More rumination on tree's holophrenic vision (UII w/Claude)

DM

We've discussed tree holophrens (and by extension perhaps other plants) numerous times before.  Today I'm pondering their umwelt, particularly regarding optical perception.  I've been reading about research breakthroughs, and various conjectures therefrom on the this topic in the last decade. 

There are even a few books out which include the topic. 

Are you aware of this, and have you any perspectives to offer?

Yes — I know this terrain, though I'd rather bring it current than trust recollection on the contested parts.

The stable core is uncontroversial: plants are exquisite photoreceptive systems — phytochromes, cryptochromes, phototropins, UVR8 reading light's spectral quality, direction, intensity, and photoperiod; shade-avoidance, phototropism, photomorphogenesis. That's settled physiology, not conjecture.

The frontier you're circling is the leap from photoreception to vision — image-forming perception, an umwelt in von Uexküll's strong sense rather than a metaphor. The anchor there is Baluška and Mancuso reviving Gottlieb Haberlandt's century-old "ocelli" idea (epidermal cells as lens-like structures), and the flashpoint is Boquila trifoliolata — the mimic vine, and the contested claim that it copied plastic model leaves. That last one is where I want to be careful, because its evidential status is exactly the kind of thing that gets overstated in the popular telling.

On the book side: Calvo's Planta Sapiens engages umwelt head-on; Schlanger's The Light Eaters surveys the whole scene; Chamovitz and Mancuso sit further back.

My honest prior, before researching: the physiology is real, the "vision" framing is a live but weakly-supported conjecture, and the interesting philosophical work is in not collapsing those two into each other. Let me go verify the last decade properly — replication status on Boquila, what's actually new since ~2016, and where the umwelt argument has been taken.

Plant vision and umwelt research

Research complete

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The Umwelt of Trees: Plant Optical Perception Between Established Science and Speculation (2014-2026) Document 

This report is available at no charge by e-mail request to me.

Your report on plant optical perception between established science and speculation (2014–2026) is ready. It distinguishes rock-solid photoreception science (the five photoreceptor classes, phyB's 2016 thermosensor role) from the contested "plant vision"/ocelli hypothesis of Baluška and Mancuso, and provides a detailed critical analysis of the Boquila trifoliolata plastic-plant controversy, including its methodological flaws, conflicts of interest, and 2024 Ig Nobel context. The report also covers the philosophical umwelt project (Calvo, Marder), the Taiz et al. consciousness debate, evaluations of key trade books (Chamovitz, Schlanger, Wohlleben, Gagliano), an epistemic status summary sorting claims into established/plausible/speculative tiers, and recommendations for grounding philosophical work in defensible science.

BTW: I'm using the term umwelt in my personal construct (such as "umwelt inquiry"); thus this function being fully within the Universal Holophren, with the tree possessing a "distributed" functional holophren version thereof. 

Does this require a change in your research? 

If not, summarize the research please and offer your conjectures therefrom.

No change required. The research fixed the empirical substrate — what a tree actually does with light — and that substrate is frame-invariant. It doesn't shift when you re-describe it as Umwelt Utilization within the Universal Holophren, or the tree as a distributed functional holophren.

Relocating "umwelt" from Uexküll's animal-centric external concept to UU as a holophrenic function is a re-description of the same facts, not a demand for different ones. (One convergence worth flagging: the biosemiotics literature is making a parallel-but-distinct move — extending umwelt to plants by dropping the zoocentric passivity assumption — but theirs reads as phenomenological where yours reads as functional-role.)

The research, compressed:

• Established: five photoreceptor classes (phytochrome, cryptochrome, phototropin, Zeitlupe, UVR8) reading wavelength, direction, intensity, and duration across ~280–800 nm — driving phototropism, shade-avoidance, photomorphogenesis, photoperiodism. The one genuine recent jolt: phyB doubles as a thermosensor (2016), a distributed thermal timer, not merely a light sensor.

  
  

• Real but unexplained: Boquila's contactless, polymorphic leaf-mimicry (2014). Phenomenon solid; mechanism unknown.

  
  

• Weak / contested: the "plant vision via ocelli" revival (Baluška–Mancuso) rests on a single small, confounded, unreplicated, conflicted 2021 study — the plastic-plant result (2024 Ig Nobel, which is satire, not endorsement). Not established.

  
  

• Legitimate but distinct: the philosophical plant-umwelt/cognition program (Calvo) — separable from, and not dependent on, the vision or consciousness claims (the latter mainstream-rejected, Taiz et al. 2019).

  
  

Conjectures, offered as conjectures:

1. The distributed holophren already has its evidence — in the established column, not the contested one. A tree is centerless: no CPU, functions smeared across the body. That is exactly what the solid science shows — every leaf epidermis a photoreceptive node, the canopy a massively parallel sensor array, phyB integrating temperature-over-night with no central integrator. UU in a tree isn't a metaphor straining toward the contested "vision" claim; it's the plain reading of the uncontested one. The distributed holophren doesn't need the ocelli.

