, we value them, but, in our heart of hearts, we value them because, oh shit, we need oxygen, we need textile, we need food, we need, we need, we need them.
Mm hmm. I think that that we should rethink it all. We shouldn't, we should not care for them because we need them. We should care. I mean, think about it. How do you mean? Do you mean to say that if we didn't need them, we shouldn't care for them? I mean, imagine we managed to get our oxygen textile some other way.
Does it mean then that we can, you know, forget about it? Just, I don't care about [00:53:00] them anymore because they are not resources that I need. They've got to have their intrinsic value. And ethically speaking, modally speaking, caring for them, it has got to do with what they are in themselves and for themselves, not because of the way I need them.
And I think we are far from being there.
Andrea Hiott: I think this gets at this love, you know, which we'll come back to, but it's wonderful you say that because just a few days, not a few days, a few months ago, I guess, I asked my Husband who's working with plants and, or with trees specifically, actually, like what if they did come up with some way to have some kind of or airsots tree that you could put in cities, cause he works in urban planning, that you could put in cities and do the job of trees.
Like something would be really missing there. And just to try to connect these threads a little bit, because your book, I think it's, it's much bigger than, than even plant cognition, which is already a big thing, but in these ways we're talking about, [00:54:00] but. There's something in this about like, we've talked about Gibson a lot and some quote I like about him was trying to get past this way of thinking of subjective or objective or thinking of I and them, human and plant, like this beyond dichotomy, which is the theme of mine.
And that's what I love about his writing in a way. And I feel like it's what I, one of the things I love about what you're doing with the book too. And this know thyself and it's, it's Like there's, there's, it's, it's, we're seeing ourselves in a way, I mean, not to get too mystical, but if we, we stop and see the plants differently, we're also seeing our own potential and capacity differently.
And in a weird way, you, you bring it up in the book of, of how the plants are kind of using us too, and like, how do we want to be used? And there's this kind of, you know, Ecological interaction that it we can really change the potential of what's possible for us to in this slowdown and oh I see.
Paco Calvo: Definitely. Definitely. Well, yeah. No, that's a great way to put it. Thanks. Yeah [00:55:00] One thing we keep forgetting is that even when we put it in an evolutionary context is that we forget that there is Nothing we as evolution as such. I mean, there is only co evolution. Nothing evolves without somebody else co evolving.
So everything is co evolution. So when you think of a flower and a pollinator. Sometimes we put the focus, the emphasis, the spotlight onto the pollinator, because we might be interested in understanding how the pollinator, you know, tracks the scent or lands on the petals or whatever it does. So that reminds
Andrea Hiott: me of in the book, you talk about the bee and the orchid, right?
The bees using the orchids and yeah, that's beautiful.
Paco Calvo: So it goes both ways. But funnily enough, so there are like two hurdles. One is shift from evolution to co evolution. There is no evolution as such. Every single form of evolution is co evolution. [00:56:00] There are always more than one actor. This is an arm race.
Yeah, right. So pollinator flowers. So this is an embrace and you are getting here because I got here because you, and then you understand how everything is flourishing nators capacities to navigate the flowers and the flowers to attract the pollinators to, to learn, to learn them to all the things that this is always a pattern of co evolution.
Right. So, but the second part of it, it's that we. In this dichotomy, uh, frame of mind that we have, we can help it, these binary decisions and everything. Uh, we keep thinking that, hey, we are, you know, they are the actors and we forget that we are, but just one more actor. So engage likewise in these patterns of co evolution.
So the very same way that flowers and [00:57:00] pollinators co evolved. agriculture, when we are selecting plants, phenotypes through, you know, the selection we've been doing for, for a few thousand years, uh, we don't realize that we are the pollinators. And if so, we are also being selected. And if so, if everything is co evolving, it is true what you said that, that we might see in which ways we might dynamically.
and find other trajectories. Yeah. From the perspective. Of we being just one more actor and not the master overlooking its garden.
Andrea Hiott: Exactly. That's that thing that's so hard to articulate that I feel like we're all trying to articulate in a new way, which is like, or that were that your book is when you say we need to rethink intelligence.
