🌱 “Do Plants Really Give a Shit About Us?”
I've been reading Lights On by Annaka Harris, an audio documentary about Consciousness and whether it is fundamental.
It’s been rattling a question around in my mind:
What if our definition of consciousness is just a mirror we keep holding up to ourselves?
In the book, there’s an interview with a scientist who draws a comparison between human and plant consciousness. He talks about “mother trees”—how they allocate more nutrients to their kin beneath the soil. A kind of subterranean care. A quiet, mycelium-mediated devotion.
Then he pivots.
Humans, he says, can study plants.
We can get PhDs in botany.
Run experiments.
Publish papers.
There are no trees, to our knowledge, doing that about us.
I recall him saying “Trees don’t give a shit about us.” or something to that effect.
That really stuck with me.
And that’s supposed to be the mic drop. Case closed.
We’re the conscious ones. They’re not.
As I sit more with that thought, I’m not sure I buy it.
The Consciousness Olympics
What makes us so sure that studying something in a lab is a higher order of intelligence than nurturing your offspring through root networks under a forest floor?
If a tree can chemically signal danger, redistribute nutrients to a weaker kin, and even warn surrounding organisms about incoming threats... isn’t that a kind of cognition?
Isn’t that a kind of love?
Or is it just chemical coincidence?
We’re quick to label it “instinct,” “programming,” “adaptive behavior.”
But let a human do the same thing and we call it “parenting,” “altruism,” “conscious care.”
Why?
Because we wrote the definitions.
Symbolic language is a shared way of making sense of the world together.
We don’t speak tree, we speak English, Spanish, Japanese, etc.
What if the trees could translate their love through root networks into English?
What would that sound like?
I have no answers, but it’s an interesting thought.
The Edges of Empathy
Philosopher Thomas Nagel once posed the now-famous question:
He was pointing at the boundary of consciousness itself.
We can model a bat’s behavior.
We can map its neural correlates.
But we’ll never know what it feels like to be a bat.
Because the bat has an inner world we can’t access.
And that’s the catch with consciousness.
It’s not just about what something does.
It’s about what it’s like to be that something.
What is it like to be a bat?
What is it like to be a tree?
We don’t know.
A Lens We Can’t Take Off
Here’s what I’m reckoning with:
Maybe we’ll never figure out what consciousness is because we can’t get outside the lens we’re looking through.
Everybody has a lens on life, and empathy helps you hold up another’s lens.
But it’s imperfect. Meaning not 100% the same as being the person.
Or a tree.
Or a bat.
Maybe it’s a spectrum of subjectivity—emergent, relational, and context-dependent.
Maybe it’s fundamental.
That’s what Annaka Harris seeks to figure out in her audio documentary.
Not as in “foundational to humans,” but woven into the structure of reality itself.
From root systems to neural networks.
From trees to LLMs.
All of it.
If Trees Could Talk, Would We Listen?
Let’s flip the thought experiment.
If a tree could study us—map our cities like mycelium, decode our social structures the way we decode carbon cycles—would they write us off?
“Humans think they’re so advanced… But they kill their kin. Burn their own forests. Pollute their own water. What’s wrong with them?”
Would they be wrong?
Or just holding a different lens like we are to them?
Maybe the more important question is:
Do we give a shit about what we can’t understand (yet)?
Because if we don’t—if we only respect what resembles us… Then we’ve already limited the scope of what consciousness can be.
And, from my perspective, we may be missing the forest for the brain.
Thanks for reading. I’m trying a different format today—more of an essay. Let me know what you think of it. I’ve been thinking a lot about consciousness, as we’re implementing our own belief system modeling engine with Epistemic Me.
It’s been fascinating, and I wanted to get down my thoughts to share.
Let me know if you find this as interesting as I do (:
Best,
Robert
Liked this article?
💚 Click the like button.
Feedback or addition?
💬 Drop a comment.
Know someone that would find this helpful?
🔁 Share this post.
P.S. If you haven’t already checked out my other newsletter, ABCs for Growth—that’s where I have personal reflections on personal growth related to applied emotional intelligence, leadership and influence concepts, etc.
P.S.S. Want reminders on entrepreneurship, growth, leadership, empathy, and product?
Follow me on…
💪🏼 How You Can Help
What's Next?
We're building something unprecedented: kind of an operating system for human understanding and beliefs.
We’re building something unprecedented. If you’re a builder, engineer, or entrepreneur interested in the intersection of AI and human understanding, let's connect.
Check out our website: https://epistemicme.ai/
GitHub here: https://github.com/Epistemic-Me
EM acts as a hyper-personalization layer and set of services that allows you and your applications to understand your users better.
We have built a model and set of interfaces from first principles thinking in philosophy and epistemology to accurately map human belief systems.
What can that do for you?
→ Perhaps increase sales conversions.
→ Perhaps optimize copywriting in your automation funnels, depending on the user.
→ Perhaps helping researchers and scientists better quantify subjectivity in their experiments, for better science.
And… if you are looking for the “next best question” to evolve your beliefs, it could help you too.
In a few weeks we are going to rapidly get the structure to ship new features constantly, with new releases tied to this newsletter and our podcast.
Check out our first podcast on YouTube or Substack for a heavier deep dive into our “Why”.
Insightful! We've been measuring consciousness with a ruler we designed specifically to make ourselves come out on top. Classic us. Meanwhile, trees out here running their own underground social network and we’re like, “yeah but... can they do calculus?” Maybe real intelligence isn’t about being top dog but thriving within our ecosystem for millions of years.