/lit/ - Literature

>>12704823

I hate how people read so much and come up so far in their studies but end up falling for the almost panpsychism sentience (sapience? yeah whatever) meme. That plants and fungi can communicate and exchange nutrients and informations has even become a sci-fi trope (Avatar, Resident Evil 7, Star Trek discovery), and they might even constitute, or rather correspond, to complex systems with emergent properties, but that does not equate our own emergent property of conscience, not by a long shot.

By that logic Capital would be a heck of a living being because its emergent property arrives at the expense of nonlinear combinations of billions of what are also complex systems (humans). That does not mean it's alive like us (so this is quite bad wording) neither that it can act out like we do, even if it might be capable of "acting out" in elaborate manners that we simply can't, because it's not fucking sentient in the way those authors mean, i.e like humans.

In short, this book and other "pop sci" about complex systems are fine, but remarkably fall short when it comes to drawing analogy. We need more people who can explain that these apparent sentient actions come out of self-consistency of complex systems, with the emergent effect retroactively modifying the elements who cause it to begin with. I guess I should shut up and write myself about this instead of complaining on a random Japanese format forum.