It has to do with this and it's what I was trying to bring up with the scales and that it's not an either [00:58:00] or that it's not just one or the other. That in fact, as you were talking, I was thinking, yeah, so if you're, if you're going to assess it from the point of view of the B, it's going to be. It's going to look this way.
If you're going to assess it from the point of view of the orchid, it's going to look this way. If you're going to assess it from the point of view of the human, it's going to look this way. And those are just assessments. We forget that those are just measurements, right? The process itself, the ecological, the ecological is, is, is never stop.
It's ongoing and it's all of it. And it's all mutually kind of co determining, depending on where you want to look, all the potentials. You know, and, and what
Paco Calvo: is the film? It's like the, the real thing, uh, unfolds in real time and you cannot press pause.
Andrea Hiott: No.
Paco Calvo: And every, this is like, like, you know, you, you run the film of evolution and if you press pause by, by definition, you are gonna miss 99% of what's going on.
You're just taking snapshot.
Andrea Hiott: It's like what you were saying with the videos, right? It's wonderful to watch the video of the plant, but yeah, as you point [00:59:00] out in the book Yes, because we've built that on our human kind of cognition. You miss a lot. You have to actually
Paco Calvo: Definitely definitely so but we need to be so so the fact this happens in science the fact that that There are cognitive and subjective biases.
Some people think that you know, they have these romantic Idealized version of science and they think science can be truly objective and that's nobody believes that nowhere there's right and we are aware of our subjective biases where our cognitive biases, our confirmation biases. I mean, science is done by humans with their hormones, with everything we are.
So science is just a product of human activity, like any other product, any other thing we do. Right? So with its virtues and its miseries. So, so this means that, that it's not about, uh, finding the way to, to do a way with those biases is about [01:00:00] being aware and making them explicit. So I can take a snapshot and study the pollinator.
I just need to remind myself that this is just a snapshot from the point of view of putting the focus on the pollinator. And I need just simply to remind myself, this is just a slide. I'm slicing reality. I'm, you know, cutting across and just getting a few dimensions. And then you need to remember, remind yourself that this belongs to a, to an N dimensional hypercube.
And you're slicing little, you know,
Andrea Hiott: uh, in the book, you bring up the famous Nagel article, or Essay or piece, you know, what is it like to be a bad and in a way this is kind of what we're talking about too and it relates to in one way why technology is good because There's no objective in the sense of the opposite of subjective that there's some kind of you know But there are inner subjective scientific practices that are robust and that we we do make these assessments And we do try to get somewhere.
And in a [01:01:00] way with our telescopes, our microscopes, and the, the, you recording the plants, it's all a way for us to at least get a little bit better idea of how to become a plan or become, it's not that we ever will totally, but we are in a way in this slowing down and rethinking and know thyself, we're trying to see from different perspectives, invent ways, even books or music or movies are doing that in a sense, like, but science is doing it in a very rigorous sense.
Paco Calvo: Yeah, no, definitely. Look, I mean, recently I was, I was reading, uh, Ed Young's, uh, uh, An Immense World, uh, the bestseller. I mean, many people watching this. About the
Andrea Hiott: animals and all their different sensory capabilities.
Paco Calvo: Yeah. It's, it's an amazing book. And, and, and if you, I mean, this is a, this is a good start.
I, I mean, just, just a suggestion for, for listeners, uh, for watchers, right? They are watching this. Uh, if you take an immense world at John's book and plant a [01:02:00] sapiens and literally Apply Ed Young's recipe. Moving out of the animal kingdom, it explodes exponentially. So the mental gymnastics you need to do to understand what Ed Young is asking you to do, like to put yourself in the shoes of what is it like to be a bat, what is it like to be an elephant, what is it like to be a snake, what is it like to be I mean to understand, hey, You know, your sensory channels are not, you know, the ones that, you know, clear cut that we have our five senses, blah, blah, blah.
Things are way more complicated. You know, some animals, you wouldn't believe they would have the, you know, snake with their tongue with, you know, having a stereo sense of smell. And then you get to see all the details of different animals doing their own things and in ways that you would never imagine.
And the way you were saying, yeah, we can use all this, you know, we can make An effort and a leap of imagination scientifically informed to put yourself in [01:03:00] the shoes of all these life forms, right? So, uh, I, I, I'm Ed, Ed young, he even mentions the, what is it like to be a bad Nagle's Nagle's paper in the preface?