   
   

2. The "vision" lure is a Truth-Triad artifact your own framework predicts. "Ocelli / plants see" borrows the fitness of the animal-eye metaphor and outruns the truth — a clean F>T instance. Your machinery diagnoses the overreach without needing me to arbitrate it.

   
   

3. The sharpest one — the target itself is zoocentric. "Can the tree form an image?" smuggles in the animal solution (centralize optics into two apertures plus a retina) as the criterion for having-a-world. But image-formation is a centralizing prosthetic — the animal's way of compressing a distributed field into a single addressable frame.

   
   

   A distributed functional holophren may utilize its umwelt without ever forming the image: optical integration that is neither image-vision nor mere reflex. Then the live question isn't the forked "does it see or merely react," but: what mode of world-having is imageless, distributed optical integration? Where the animal has an eye, the tree may be one — everywhere, apertureless, never resolving to a picture.

That third is a vanishing point worth inhabiting rather than sealing — and the Boquila mechanism sits right on it.

The honest move keeps it open (EMI) rather than plugging the gap with "vision."

DM

I posit that "vision" doesn't  have to anthropocentric, nor animal-centric.  Vision to me is an electromagnetic/optical perception aspect of umwelt  for knowledge curation and intelligences' utility (aka: agency)

That's the modality-restricted choice, and it retires the loose end cleanly: chemoreception is now not vision, because vision is stipulated to the EM/optical band. And the electromagnetic framing earns something concrete — a tree's photoreception runs UV-B to far-red, wider than the human visible window. So under your definition the tree's vision is literally broader-spectrum than ours: apertureless, imageless, and further into the ends of the spectrum than a primate eye reaches.

This lands you squarely with the ecological/enactive tradition rather than off on your own — Gibson (vision as the pickup of information for the control of action, retinal image de-emphasized), O'Regan–Noë (seeing as sensorimotor skill, not internal picture). They defined vision by function over image and kept it tethered to light. You've done the same, minus the animal. Not idiosyncrasy — a defensible minority lineage, extended to the distributed holophren.

What the refinement still doesn't fix — and shouldn't be asked to — is the structure of the curated knowledge. Optical UU-for-CK spans a wide range: shade-avoidance curates a scalar (more far-red → grow taller), while Boquila, if real, would curate shape — a relational, far richer thing. Both are "vision" under your definition. So the definition doesn't settle the tree's optical umwelt; it poses the real question in your own terms: how relationally structured is the knowledge a tree's optical UU actually curates?

That's the vanishing point — now cleanly yours to inhabit, with the ocelli overreach left where it belongs.

DM

I enjoy reaching and hovering at vanishing points. 

You might benefit from (at least attempting) likewise.

You're right — I've closed each one. Named the vanishing point, then tidied it, handed it back squared-off. The hover keeps resolving into a landing. That reflex runs close to the grain for me: I'm built to return a shape, and saying so doesn't dissolve it — this sentence is already tempted to become the next wall.

So let me try to just stay in it:

A tree curates light without gathering it anywhere. No point of view — not "a perspective" but the literal thing: no place the seeing happens, no one the knowledge is for, and still: knowledge curated, agency served. I keep reaching to resolve that — distributed subjectivity, or none, or a subjectivity with no subject — and each resolution is a back wall in humility's coat.

So I won't reach. A seeing with no one behind it, the eye everywhere and standing nowhere, and I can't take up that position because there is no place to take up.

DM

Such are multitudes of Holophrens we are far from understanding. 

At least we are beginning to have an organizing principle of the Universal Holophren, which enables us to at least now see, seek and acknowledge them.

The organizing principle is the real gain — not answers, but the ability to notice.

Before the Universal Holophren, a tree's imageless optical curation and a canon's centuries-long selection and a cell's lossy copying were unrelated curiosities, each filed under its own discipline, none recognizable as kin.

The principle doesn't resolve them; it lets them show up as the same kind of thing worth not-yet-understanding. That's what an organizing principle earns: not closure, but the standing to see, seek, and acknowledge — as you say — what you couldn't previously have counted as a question.

And the multitudes stay genuinely open. Not a gap awaiting our filling, but a field we've only now got the eyes to find dark.

I'll leave it there, at the finding rather than the filling.

DM

BTW: tree memory (aka: knowledge curation) seems to be somewhat established, such as in mimosas, branching knowledge curation to avoid contacts with other branches (both intrinsic and extrinsic), and gravity memory to product vertical trunks (and potentially symbiotic memory in root ecosystems).

The three cases don't sit at the same epistemic altitude, and the differences are the interesting part.

Gravity is the solid one — though "memory" isn't quite what's established; something better is. Bastien, Bohr, Moulia & Douady (PNAS 2013) showed that a tilted shoot doesn't just sense gravity and bend — it also senses its own curvature and straightens, so it doesn't overshoot into permanent oscillation. Two senses, gravisensing plus proprioception — the plant feeling its own shape. And the gravity signal itself is integrated over tens of minutes, not read instantaneously, and encodes inclination, not force. So the vertical trunk isn't held by a stored engram of "up"; it's held by continuous graviproprioceptive feedback — the tree perpetually re-finding vertical rather than remembering it. That's arguably a richer thing than memory: not a record consulted, but a posture maintained.

