Lucas Hinojosa-López

Ecosystems are routinely evaluated in terms of degradation, resilience, recovery, and restoration success, yet the conceptual status of ecosystemic health remains unresolved. This paper examines whether health can be ontologically attributed to ecosystems. We first characterise ecosystems as complex biological systems whose organisation depends not merely on the presence of organisms, but on structured networks of trophic, mutualistic, symbiotic, competitive, and biogeochemical interactions. We then adopt an ecological account of health according to which health is understood as the capacity to endure and adapt to environmental perturbations. Against this background, we ask whether ecosystems possess the forms of regulation required for health in the strict biological sense. Our conclusion is qualified. Although ecosystems exhibit adaptive capacities associated with their complex organisation, current evidence does not warrant attributing to them the specialised biological regulation required for organismic health in the strict sense. Even so, the concept is not merely decorative, as it offers a theoretically disciplined and empirically tractable framework for ecological restoration by shifting attention from species counts alone to the recovery of interactional organisation, functional relations, and adaptive capacity under disturbance.

Nagel (1974) kickstarted a now-long tradition in the Philosophy of Mind of using thought experiments to elucidate the relationship between conscious experience and the body, and the difficulties of explaining its character in a pure physicalist fashion. In this article, Nagel points out that, even though we know a lot about how bats use echolocation to navigate and make sense of their environments, these (naturalistic, mechanical) explanations don’t help us to imagine what it is like to be a bat, how their inner experience is qualitatively different from ours. Recent research in the novel area of Plant Cognition (Calvo 2016, Calvo & Lawrence, 2022) has strongly, albeit controversially, suggested that some plants and fungi exhibit fitness-increasing behaviors that strikingly resemble aspects of animal cognition, even in the absence of a dedicated, central nervous system: they seem capable of sensing/perceiving their environment, form memories and learn from past experiences, make anticipatory decisions regarding their current state and the environment, and communicate and behave as a coordinated collective. On the other hand, in the Philosophy of Mind, there has been an increasing interest in non-representational forms of cognition. The 4E Cognition movement has suggested that representational, intentional cognition only emerges when more basic cognitive abilities (imitation, communication, and language) are already in place and that most cognitive activities don't involve contentful representation. This leaves open the possibility of basic fungal cognition, sophisticated enough to explain the behaviors exhibited by the Infected in The Last of Us. Regarding the relationship between plants and fungi, Simard (2018) has suggested that the symbiosis between these organisms confers cognitive abilities to the trees and plants involved in this relationship, mainly abilities such as learning, communication, and a type of intelligence based on memory. When the symbiosis occurs within a forest ecosystem, the participating fungi act as nodes in a network, being a link between the different trees colonized by a certain fungus. By achieving a free-scale ecosystem interconnection within forests (Beiler et al. 2015; Beiler and Simard 2010), fungi act as mediators between plant organisms, providing a substrate for direct communication between symbiotic agents based on chemical and electrical signals (Simard et al. 1997; Song et al. 2015). This suggests Clickers not only use echolocation, but also an underground communication network established from the symbiosis between plant and fungus, allowing recognition of the space in which they are located and adaptation within it. This article will attempt to explain how Clickers gain basic echolocation given the loss of neural cognitive resources, in order to explain how this mixed/symbiotic cognitive agency, if ever possible, might be explained.

A planta sensível Mimosa Púdica é um tipo particular de planta que possui folhas capazes de responder ao contato em questão de segundos, fazendo com que se retraiam e pareçam murchas. É uma das poucas plantas que iniciam movimentos visualmente perceptíveis ao ser humano. No que diz respeito às pesquisas incipientes sobre sensibilidade e cognição em plantas, a Mimosa parece ser um organismo modelo interessante para analisar essas possibilidades graças às suas respostas rápidas que podem ser observadas diretamente. Desta forma, a Mimosa Púdica poderá ser utilizada como modelo para o estudo do fenómeno da sensibilidade e da cognição, não só a nível eletrofisiológico, mas também a nível comportamental e funcional. Com base nas evidências científicas da biologia e da neurociência dos últimos 15 anos, argumentar-se-á que a planta sensível é um organismo modelo adequado para estudar, não apenas a nível fisiológico-mecânico, a capacidade das plantas em responder a estímulos, mas também também avaliar que tantas habilidades cognitivas, como aprendizagem e memória, são atribuíveis aos organismos vegetais a partir das respostas observáveis ​​no referido modelo. O acima exposto é postulado em relação à ideia de que todos os organismos vegetais iniciam movimentos, mas nem todos são observáveis ​​pelos humanos: a Mimosa seria então um modelo útil para análise, pois apresenta movimentos que podem ser observados pelos pesquisadores e permitiria a avaliação de diferentes capacidades relacionadas aos fenômenos de sensibilidade e cognição.