It's a
Andrea Hiott: wonderful question that,
Paco Calvo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And I, I, I'm implanted sapiens. You know, that is the title of one chapter. What is it like to be a plant?
Andrea Hiott: What I really love that you present though, is because people kind of stop sometimes with asking the question and sometimes it's assumed, well, we'll never know what it's like to be a bat, but two, two very interesting things.
First that you studied with Paul Churchill and that's very interesting. How in the world did that happen? I was kind of shocked by how, by his take on it and how, I mean, just having read his other philosophy, but I mean, maybe if you feel like it, you could say a little bit about this moment with Paul Churchland, how you ended up there, and this Fahrenheit Celsius thing that he, Yeah,
Paco Calvo: yeah, definitely, definitely.
So to me, I mean, uh, Paul Churchland both Paul and Pat Churchland, Yeah, wonderful. at the time that was in the late 90s and so I [01:04:00] was on a Fulbright scholarship and so it took a year to write up my thesis in at San Diego UCSD. So I was doing my PhD in Glasgow so that was this year to write it up. Okay because
Andrea Hiott: you were also with Andy Clark around this time.
Yes. Yeah there was a lot of Kind of wonderful geography. Yeah, there was a lot
Paco Calvo: of going on stuff and I was lucky enough to be able to be there. And so in the case of, of San Diego, it was in the, you know, the nineties and it was like the, at the time was the Mecca of, of, of artificial neural networks and stuff.
And Pat and Paul Churchill were, you know, like making all the progress in, in, you know, Neurocomputational perspective in philosophy, all this stuff but, but I, I do recall this, this, this, uh, master course Paul was teaching at the moment and I attended this idea of, of, of truly, you know, making the effort as he was recounting the story of how he, you know, You know, moving from Canada, he was changing from Fahrenheit to Celsius [01:05:00] or the other way around.
And, and, and having to, you know, to make all these effort to, to, to, to change metrics. Right. And how you end up, uh, interiorizing it. So it becomes your new native language. As you become fluent into thinking Celsius or thinking Fahrenheit, if you think
Andrea Hiott: through those assumptions in a way.
Paco Calvo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have
Andrea Hiott: to think about it.
I don't know.
Paco Calvo: Yeah, that's it. That's it. You filter the way through, you know, the pair of glasses you wear and then you see the world through, but the ones you carry with you. From birth, they're like your mother language and your mother metrics. Those are so rooted that you don't, you forget that once upon a time you had to learn those.
It's as if they came with you from birth. And no, of course they don't, right? That means that if we are patient and stubborn enough, Which Paul [01:06:00] was you can say hey, I'm gonna make the extra extra extra effort to learn a new language as if It was my new native language, my new mother tongue, right? And you can stretch this, not just from Celsius to Fahrenheit or vice versa, to any other system of coordinates that you can translate into, like moving from one space to another, right?
And, and then you can go get to more bizarre places, not just temperature units, but moving, you know, kinetic energy, moving, so you can move. Start thinking in native speaker, in, in jewels, if you are talking about energy or, you know, whatever.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He kind of goes down to, yeah, if you, or you were thinking about if you start to try to think like the electron or something.
Yeah. Yeah.
Paco Calvo: So now, now Paul, Paul Chetland, he's a very, original thinker. And, and I found a lot of food for thought in, in brainstorming and having the, the, you know, [01:07:00] at the time to be a, I was in my twenties, to me was like a
Andrea Hiott: prefect. Amazing that you were around those minds.
Paco Calvo: To get his, to pick his brains and all that stuff.
Right. But with that being said, there is a twist and is what I think they didn't go far enough. And, and the Churchlands, they were doing something great at the time, which was questioning this language like or this Fodorian frame of mind, right, in the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of science.
Like, science and psychology doesn't have to do with, you know, reasoning and logic following rules and linguistic formatting. And they were exploiting this vectorial space. Like, like the, the vectorial space of the great matrix of a neural network, an artificial neural network. If you have a matrix with all the values of all the synopsis, the connections, the strengths, right?
Then they were using artificial neural [01:08:00] networks as the, their way of modeling the human mind and the mind of a scientist. That's why he was able to apply those insights from con connectionism, from neural network theory to the philosophy of mind and to the philosophy of science. So, so, that was, uh, At the time, to me, revolutionary, but afterwards, I realized that there was something missing here, and it's that they were just changing one format for another.
