When a rock tells a story about its past, it isn't. You are reading a story. You are giving meaning to an old rock. Now perhaps the rock is sentient, and could have inherent or derived purpose or meaning, but as we truly know only our own thoughts, we can not know the rock's meaning unless we become it. The meaning we know is our own.
Hmmm. I'm still thinking like TP that the "meaning" as you call it is a storage of information, it's utilization, and context. I think if you look at the three aspects of being a rock (what crystals are where, what is its chemical composition) the literal path it took to become THAT rock is etched into it much like a 1 or 0 is written in RAM on a computer.
"I am a granite boulder in a stream".
Clearly it is in a stream. It is made of quartz, potassium and calcium plagioclase with a minor amount of mica and mafic minerals that had to cool slowly". It would not be any of these things if it came from somewhere else like a beach in Hawaii. That is a memory, IMO. Even as it wears down in the stream all these memories affect how it will react to various stimuli in the stream. An impact that would break a sandstone boulder, will leave it unharmed. But, extended exposure to water will cause the calcium plagioclase to turn into zeolite.
Ant colonial intelligence is accomplished by similar, highly mechanistic algorithms that compete against one another. I don't think any of us who look at an ant colony can walk away thinking that the 100k neurons in each ant's brain is enough to describe the total phenomena.
BTW, TP, I agree that the crust is highly mobile and that if consciousness is defined as changing memories, then yes, rocks may have a consciousness that would exist on a time scale impossible for us to understand. |
