Taxonomy as Prayer

Apologies for the title, because I am not going to write about either taxonomy or prayer, which will probably come as a relief to you. The phrase simply captures a dynamic and process that I do want to explore, which is the phase shift that occurs when intense engagement with the physical world evolves into a a more abstracted involvement. Sigmund Freud called it the 'oceanic feeling', if I am correct in aligning my simple thought with one of the many insights of such an original thinker. As a young researcher, he took to dissecting the brains of mice in an attempt to discover the origin of the soul, finally abandoning that approach for another that eventually came to be psychoanalysis and psychotherapy achieved through talking, which involves essentially the same shift from the concrete to the abstract which I have in mind.

I remember once, in a graduate seminar, expressing my desire to break down a house into its myriad components, using a simple tool such as a spider diagram. I was immediately and roundly chastised by one of the professors present, saying that a house is not a home, and that my approach to understanding the house would be overly reductive. Well, yeah. That was the whole point. Or one of the points. My instinct was to break down the house - into doors, siding, windows, latches, nails, et cetera, down to the most infinitesimal piece imaginable, decomposing also the raw materials into their constituent elements: fiber, vapor, molecules, atoms, electrons . . .

By doing so, my aim was to completely exhaust the material nature of the house, just as I suspect that Freud was trying to completely dismantle the physical structure of the brains of those poor rodents, with the feeling that once that was done, the spiritual will become accessible. It is clearly a Baroque exercise, looking for truth in the irreducible. It also has its Romantic version, however. Many times over the past year, as I have toiled away at refurbishing my house, I have fallen into faint revelries in the midst of one task or another. I recall standing on a ladder while working on some pipes, struggling with a wrench to fit a length into a tight space, gaining a fraction of an inch with each turn, all while making sure to not lose my balance, but so absorbed in the task that I felt perfectly comfortable, pipe and fitting here, pipe dope there, feet planted firmly on the ladder, the wrench a mere extension of my arm . . .

Then I looked up and saw the clouds scudding across the sky, and there it was. That revelry. That feeling. Probably the thing that Freud felt as he sat hunched over his work.

It happened another time when I was snaking out a sewer line in my driveway. Seated on the concrete, I struggled to get the snake up the mainline to clear it, again gaining an inch or two with every turn. There must be something in the rhythmic nature of the work that sets one up to shift from one phase to another. So after minutes - hours? - of wrestling with this snake, I was prompted to look up, who knows shy, and gazed into the middle distance, immersed in that same intense feeling, of somehow being connected to something much bigger or markedly different from everyday reality.

Who knows. Maybe this is just the same as a runner's high, something which I have also experienced. But its source is somehow rooted in a different place, more cognitive somehow, because as demanding as the pipefitting or drain snaking was, I was not at all exhausted in a physical sense, and there was no rush of endorphins.

But back to the house. My idea, or my instinct, was to pulverize the house to the point that the constituent elements both disappeared and also then perhaps blew away or recombined to produce something new, something of a new order, in a new phase. From dust you came and to dust you shall return. Had the professor been more patient, I think he would have seen how I got from house to home by destroying the house, or at least by breaking it down so methodically and exhaustively.

So to do this with plants would, I think, help enter that new phase of understanding, helping to discover that ultimate container that I mentioned in my earlier post. Trunk, branch, stem, leaf, fiber, cell . . . Not to do this materially necessarily, but in one's imagination, and to do it to oneself also . . . Again, I think this is what people are talking about when they speak of being at one with nature, when they go hiking or fishing or whatever . . .

This idea gets at the point of an even earlier post in which I talk about walking in the Oakland Hills and was looking for some possible point of juncture with the trees that surrounded me, as fellow beings. What is that common core?

Unequal Equality and the Need for an Ultimate Container

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The quote above is from Animal Farm by George Orwell. It came to mind when I was thinking of my gradation of multi-ontological personhoods, the idea being that every or most things can be a person, according to various scientific and philosophical understandings, but that they are, by virtue of their varying natures, different kinds of persons. In other words, I have posited a gradation, spectrum or range of personhood, organized not by value but by characteristics - by qualities but not by quality.

It is all a bit of a cheat, or at least a potential cheat, because what is the point of creating a category of something if all of the things within that category are in fact radically different, or inhabit the category for radically different reasons? What I need is a bigger container in which I can put my personhood container, in order to provide an overarching rationale or model of personhood, but of course that does not really solve the problem, since I would in turn need another container for the that container, and so on. 