So they were moving from a linguistic format to a vectorial format. So, when people think that their views were very radical, they were not that radical. They were changing one representational language for another, still representational language. So they were still into representationalism and computationalism.
They were simply saying, hey, computations and representations are [01:09:00] neither linguistic or pictorial or based on good old fashioned AI. Vectorial, uh, vectors. And we have, uh, uh, the space provided by the way we are approximating a function in a neural network. But it was still computational. It was neurocomputational.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. That's a good way to, to explain it. I think it's the eliminativist kind of side that it, it's, it's, it's, it's really complicated. In a weird way, you could almost look at it, if you, if you wanted to open it up in the way that, you know, you could think of that as ecological, as
Paco Calvo: That's it.
Andrea Hiott: Smooshing it together, but then you need the ecological, but, I mean, we could talk, that would be another talk, but what, what I like about what you do in the book and what you just said there, the way you laid it out with the vectors is, actually, I can see how you and your young 20s had a kind of revelation because in a way, they're, they're saying what we've been saying, like they're showing that there's multiple paths to a similar goal and that you can actually assess them with [01:10:00] science and maths and, and kind of, you know, even think of them computationally, which is very helpful if we understand that it's just one assessment in the way we were talking about.
Paco Calvo: That's right. That's right.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Paco Calvo: Yeah, so it's wonderful in
Andrea Hiott: the book that you present it like that, because then I started thinking, gosh, you know, even like talking about how do we start to understand, like re thinking through the experience of a plant or animal or insect, we already do it when we learn a new language, for example, or, you know, this Fahrenheit Celsius kind of opened up to me thinking, well, we actually can think through different kinds of experiences, what we do when we read a good book, you know, and so, I guess, like, it's wonderful that you, that you made that connection and I, and to go a little bit farther now as we end and to come to this love and you do talk about plants and emotions and for those who have violent reactions to plant cognition, plant emotion is even, even more, I guess.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Paco Calvo: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I mean, you have, you know, the intelligence is a [01:11:00] hard pill to swallow. Then you have sentence. How you mean, I mean, having their own subjective experiences, you know, even, even I, you know, when I say legumes, legumes go to bed. Yeah. They sleep.
Plants
Andrea Hiott: can sleep and wake. That is proven, actually. Yeah.
Paco Calvo: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: You can anesthetize plants. This is incredible. Yeah.
Paco Calvo: So, but, but think about it. I mean, the same way we spoke of the circadian clocks and what unites us all in the Tree of Life. This is a way, way to end, I think, because. Here is one master key.
Think of melatonin, right? So melatonin uh, we know it's being secreted by the pineal gland. We know what it does in mammals. And you know what happened in the nineties? When it was first seen, observed in, in, in plants, 95, 1995, so three, four decades after it was identified in, in, in, in, in mammals scientists, plant physiologists, they, [01:12:00] they wouldn't see it.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it couldn't possibly be true even though it was exactly the same thing and the same molecule,
Paco Calvo: the same molecule. They couldn't see it because the frame of mind, this is a great example of the theory lateness of observation.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Paco Calvo: So plants are not supposed to have it. Thereby, I'm not, what I'm seeing is not melatonin.
Andrea Hiott: It can't possibly be that you don't. But
Paco Calvo: what's funny beyond the, you know, the sociology of science and, you know, how long it took for, you know, to like, like, eight, 10 more years for the society of plant physiology to, to acknowledge it and give it a name. They added the prefix phyto, no? Because. So
Andrea Hiott: that it seems like it's something different, but it's the same thing, right?
The same thing. Exactly the same. The
Paco Calvo: same thing. So, but phyto, the prefix. That's because our melatonin is the, you know, the good stuff. Theirs is phytomelatonin, right? But that's not, the more interesting part of it is that when you see legumes folding their leaves at night, right, so legumes do, they go like this, they fold their leaves when [01:13:00] the sun sets, and then they unfold them in the morning prior to the sun setting, so it's anticipatory folding, right?
