A Curious Confluence: Revelation Of The Obvious

From Space.com, a snippet:

"Spruce trees retain ancient memories of their environment and communicate with one other in the hours preceding a solar eclipse, a new international study suggests.

We now see the forest not as a mere collection of individuals, but as an orchestra of phase correlated plants," Alessandro Chiolerio, Italian Institute of Technology and University of the West of England, and the study co-leader, said in a statement.

An interdisciplinary team consisting of researchers from Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain and Australia built custom sensors and placed them across a forest in the Dolomite mountains in Italy. Using the sensors, the team recorded simultaneous bioelectrical responses from the spruce trees."

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The rest of this is at least as interesting, but the essence of it is in these few words, so I am going to move on to my real purpose.

My son sent me a link to this article because we are both interested in nonstandard views of how things happen.

Here is what I emailed him in response.

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"I've been seeing news items like this about trees, off and on, for several years now.

The first time I read one a shiver ensued.  

It sounded so much like Tolkien talking about the Ents that it could have been from The Hobbit and the Trilogy.

An equally chilling experience - for me - was the first time I heard a discussion of string theory.

It sounded like the opening chapter of Silmarillion.

But, back to the trees.  

I have recently heard of similar studies that document flowers stepping up nectar production when bees are in the area.  

Apparently the flowers sense the vibrations from the bees' wings. 

Didn't somebody make a movie about that, except with papillon wings? 

A recent episode of The Wild spent the entire podcast talking about multiple studies that will yield an AI framework that will give us detail on the structure of non-human (animal) language.  

Note that it wasn't "if" there is one; it was "what" is its structure.  

The summary was that we're about five years away from having it, but that, when had, we won't know what it means because, unlike human languages, including ancient Egyptian (Rosetta Stone) we don't have a clue about the vocabulary.  

But we'll have the framework.

Maybe AI will give us the vocabulary.  

When I wrote The Cream Soup Spoon I did it because the Ouija had started talking to me.  

But I kept writing even when she - Ouija - periodically abandoned me, due to my belief that the only reason cats don't pay any attention to some human words and know exactly what others mean and have personal, unique and variable reactions to them is because they only learn stuff that interests them, or things that relate to their happiness or their perceived well-being.  

I spent a bunch of pages telling a story about the confluence of all of the above with human arrogance."