Notes from Maine - 2023/09/10

The horse dentist cancelled again. They said it was too hot last week. Nobody wants to sedate a horse when it’s hot—I guess they don’t maintain proper temperature when it’s hot. I suppose I should have thought of that when I tried to shift all their medical appointments to the summer. Vets are so busy in the fall, so I was trying to make scheduling a little easier. 

We rescheduled for the end of the month. Maybe that will work. The weather here has been unpredictable. Our hottest week of the summer didn’t come until the beginning of September! I believe that this is a “mast year” for both the maple trees and the pines in back of my house. Are you familiar with that term? A friend of mine brought me up to speed a few years ago. 

Here’s a concise definition:  

“Every few years, some species of trees and shrubs produce a bumper crop of their fruits or nuts. The collective term for these fruits and nuts is 'mast', so we call this a mast year.”

Late last spring, when the maple leaves came out, the trees also produced a ton of helicopter seeds. There are way more than usual. In the past month, the pines have produced an abundance of pine cones. They’re weighing down the tops of the trees in numbers that I’ve never seen before. Animals (like squirrels and chipmunks, I guess) who collect this produce will probably have a bunch of offspring next year. It’s an interesting strategy, I suppose. The trees overwhelm the local seedeaters one year, get their seeds dispersed all around, and then other years they just lay back to rebuild strength. That’s how I’m interpreting the behavior.

What’s really interesting is that the maple trees started producing all these seeds before the rain started. With all the rain, it has been a great year for trees and plants. My neighbor is having his first really successful cucumber year due to the abundance of rain. The maples, stressed out by the dry summers the past few years, picked just the right year to invest in growing seeds. Did they somehow know that the rain was coming?

My grandfather’s friend used to predict the severity of the upcoming winter based on where the wasps would nest. If they nested up high, the wasps were preparing for a late spring with deep snow pack. Nests down low meant we weren’t going to get as much snow.

This is from the Old Farmer’s Almanac:

“Expect rain when dogs eat grass, oxen sniff the air, and swine are restless. If the bull leads the cows to pasture, expect rain; if the cows precede the bull, the weather will be uncertain.”

It’s fun to think about plants and animals with instinctual knowledge of what the future will bring. And it’s pretty easy to imagine the mechanism for how it could happen. The wasps who responded to subtle environmental changes would survive more often. The others—ones who always built up high, or always built their nests down low—might perish because of wind, cold, or snowpack. But if the feedback is only annual, how many years would it take to develop this response? Wasps have been around since the mid-Triassic, or about 240 million years. Would a couple hundred million be enough?

The computer AI discussions have talked a lot about the meaning of “intelligence.” It seems like the behavior is more akin to instinct. Since I’m quoting websites today, instinct is, “An inborn impulse or motivation to action typically performed in response to specific external stimuli.”

In contrast, intelligence is, “The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.”

Chat GPT can come up with astoundingly good responses to some questions, and it’s based on NLP (Natural Language Processing), which is a branch of AI (Artificial Intelligence). Nobody credible is saying that Chat GPT has actually reached intelligence. I think it’s more useful to think of the responses as purely instinctual. All the Chat GPTs with the wrong answer to the query were culled. All that’s left is the one that instinctually knows the answer to the prompt.

I just witnessed a great example of the difference between instinct and intelligence!

There was a big juicy fly buzzing around my room, trying to land in my coffee just now. Instinct drew it to the natural light coming through the window. It took true intelligence for me to grab a rag, swat it at the fly (missing it!), and knock a framed photo from the windowsill to the floor, breaking it.