So it's circadian based. So they fold them prior to the sun setting, they unfold them prior to the sun rising in the morning, right? Okay. And that's an amazing pattern. But what we don't see is that they are actually the temporal, the dynamical profile of the concentration. It peaks with sunset. And then they have a second peak in the middle of the night and make the worst of it during the day.
So the very same thing as in mammals.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It's this nervous system kind of.
Paco Calvo: So you can go, so you can go to the kitchen cabinet and pick a melatonin synthetic tablet and you know, take it, take a pill to, you know, to ease yourself to sleep one night because you're stressed wherever you've been on your phone for too long.
So, so we know that melatonin puts us back in sync. , right? And then when you [01:14:00] see plans with the same dynamical profile, the same concentration levels, the same wearing off during the day and the leaves folding and unfolding, we resist the idea of them going to bed sleeping. And we are pacs got to be speaking metaphorically.
How you, how do you mean metaphorically? Uh, this is the same idea of action potentials do. You don't need neurons to fire action potentials, plant cells, fire action potentials. That doesn't need to be neuronal tissue, right? So, so what unites us all is already there. So sentience. love, right? So when you spoke of sentience of subjective experiences, of course, the mistake is to anthropomorphize plants and think, hey, if they experienced the world, they've got to somehow experience it the way I do.
I mean, for God's sake, stop, get rid of the gold standard and yourself. Imagine we don't inhabit planet earth. So this is a good mental [01:15:00] exercise. Imagine we travel back in time before humans or animals existed, mammals, and you see plants. Imagine you are just a Martian scientist landing on this earth a few million years ago.
You cannot use Homo sapiens as the gold standard because we haven't evolved yet. So how would you study what that plant folding its leaves is doing? Melatonin. And so how would you study that without using yourself for the sake of comparing for comparison purposes? That's the, that's the challenge.
Intellectually speaking, wouldn't, wouldn't you arrive to the conclusion that they are taking a nap, that they are taking a break, that, you know, life Needs to rest any form of life whatsoever needs to rest
Andrea Hiott: and it's back to the [01:16:00] Regularities and what we sort of started with the robot and what we can learn from plants and if we can get out of that Human stance, I think it's also about this whole trying to think like, you know in different from different perspectives If we can get out of that human stance and do that thought experiment like you just explained then it actually opens up a lot It tells us a lot about how a body can function And how intelligence, what intelligence is, what cognition could be, because this plan in the space that you just described, it's trying, it's, it's going through its encounter.
That's its movement, right? I would say it's moving from A to B without leaving A, but it's movement. And it's, so it's developing something like melatonin as you know, to do that. And this is, this is an intelligent system, but it doesn't look anything like humans, but then the patterns are, can be connected.
So you open up this nested. Connection. But what I think is even more important about that and what you say in your book is actually then you have to give up on anthropomorphizing the plant.
Paco Calvo: Absolutely. Absolutely. [01:17:00] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the mistake. I think they are, they are, they are targeting the wrong you know, the, the type of strongman they are fighting against is not the position we are.
I mean, I, I usually say, you know, sort of ingest. I say, Hey, if, if, if. If I was like in your food, if I was in your shoes thinking that I'm thinking like this, like, like plants, like human, like, of course I would go nuts as you do. But look, that's not what I'm defending. Get rid of that comparison by default.
It is you, the anthropomorphizing them and that's why you are going nuts. I would go nuts as well. Just get rid of that.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's actually a little bit
Paco Calvo: disrespectful, too, to the planet. That's not part of my picture. No, no. You're projecting you, yourself, not me.
Andrea Hiott: And I think that that's the hard work you're doing is trying to get people to slow down and realize that you're not saying what they've assumed that you're saying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's the hard [01:18:00] work of, and at some point it'll become obvious, right? Like people will start to think, they won't react in that violent way when they hear it in the same way that, you know, Some people would have reacted the same way with animal intelligence at some point, but now because we've connected to movement, the Dalai Lama can assume that or, you know, but it just takes time and it takes people kind of putting themselves out there and being criticized.
And again,
Paco Calvo: education. That's why education. And education in the way
Andrea Hiott: that you describe at the end of the book. The new generations.
Paco Calvo: I mean, this is, this is It's not about these guys that, you know, they might retire and never get it. It's the new generations, the people who are now in primary school, in secondary school.
