![]() Corals don’t have iPhones or secretaries, but all of them need to spawn in a synchronous fashion for the eggs to be fertilised. (A great example of this, though animal not plant, is coral spawning. It is wonderful, and is definitely a key to understanding plant behaviour. It is simply a process evolved among communities of living things: plants, animals, bacteria and so on. The idea of co-operation without thought or intellect is an exact parallel of evolution without design. Trees don’t have brains, but nevertheless there is communication and co-operation between them and Chalmers would say that there is a level of consciousness. There is no suggestion of intellectual thought being involved, nor sentience. Their work in integrated information theory is stupefyingly hard to get one's head around (good wine is definitely handy here), but they would see the sorts of communication networks that plants enjoy along with the consequential co-operation and actions they stimulate as an example of consciousness. They see consciousness as something that does not have an intellectual threshold and consciousness is something that stretches through all communication. Guilio Tononi is a neuroscientist working in this field and his ideas gel with those of philosopher David Chalmers. But some of the leading philosophers and neuroscientists today are challenging this view. The co-operation of species and between species happens with communication, but often without language or thought (we might argue about language, depending on how we might try to define the word).Ĭonsciousness has often been generally regarded as a function of higher brain activity, needing language, logic and awareness. I still have regularly to remind myself that this all happens by evolution without any thought taking place. He shows us how it is that an unthinking process creates things that we find (in our prejudice) almost impossible to imagine as not being part of some intelligent plan. Dawkins has so beautifully expressed this in The Blind Watchmaker (Norton & Co, 1986). The sheer brilliance of evolution is that it causes incredible mimicry of design (an intellectual process), both in physical form and behaviour, without any actual design taking place. If this sounds flakey to some, that is probably because they are applying human prejudice to terms such as consciousness and co-operation. Katia discusses the concepts of consciousness among plants and ecosystems, about the ways they can communicate and co-operate. But it would be sensible to extend this debate. I don’t want to create cabals of Sunnis and Shiites among the biodynamic community, nor the wider wine world, so I am not going to challenge or claim that there is some sort of 'true path'. There is a substantial body of those who are equally convinced that the whole thing runs on cosmic energies that cannot be understood by science and anything that breaks the holy trinity of cow horns, stag’s bladders and astrology is tantamount to heresy. While I am absolutely convinced that this is the right path, it would be naive to imagine that this is a generally held view in the biodynamic community. As the acceptance of biodynamic farming and viticulture has grown, more and more farmers are convinced evangelists for the 'dynamic ecosystem' approach: the idea that we can understand and form sympathetic alliances with the underlying ecosystems of our land and this lies at the heart of successful biodynamic farming. The thoughts of Katia Nussbaum are ones that have been reverberating around many biodynamic producers for some time. See also the many thoughtful responses on our Members' forum. Instead of delving into our archives this Thursday, we publish Nigel Greening of Felton Road 's enthusiastic response to Katia Nussbaum's recent article. ![]()
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