I noticed the same problem when listening to a cosmologist give a year end summary of the current thinking about the beginnings of the universe. It all came off as kind of funny to me, because apparently the reigning ideas are that the universe came from nothing, that it has its own rules, that the stuff inside the universe is not like the universe itself, that all of our physics breaks down before the Big Bang, and that we should not be surprised if the universe turns out to be unlike anything we have ever known before. In other words, the container that we have needs to fit into another container to give it a rational and meaningful context, and so on. So it is the same problem.

I suppose what resolves the rational contradiction for me is that it all just feels right. As a teenager I developed this idea of a sensual morality. Something is wrong if it feels wrong. It was the argument I used for being a vegetarian. Of course, now that I know more about plants, I feel bad about eating them too. So the new task is to somehow reconcile the idea that somethings have to die in order for other things to live. This is the central problem of being human, and in my view the central problem, or one of the central problems, that animates religious, philosophical and scientific thought.

There are many ways that this is done, but as far as I can tell they all suffer from the ultimate container problem.

Christmas Trees and Cut Flowers

Let's talk Christmas trees, shall we? And also cut flowers. I'll start with Christmas trees first although much of what I say about Christmas trees applies to cut flowers, and even in some cases animals.

I think cutting down a tree, bringing it into the house, and stringing it with electrical wires and light bulbs, is weird. I have always felt this way, or at least that is how it seems now, but it might be the case that as a child I accepted the common wisdom that this was a good thing to do. I am pretty sure, however, that I had an instinctual feeling that it was wrong, just as I was sickened every time I went into the meat aisle of the supermarket as I tagged along with my mother when she went grocery shopping. As a young adolescent I turned this feeling into an intellectual argument, but I think the feeling has always been with me, and always sincerely felt.

As I mentioned at the start, the I had the same feeling toward cut flowers, although I think I arrived at this position somewhat later than I did with Christmas trees, and for somewhat different reasons, at least initially. As a young boy, I was alienated from the aesthetic. Highly gendered, cut flowers were for girls. I could admire flowers growing outside, but the world of stems in vases was a bit out of my ambit. This sentiment, too, later evolved into an intellectual lament: Why kill beautiful flowers, who were happily growing outside, only to try to extend their life by putting them in water, often with aspirin or some other additive that was supposed to help preserve them?

I now feel that having any kind of plant in the house, even living ones in potted plants, is strange and unhealthy. As much as I like plants, I generally feel that they belong outdoors, rooted in the soil, in the earth, and not inside. I think the same is true of animals. Don't get me started on the idea of birds in a cage. As a teenager I was an avid aquarist. No more. I was happy to read several years ago that the Italian city of Bologna had outlawed keeping goldfish in bowls. Bravo.

The Disarming Nature of Babies

This is a photo of the cactus I have had half-a-mind to remove for the past year or so. But as soon as it started to produce 'babies' I just couldn't do it. There is something about the act of producing, or reproducing, that I find disarming. The same is true for my rose bushes. I am so pleased with the lush green grass that the winter rains have brought, so I view anything that is sharp and spiky as less than desirable. But the roses also have put out new buds - I counted 23 the other day - so they too are going to stay, I suppose until they have reached the natural end of their life. At the end of the season, I don't feel bad about raking up the dried remains of the grass and weeds. They have lived their lives, and I feel it is okay to remove them and send them to the yard bin without feeling that I am doing anything wrong. The cactus and roses have earned their place, even if at times I feel cross with them.

EXCERPT: Davos (3)

Here are the next two paragraphs of Davos, the first book in the Franco Fasiolo series, which recounts the adventures of its eponymous protagonist, who is a forensic botanist and reluctant cosmopolitan. I hope you enjoy them!

Eventually Franco reached some curves, just a small cluster of switchbacks, but welcome nonetheless to relieve the monotony of the long slow trudge up the bituminous slide. Franco wished he could see inside of his lungs. He could feel them but he could not see them. He looked out and down to where he had come from and could see the layer of moisture he had passed through. He could feel it in his lungs, the heavy cloying moisture that coated and soothed but also congested them. What would it be like to have lizard lungs, hot and dry, with fine strong veins that soaked up the oxygen without having to extract it from water? How fast and light his body would be, like a balsa wood airplane passing through thin summer air. He regretted his jacket already, and it was not even nine o’clock yet, but this was always the way. There seemed to be no escaping it. When he had stepped outside the door the cold had surprised and delighted him, but already he felt the sweat on the back of his neck, either sweat or moisture from the air. Was there a difference? Who could tell? When did one become the other?