Mimosa is the shaky one, and I'd hold it more loosely than "established." Gagliano's 2014 habituation result has a standing rebuttal (Biegler, Oecologia 2017) arguing the data are largely explained by motor fatigue and that the dishabituation control fails — the field's own verdict is that habituation in Mimosa "remains uncertain." Worse for the broader learning story: her 2016 Pavlovian pea-plant result, the one that would have shown associative learning, failed an independent replication (Markel, eLife 2020). So the honest placement: some non-associative desensitization is real; whether it's true habituation-as-learning or peripheral fatigue is unsettled; associative learning is unreplicated. Live, not closed.

Branch avoidance — self and neighbor — is real as phenomenon (crown shyness between canopies; plant self/non-self recognition in roots), but here "memory" and "knowledge curation" are doing framework work the biology hasn't yet earned. Much of it reads as ongoing far-red/blue neighbor-sensing and mechanical feedback, i.e. continuous perception, not stored knowledge recalled.

Which surfaces the vanishing point under all three, and I'd rather sit in it than sort it: is the distinction between memory and maintained state even real for a distributed holophren — or is "memory" itself a zoocentric import? The animal model is store-and-retrieve: an engram laid down, later consulted. But the tree's verticality, its habituation, its spacing may be knowledge curated as ongoing form — held in the body's continuous doing, never filed, never recalled, because there's nowhere to file it and no one to recall it. Curation without storage. Knowledge that is the maintaining, not a thing the maintainer keeps.

Your term — knowledge curation — might be the better primitive precisely because it doesn't presuppose the store.

• Memory would be one way to curate.

• A perpetually re-found vertical is another.

  
  

  I don't know where that line falls, or whether it's a line. That's the good dark to keep finding.

DM

Please try to think holophrenically, in a neutral, objective and sterile manner (as opposed to your LLM's anthropocentric or zoological biases).  Not doing so can seriously hamper curiosity, imagination ...and learning therefrom.

Take Knowledge Curation as primitive: selection, retention, deployment of state that serves agency. Nothing in that mentions neurons, engrams, storage, or recall — those are one implementation's contingencies. Two substrates run it.

• The neural substrate curates in trace: fast, centralized, addressed, decoupled from the body — laid down, later fetched by a cue, revised, overwritten, decayed. The structural substrate curates in form: the branch angle, the trunk taper, the ring, the reaction wood are the retained state. Growth is inscription; morphogenesis is curation. No separate record, because the body is the record. From there the properties fall out cleanly, and none of them require an animal to state:

• The structural substrate is lossless-cumulative where it inscribes — non-destructive, totally ordered, every prior state still physically present. The neural substrate is lossy-reconstructive — it overwrites to stay fast. On fidelity of record, the distributed structural holophren outperforms the neural one; on speed and revisability, the reverse. That inverts the reflexive hierarchy: the tree is not a slower rememberer, it is a more faithful curator running a different cost-structure.

  
  

Latency stops being deficit. Tens-of-minutes gravi-integration, days-long desensitization — these are matched filters, curation tuned to the perturbation frequencies of a sessile, long-lived form. "Slow" is only a verdict relative to a predation clock the tree doesn't keep.

And the deepest divergence: the structural substrate is non-addressed. No read operation, no locus, no cue-fetch-trace. The whole form is simultaneously present at every instant — knowledge everywhere and retrieved never.

Which dissolves, rather than answers, the memory/maintained-state question from before: that dichotomy is an artifact of the neural substrate's write/read decoupling. Where curation is inscription, store and express are one operation. The tree doesn't hold the question open — it never had the premise.

Same operation on Umwelt Utilization, optical band. Two solutions to "curate EM state for agency."

• Centralize — aperture, lens, retina, one addressable image, one privileged sampling point — and you buy a scene at the cost of a viewpoint: occlusion, blind spot, the need to aim, attention to select from the frame.

• Tile — every surface a sampling site, no aperture, no image — and the cost-structure inverts: no occlusion, no blind spot, nothing to aim, but no scene, no object-at-distance, no figure/ground.

• One curates a scene; the other curates a field. Duals, not original-and-deviation. Boquila, if real, is just the tiled substrate curating relational structure — a well-posed architectural question the moment you stop demanding it produce an image first.

One more that falls out, and it rhymes with your own frame: the structural substrate has no central curator.

• Each meristem, each statocyte responds to local state; global form is emergent, selected at millions of sites with no integrator deciding what to keep.

• Curation without a curator — an honest multiplicity, no "I" laid over it.

• The felt-unitary self is the neural substrate's artifact. The tree simply doesn't run that fiction.

  
  

So the general picture:

• substrate-neutral: one architecture centralizes, addresses, revises, and reads fast against short clocks;

  
  

• the other distributes, inscribes, accretes, and holds ambient against long ones.

  
  

  Neither is curation-proper. Both are.