I was listening to NPR while making dinner tonight and heard about plant-insect signaling, which focused on a specific rainforest species of plant that has existed for countless millennia and is now being threated with extinction. Apparently, this plant heats up its fruiting body to signal to a specific beetle that uses its antenna to 'see' this heat spike against its background as the thing it is looking for: the pollen of this plant.
I draw this conclusion because of a book I read by Donald Hoffman, who deconstructed space-time as an evolutionary adaptation, which is, itself, a fiction. From that we can draw how we reconstruct our perception of photons by our eyes as doing just this—reconstructing within the three-dimensional environment the point-source for this photon. The same can be said for this beetle's 'seeing' of the plant's heat in the infrared range. And the same thing can be said for dolphins echo-mapping their environment both at its surface and its depth, determining whether a reflected object is coral, food, or foe—a metaphor for seeing.
Something to chew on.
No comments:
Post a Comment