Those are the ones that need to understand it in this other way.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And if they do, it, it's, it opens up a better, and I would think better, but we don't have to say better, but another way of being as the world, which we really need right now. A
Paco Calvo: little bit more humility. Yeah. Yeah, humility and understanding
Andrea Hiott: self ecologically.
Absolutely.
Paco Calvo: [01:19:00] Absolutely.
Andrea Hiott: Just to kind of end though, I think one thing that is hard for people who do, uh, so, so like, like there's the people who react violently against the anthropomorphizing, but then there's also a lot of people who want that, you know, and that, that's part of the reaction of why some people in science are so, are so, uh, so violent against it because some people want to believe that plants are speaking to them in a kind of way.
And of course everything is speaking to everything, but I think what they don't want to give up about that is that there's something awe inspiring and wonderful when you do start to communicate with plants and it's hard to talk about that. Uh, and so it becomes like a cartoon kind of version of it.
Paco Calvo: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What I say in the book, remember they say at some point the magic It's already within the science.
Andrea Hiott: Absolutely. That's what I wanted. I wanted to bring that up because you bring that up in the book and that's a very important point. We're not giving up anything. It's becoming
Paco Calvo: more wondrous.[01:20:00]
It's just Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so science, if it's not reductionist or mechanistic, already has the resources to feel the awe the wonder
Andrea Hiott: And this kind of space of also understanding that you're looking at yourself in a way when you're looking at the plant, or the plant's looking at itself through you or something, it becomes less mystical because it's kind of what we do with science. You know, you brought up Patricia Churchill and that made me think of dopamine and that's, we didn't have time to talk about it, but plants also have dopamine and GABA and these kinds of, these things.
Paco Calvo: Many, many, many neurotransmitters. Yeah. Emotion. Yeah. Yeah. Well, think about it. Uh, no, it's funny actually. That's a, I'm glad you brought this before we end because some of our critics have said, look, glutamate or GABA, uh, that we know plants have it, uh, it's not a neurotransmitter. [01:21:00] It's just a, you know, a by product, a metabolic by product, secondary metabolite.
Why? And you know what their answer is? Because this is in print. So this has been published. I mean, this is what they said. They said this cannot be a new transmitter implants because, uh, the Wikipedia. They went to the Wikipedia says that, uh, neurotransmitters relate to the idea of a synapse. So if there is not a synaptic bridge, a synapse in between neurons, you cannot have a neurotransmitter.
So think about it. Instead, this is a very important, this is a very good point about education. So in plants, you have examples where glutamate. Uh, triggers a calcium wave that spreads all over a plant and triggers a systemic response to [01:22:00] herbivores. So it's a signaling, it is playing a signaling role, systemic signaling, right?
So, so what a better example of glutamate as playing the role of a neurotransmitter than this, the signaling role, right? So they stick to the definition. On grounds that have to do with looking it up the dictionary or at the Wikipedia and instead of saying, Hey, in light of the evidence of this systemic signaling responses in plants that we find related to glutamate or GABA, Oh, let's revise our definition of an intransmitter.
Implants, it does need to relate to the synapse because of course implants are no synapses. So instead of saying, Hey, we need to enlarge the picture and redefine what we mean by neurotransmitter to make it more encompassing to bring in all these non neural guys, [01:23:00] which is still exhibit systemic signaling responses.
So instead of saying that. They ignore that evidence and say, no, no, they cannot possibly have it. It's just a metabolite. And we know GABA is not just a metabolite. The literature is there. But they want to turn a blind eye on grounds that try to stick to our privileged status of animals. No, no, this is an animal thing, like with melatonin.
No, no, no synapse, no neurotransmission. End of the story. Instead of thinking, wow, I mean, this is systemic signaling. Oh, let's enlarge the picture. Let's redefine those terms because the history of science is the history of revising. You cannot do science without revising. We could be stuck with Ptolemaic thinking that everything revolves around the earth if we were not revising.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, absolutely. It's you unpack it really well in, in the book and a lot of it seems to me to be getting stuck on again that [01:24:00] you need to have a brain and that intelligence is kind of this one thing and the linear stuff rather than understanding it could come in many different ways and how fascinating it is that not only are there patterns shared but there are even chemicals that like are exactly the same chemical, right?