What would he say at Davos? What would they ask? Franco always tried to prepare but no more than a few minutes in, he would abandon the effort, overwhelmed by the infinite number of considerations that could sway his testimony one way or another, or another, or another. His idea was always to use these walks to collect his thoughts, but without the ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum of the train, and its rhythmic slowing and speeding, he had no mechanism to order and propel his thinking, except for his heartbeat, footfall and breathing. Wasn’t that enough? Too much? No, the problem was his brain, with neural circuits that ran like highway overpasses, with entrances, exits and overpasses, cloverleaves that produced sudden and unplanned proximities, enlightening tangents. His body had been replaced by the world, especially by the city, the urban world. ‘I can’t not read words in front of me’, a woman had said, not to him but to another woman she was talking to. Franco thought of people he knew who read deliberately, and with effort. It was not natural and ineluctable for them as it was for that woman and as it was for him. What were their brains like? How nice it must be to decide to read something, or otherwise to be able to ignore it. Is this what he liked about the goat and the donkey, the poor sad cow, the fig tree, the stone that sits in the sun and rain, indifferent to the world of words? Davossssss. It was too late for Franco.

Plants as Placemakers

Corpus torrentis in locum signat. 

The body in the river marks the spot. For some reason I worked up this phrase in a febrile hour of tossing and turning in the middle of the night. I then spent the next hour - or perhaps just several intense minutes, who knows - spinning this idea out to larger Baroque ideas about the nature and scale of reality. Briefly, according to Kwa Chunglin, one can contrast two ways of engaging the world: Romantic, in which one sees a large and inclusive system that extends above and beyond the viewer, and the Baroque, one that contains worlds within worlds that repeat endlessly downward and inward. Romantics use telescopes; Baroques use microscopes.

And so we have a body (of a person) floating in a body (of water). It is a Baroque image to be sure. One could extend the perspective to see bodies within the personal body: colonies of bacteria, for example, and even viruses that inhabit the bodies of the bacterial bodies. Complicating the scene is the fact that the body is floating, and presumably moving because the river itself is moving. So what we have is a body that marks a place, always the same place, that which is informed by the body, but also different places, because the body is always moving. So the river itself is a body within a body: call it the land, the earth or what have you.

What does this have to do with plants? Well, as I have remarked before, I find the sessile nature of plants to be among the most characteristic and charming of their features. Corpus terrenus in locum signat. (Let me confess at this point that my Latin is at best shaky. A genuine Latin scholar would surely do better). The body in the earth marks the spot. No form of life is more rooted in the earth than plants. Are they then the first and ultimate makers of place (in general) and places (in specific)? No, I would give the pride of place to the earth and elements of it (stones, et cetera) and then plants, which means that humus plays a special role, being the decayed remnants of defunct plants that add their own uniquely organic component to soil, that most special kind of earth.

All of this leads me back to the notion that plants are the great translators of the universe, mediating between Earth and its denizens on the one side and the Sun on the other.

The Collective Person

A recent study indicates that the immune system of an individual being, in this case rhesus monkeys, is sensitive to social rank. Immune system responses and severity of tissue inflammation varied according to where the individual fell with respect to rank within its community.

The study raises two questions for me. One, to what extent can we identify individual persons given the extent to which an individual body appears to be connected to exogenous structures? Two, to what extent can we conceive and speak of collective persons, given that there seems to be an identifiable network of agency that lies outside of the body of a single entity?

Michel Serres has written of our inability or reluctance to acknowledge 'the swarm'. He made his observations quite some time ago, before public health and epidemiological studies began making the individual-collective connection, but on a general cultural level, his observation is still valid. Studies show that one's eating habits depend strongly upon the habits of one's social group, so measures aimed at controlling obesity, diabetes and other diet related conditions that focus only or primarily on individual agency are largely unsuccessful. We may understand this group dynamic scientifically, but culturally it seems we have still not formulated a working model of it.