Like to me it, if you, once you open up this And let it be a scaled kind of intelligence where it's not just like a plant needs to have a brain or there's some chain of going to the brain or whatever, it's, it's very hard, but you're doing it in your book, Opening the Space, but then it becomes, actually, I could see those people who are criticizing it could actually improve their own research in a way, in the same way that, like, robotics can be improved by plant intelligence.
It gives you another way of thinking about it.
Paco Calvo: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. So this is not against this is not against anyone. This is against ignorance. Yeah. Or just like opening up the
Andrea Hiott: space, right, in the way that you talk about in the education part.
Absolutely. Which is learning a new way of thinking, I think,
Paco Calvo: in the
Andrea Hiott: same way that you're presenting at beginning.
Paco Calvo: And we need [01:25:00] adversarial collaboration. So it's good to have the skeptics on board. This is not we against them or them against us.
This is all of us teaming up together against ignorance. That's what propels science. revising without, you know, without apology. You don't need to apologize for noticing or discovering or unearthing that things were not the way we thought. Sorry the earth is not at the center of anywhere. I mean, we are just, you know, modesty, humility, anyway.
Exactly.
Andrea Hiott: And this is a very hard question, but I did find myself thinking about it because this is called love and philosophy. And so It's interesting the way we can think about, you do talk about emotions and plants in a way, and in a very non dramatic, easy to access understanding of it in the book, I'll just leave it to people, but it, it kind of became, I don't know how to think about love and plants, you know, it's hard.
Is it, is it like, I mean, I could think of it [01:26:00] in a very mystical way of just the plant and the sunlight are in love with each other and that's, that's that process in a way, or I could think of it as my love, the way that it, The way that I in relation with the plant or the you know, it's relational somehow, but I don't know Does it what do you think it's a can this word even be brought up or
Paco Calvo: a I I wouldn't have any problem with that Again, if we if we unpack it in a way that is not, you know doing a disservice As in when we say plants go to bed, they sleep tight.
They are not, of course, you know, you don't go and
Andrea Hiott: No, no, they're not tucking each other into little beds. Oh, but,
Paco Calvo: but, but, uh, if you put in terms of energy flows, the idea of, uh, be, you know, good vibe, you know, being in good terms with your surroundings and, and, you know, Uh, in terms of
Andrea Hiott: kind of symbiosis or something
Paco Calvo: and energy and you know, if, if you think of all the sensory channels in plants and the [01:27:00] parameter space that they, the stuff they are able to sense and respond to you know, electromagnetic fields and King, non king, parental relations, so all the things they go through to in their meaning making, of course, part of the story has got to do with a good vibe, good, hey, this is good news to me, I feel comfy, I feel comfy.
But I feel good about it. So this is oh, this is good. This is good. I mean, that's something that shouldn't be at odds because it boils down to biochemistry. I mean, the same way that you are identifying these hormones on these neurotransmitters. So love speaks the language of molecules. What's, what's wrong with that?
Again, again, you don't miss that. You don't miss anything by speaking that language. You reveal the magic in the science itself. Chemically speaking, plants speak an amazing language [01:28:00] of chemicals, you know, volatiles, you know, compounds, airborne compounds, bringing news, sharing news. I mean, they need each other.
They need other plants, king and non king, other organisms belonging to different kingdoms. How come they are not gonna, you know, we cannot trade in, in, in. So as long as we don't personify in human terms. Why not? I mean, it's part of what makes the world go round, right?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that in the same way you were talking about when we think about the synapse and all of this, like we really have to put it in a kind of lineage always that if we're talking about this kind of human cognition, then yes, we're, we're thinking about brains and synapses or if we're talking about plants, it's, it's a different lineage and you have to look at the whole thing and then not smoosh them together.
And why wouldn't that also be true for something like. Thinking about what love might be. Absolutely.
Paco Calvo: Absolutely. So I think that things are easier if we, if we remove [01:29:00] ourselves from the picture, then things get way easier. Like, you know.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. But to put you right back in the picture for the last question, the very last question is, uh, you've been putting a lot of your life into this.
People criticize it. People also love it, but well, there's a lot of criticism, but there's also a lot of success. Yeah.