Here is where the idea that plants serve as models for human behavior becomes instructive. Many people balk at the idea that plants are more like humans than we are wont to believe, but the idea that humans are more like plants seems to be received more readily. Among plants, the relation between individual and collective seems more normal and less problematic. The rhizome in its many forms: the lawn, the thatch, the grove, all seem to be understandable instantiations of nature. Grass, bamboo and oaks seem, in their sessile durability, easily clustered together. I have a family of cactus, presumably mamas and babies, firmly rooted in one corner of my front yard, that have so far resisted any interventions on my part to uproot them, having marshaled their collective adorability against my hostility. Parents often gain esteem from their children, but this is sometimes not acknowledged in a society that privileges individual over group, and especially familial, achievement.

I will have to revisit Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to see what insights he has into this notion.

Plant Liability and Legal Fictions

If we conceive of plants as persons, and I understand that there are good arguments against this position, we have to eventually consider what such a proposition means with regard to plant agency and, especially, plant liability. Such a concern stems from my conception of personhood as being defined by six parameters: agency, sentience, perception, consciousness, communicability and contractibility. To briefly summarize: agency is the capacity to do things, sentience is the capacity to sense things, perception is the capacity to cognitively process things, consciousness is the capacity to gather these cognitions into a synthesized awareness, communicability is the capacity to communicate with other things, and contractibility is the capacity to enter into agreements with other things. From my perspective, any one of these abilities is sufficient cause to designate personhood in an entity. It is a pretty broad view of personhood, I understand, but I feel that by using science and logic one can make a strong argument that plants are persons.

Where my argument gets even more difficult is when I start to consider liability in plants. From one perspective, it is quite easy get there as we do it all the time by creating what is considered to be a 'legal fiction'. If I park my car on a hill and another car comes along and hits it in such a way as to cause it to roll down a hill and smash into another car, I may be found to be not guilty in the event, in a legal sense, but I could very well be held liable, with regards to my auto insurance. Things happen, they are not my fault, but I still have to make amends somehow. In a literal sense I did not cause any of these things to happen, unless one considers my parking of the car to have conditioned, facilitated, allowed or made possible the string of events, but as a result of a system of laws and policies, and the legal fictions that are immanent to them, I bear some liability for them.

If we start to enfold nonhumans into this arrangement by enrolling them in our social and legal fictions, to what extent and in what manner can we assign liability to them? Medieval jurists had no trouble convicting animals of crimes, such as when a goat wandered into a bean patch and devoured a crop. Today, such a thing would be considered impossible because the legal fiction to which we adhere is that it is not the goat who is liable for its actions but the owner of the goat. In a modern court, one could not sue the goat but one could certainly sue the owner for such an act, on the grounds that he or she is liable for not restraining the goat properly and allowing it to wander onto another person's property. But it really was not the owner who ate the beans. It was the goat.

What would a system of laws (within the ambit of a legal system) or policies (within the realm of insurance) that could accommodate plant liability look like? Could a tree carry insurance that would protect it in the case of an accident that it caused? I don't see why not. Such a policy could depend upon the idea that all agency and all liability devolved to the tree without involving the agencies of other persons or property, a scenario which raises the question of recognizing personhood for land, conceived as a unitary entity, which is another fiction in itself. One need only pay attention to the dispute in North Dakota over the installation of an oil pipeline to see a living example of land and its components, in this case water in particular, as an entity that deserves respect by virtue of its sacred nature, a sacrality that is alien to western thought but essential to the world views of Native American cultures and the societies that embrace them. At the risk of dissolving into a kind of naive philosophical conjecture, the quandary leads me to consider the fiction of truth and, more optimistically, the truth of fiction.

What a strangely animated world such a shift would portend for the modern industrial world. It would mean an entry into a system of relations already enjoyed by many people, a group that is great in wisdom but sadly small in number, and even worse, weak in power. One can hope that the power - and beauty - of their ideas eventually wins out.

EXCERPT: Davos (2)

Here are the next two paragraphs of Davos, the first book in the Franco Fasiolo series, which recounts the adventures of its eponymous protagonist, who is a forensic botanist and reluctant cosmopolitan. I hope you enjoy them!

The road up out of the valley had an annoying grade, steep enough to make walking hard but not steep enough to make it exciting, just a long low incline that took the energy out of Franco's center without ever making itself known. They called it the Valley of Tears, which while unoriginal was not inaccurate, and therefore a description that Franco accommodated with a resigned complicity. His strides seemed tiny, as if he were merely lifting his feet and putting them down in almost the same place, hardly advancing at all against the road's invisible slope, like a mountaineer who had gone so high as to have immersed himself in a new register of gravity.

Finally he reached the border. The guard smirked at him with a handsome face when Franco told him where he was going. Davos? Long way away! Franco just stood and said nothing, like the donkey. What does the guard do? Sit in his silly car, or on his obnoxious motorcycle? How far has he ever walked? No more than a few hundred meters, if that. The guard handed Franco back his passport and smiled again with perfect facial hair. Funny how it just grew like that, not like Franco's beard, which was fuller and less angular. He looked like a lad of the Renaissance, not from around here, not like Franco, who was born and bred in the valley. Still, the guard was very likable and Franco was sad to go, adding him to his already long list of heartbreaks: the goat, the cow, the pig (remembered from another walk), the donkey, the slide, the smiling realtor, the fig tree.

The Wisdom of the Harpedonaptae

While I work my way through several pieces of plant research, as well as a book that I had overlooked, I offer for consideration a couple of paragraphs from a forthcoming publication, which I have modified slightly for the sake of comprehensibility:

The idea of making a pact with nature seems impossible at first. How can two agents strike an agreement when one of them clearly cannot even talk, let alone think, or act consciously, at least when viewed from a human perspective? The point is irrelevant, Michel Serres argues. After all, the social contract is tacit and unspoken and so should be the natural one. Son of a bargeman and a former merchant marine, Serres extols the ability of peasants and sailors to read nature not through words but through lines, noting that the English word “draft” works as both a noun and a verb, referring to contracts as well as the act of pulling, and the lines, of words and of fiber, that make each one possible. The administrators, managers and scientists who currently run the world have long lost their capacity to understand nature because they are no longer in daily contact with it, no longer dependent upon it, and no longer capable of negotiating with it. They have let loose the strings that once connected them to it and can no longer feel, let alone understand, the chordal vibrations through which nature speaks. Channeled into narrow fields of expertise and attentive to immediate needs, modern administrators form bonds with nature that are instrumental and temporary rather than mutual and enduring. With the onset of climate change and growing human acknowledgment of it, these cords have reappeared and the skeins of discourse have multiplied and thickened, but not nearly to extent needed to avoid global catastrophe, in Serres’ opinion. A better vision might now be in place but the old mechanisms at hand are still inadequate to achieve it. Serres recommends fuzzy sets as the proper model as they offer the needed flexibility and mutability in their many interstices and gaps. Strength lies in the plurality and uncertainty of their form, which is more like a rope than a rod.

The cords of relation that Serres envisions as the clauses of the natural contract serve three purposes: they attach, they inform and they delimit. Imagining the harpedonaptae of the Nile River delta, the rope-stretchers who would measure and mark agricultural fields following each flood, he sees cords as the perfect instruments. Hanging loosely they connect human subjects and contain the law that binds the social world. Stretched taut they transfer that law to the earth and therefore attach the natural world to the social one. But the bonds are flexible. The harpedonaptae knew they could do their work only after the river flooded and receded, so they made the cords slack and taut accordingly, knowing that the soft power of relations was more durable than the hard power of technology; knowing when to give (loosen) and when to take (tighten) was essential. Levees and damns inevitably give way to the forces of nature, permanence having been mistakenly ascribed to them. Much more durable is a recurring social-technological system of partitioning and the cords that facilitate it, the flexibility and mutability of the instrument matching the flexibility and mutability of the relation between people and river. The ways of nature may be ultimately unknowable, but Serres sees an elegance in not knowing. In place of total knowledge and total mastery, he suggests a system of ignorance with acceptance, a relation characterized by polite indifference being preferable to a prying intrusion. His is a call to respect the unknown, to have a cautious relation to the obscure.

In the Median

I mean, come on! Sorry to not offer a photo to illustrate my point, but I felt that it would just be one more layer of exploitation to heap upon the poor flowers, who some government landscaper planted in a small plot on the left-hand side of the the freeway offramp I take to get to my house.

So, apologies for the title, which is somewhat misleading, since the plants I am talking about are not in the median strip of a boulevard. The effect is the same, however. Am I overreacting? Maybe. Maybe these plants are quite indifferent to the sound and noise pollution caused by hundreds of thousands of cars passing them everyday. But I doubt it. Furthermore, I am sure that no one would think twice about seeing a dead plant that had been relegated to a roadside plot, even though it would be the very conditions of that treatment that caused its demise. Would the observer regard the scene the same way were the entity a kitten? Of course not.