Paco Calvo: But I do wonder, has
Andrea Hiott: it brought some kind of love into your life? I mean, do you, do you, do you ever have that kind of a feeling when you are in your garden or yeah, with your work?
Paco Calvo: Well, definitely, definitely.
Look, for one thing, it's true, this Darwinian idea of slowing down. I mean, when I started, look, right here, this attic, let's see if you can see this, right there. That looks like nice wood. Takes me to the attic. Well, that's where I started time lapsing vines prior to starting, setting up the lab on campus, right?
So that was when I started as sort of amateur playing Darwin, [01:30:00] so to speak. Literally, actually. Continuing
Andrea Hiott: Darwin.
Paco Calvo: Well, I brought all my Darwin, uh, to the attic. It's still there, all the old, old Darwin, old botany books. And I was playing there. And, and for the, for the sake of it, For the sake of, you know, joy, having fun, literally.
And I did that, this exercise of stop time lapsing and watch them to the naked eye. And you can't imagine how rewarding that was because I would sit on a stool for a few hours. Some people are going to think I'm crazy, but they are faster than you can think of. I mean, when we say they are so slow, Well, in a sense they are, but they are way faster than we, we think.
So if you take a Klein Bim Bim, Fasciolus, Bulgaris, and, and you sit and watch it revolve, it, it goes, you know, a whole circle, a whole revolution, [01:31:00] in, in less than an hour, 50 minutes, an hour. I mean, people watch a film for two hours. And they if they like the film, they, the time flies. Well, time flew for me watching the climbing beam.
I mean, and really I was, I, I, every time I think about it, I feel that, you know, I, I felt something that I knew I wasn't getting from the time lapse observations. I knew that the animation, the acceleration through time lapse assembling the footage was in a sense, an artifact. And I knew that to the naked eye, I was getting the real thing that took me in my own garden and I live in the outskirts in the house with an orchard.
So I have my orange trees or my lemon olive trees or like [01:32:00] Mediterranean orchard. And now I have these, these weeds. The ones that you would pluck and pluck and pluck, uh, uh, now I, I let them do their job. And I, I have actually even assembled some, some time lapse, uh, in my orca and I time lapse them. So I've been,
Andrea Hiott: I've been
Paco Calvo: time lapsing my weeds.
Now I have this weed that has grown huge and it's You know, doing its mess on the olive tree, and I'm getting this perspective of 20 because I have been living here for the last 24 years. So 24 years is a decent amount of time to give you some perspective in terms of how the orca has been growing and which trees have been, you know, having to compete for space with others who has been doing what.
So for example, my cacti Mediterranean weather. So cacti are a [01:33:00] big thing. I love cacti. So at the beginning, you know, when you get started, you want to Push them to give them a little, little help, extra help, right, to your plants, you know, when you're gardening, oh, you know, like, and then I realized, you know, I planted like, you know, like, like 80, 80 different cacti, right, 80 different species.
Uh, 2020 plus years ago, and I didn't do anything to them, nothing. So summer came, forties, four weeks, months, hell, I wouldn't water them. I wouldn't do anything to them. Most of them died, but those that survived. You wouldn't believe it. The size they have. I have some of them are taller than the olive trees.
Wow. I have never done anything to them. [01:34:00] So, so we are obsessed with When we think of caring about our plants, we can't help to anthropomorphize our care and think that the pruning, we have to prune them, we have to add nutrients, we have to water them, we have to provide, you know, and we don't realize that we are not that special.
And that to me was a message of plant sapiens, to realize that we are not that special. We need them, but they don't need us. In fact, they do way better when we don't care about them. So when you look at my plans in my Yorker, the ones that are doing great are the ones that were meant to do great, because they don't need to be spoiled by me.
And I get joy getting to your question. I get joy out of realizing [01:35:00] how unnecessary I am to them.
We are not that important.
Andrea Hiott: That's very beautiful. It actually opens up your book in a new way too slowing down and almost plant bathing or plant being, just being with them and not trying to be important to them. Yeah. It's a whole other kind of practice.
Paco Calvo: fellow travelers, not masters.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's a beautiful stance to try to take. And thanks for doing it. Thanks for the book. Thanks for the talking with me and staying. Thank you. Thank you.
Paco Calvo: No, thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for your interest and for doing this and everything.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it was great.