I can only hope that improved scientific understanding of the lives and sensibilities of plants will change our cultural attitudes toward and treatment of them.

Trees as Social Mediators

A murder of crows has taken residence in a fir tree behind my house. There are maybe a half a dozen of them, and they often put on a great show that involves throaty cawing as they swoop in and out of the tree's branches. Sometimes they stage their display around a nearby telephone pole, but in the mornings, it is most often the fir tree with, on this occasion, the graceful, high altitude gliding of a seagull, somewhat more inland than usual, apparently the cause for excitement.

The tree must provide a wealth of support and stimulus, a green and growing framework for the crows' daily efforts. Tall, it must serve as an excellent perch that provides both security and great visibility, both in the sense of maximizing the extent to which they can see as well as the extent to which others can see them. I see them duck inside the branches from time to time, often with something in their beaks, but mostly, when I see them, they are swirling around the crown with great acrobatic skill, and seemingly having a fantastic time.

I feel comfortable when they are in the tree. When they stage themselves on the telephone pole, they can get a little threatening, and visions of Alfred Hitchcock's film, The Birds, come to mind. They actually chased me into the house the other day, as they were so excited and noisy I thought they were going to attack. The telephone pole is both lower and more skeletal, so without an interior into which they can disappear, as is the case with the fir.

I wonder, then, if the arrival of telephone poles, being what they are materially, and having the effect they do on crow behavior, or on what is possible for a group of crows, or at least my perception of it, represents an important change in the local ecology, for the crows, as well as the people, and of course for the trees. With regard to the last one, perhaps the tree is indifferent to the presence of the crows, but such a conjecture suggests the need for further research. With more droppings falling on fallow concrete, as I witnessed yesterday afternoon, and keeping in mind that crows are large and hardy creatures as far as birds go, I think the consequent displacement of nourishing manure should have some kind of measurable effect, even if in the end it proves to be inconsequential. 

Developing a Meta Perspective

I was out walking in the Oakland Hills this morning, specifically in and around the Chabot Space and Science Center. The actual center was closed, but since it is located in a regional park, there is a lot to do if walking around in the woods is your thing.

And that is the question, isn't it. Does anyone like to walk in the woods? I suppose you could make an argument that certain cultures - Nordic and Amazonian - to name just two off of the top of my head, although certainly not limited to these, for even in Sicily one can drive into the Nebrodi Mountains or in and around the slopes of Mount Etna and be as much in the woods as if you were in the Black Forest or the Chocó Rainforest, or nearly so.

Somehow some cultures have developed a more inclusive relation with the woods than others. This development can include but is different from what I am going to call a meta perspective on plants. For example, if plant neurobiologists such as Stefano Mancuso can say that plants can see, how are human beings to interpret that statement? In what sense does the word 'see' denote the thing that plants do in their engagement with light as well as the thing that humans do in their engagement with light? Plants do not have eyes, so maybe the capacity to produce images is not existent, but they are apparently sensitive to changing conditions, and therefore able to discern light from shadow, and even to tell when someone or something walks by them, momentarily blocking their light. Is this a kind of seeing?

If not, what is it when a I stand out in the sun with my eyes closed? I can sense when a cloud passes over the sun and thereby blocks the light. I sense a cooling on my skin and perhaps a darkening through some kind of residual sight capacity that remains even through my closed eyelids. Focusing on the skin sensation, and omitting the specialized capacity of eyes, especially their capacity to facilitate the production of images, is this what a plant senses when a cloud momentarily blocks the sunlight? In other words, when Aristotle stated that all senses are just variations on touch, is human skin like the membrane of a leaf or stem in the way it engages light? And by focusing on this similarity, can humans gains some sense of how plants are? Does this eyeless engagement with light facilitate the development of a meta perspective on the world, or at least a part of it? And must we not also consider that photosynthesis is a form of engagement with light that is so beyond human experience that we must not be fooled into thinking that the development of a meta perspective is somehow more inclusive of plant ontology than human ontology because plant experience is simpler?

It seems that I need to know more about how a plant experiences photosynthesis, if I can even use the word 'experience' in this way as a function of plants, before I could go further in developing a meta perspective on engagements with light across plant and human ontologies, so as to do a better job of including the ways of means of plant life into the project.