THE SPACE WE SHARE

If a tree falls in a forest, does another tree feel heartbroken?

Humans defne the experience of “emotion” in their own terms, and exclude non-humans from this defnition on the same grounds. 1 Does this refexive understanding of emotion as human-exclusive really have merit? Trees are not humans, that much is true. But if our emotional and intellectual superiority lies in our cognitive capacities, it doesn’t help this claim to superiority that there’s much we still don’t know about the human brain, or any brain for that matter. We still understand relatively little about how consciousness arises, so certainly we cannot epistemically claim that our perception of the world is more real, smart, or emotional than that of other species. And yet, as scientists begin to uncover data on everything from dolphin to extraterrestrial intelligence, we still cling defensively to what we might call our fnal frontier: the capacity for emotion. Te premise that we and we alone reserve the ability to “feel” emotionally (and arguably also sensationally) seems contrived. A problem of parts even arises from the equivocal term “feel”: namely, what facet of emotion is essential to its existence? To explore the essence of what could be a contentious, dare I say “emotionally loaded,” topic, I will attempt to limit the domain of my argument to a narrower, physicalist space.

Trough the lens of this reductive physicalism, one that reduces emotions to their physical qualities, our understanding of “emotion,” therefore, can be reframed as an efect of the corporal mechanisms. 2 In her Teory of Constructed Emotion, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist, claims that “emotions have ontological status as causal entities… [efecting] changes in sensory, perceptual, motor, and physiological outputs.” In other words, emotions exist in so far as they cause physical outputs via the body. But where Barrett leaves fexibility for the coexistence of “feelings” in the input of emotions, Andrea Scarantino, a neuro-philosopher, eliminates their consideration altogether. In Te Motivational Teory of Emotions, Scarantino continues to boil down Barrett’s teleology of emotions as existing entirely by their function: to prepare the body for a correct (re)action. Scarantino conceives of emotions as links in a reactionary chain of inputs and out

15 1. Te most common view of scientists studying animal cognition is that animals experience simple emotions, but lack the breadth of emotions that humans experience. 2. Reductive physicalism is the idea that mental states derive from and can be reduced to physical states.

puts; and the additional reductive constraint of “correct” or “incorrect” imposed upon each link eliminates any possible coexistence of “feelings.” Terefore, all emotional interactions, whether between people, places, or memories, exist without “feelings.”

Neuroscience, specifcally experiments featuring chemosignals, ofers confounding evidence that “consciousness,” another abstract sensation, might also be irrelevant to emotions. Tese experiments with chemosignals, social chemical signals detected through chemical senses, suggest diferent creatures can emotionally connect and synchronize outside of conscious awareness. Tis physical medium, independent of our mental cognition, further implies that the hardwiring to transmit and receive “emotions” is a more relevant description than that of “feeling.” Te medium of chemosignals also introduces the idea that emotions do not just afect, but associate with and “take up” space. In Space and Emotion: Building to Feel, Margrit Pernau, an emotional historian, connects emotions and physical spaces as “mediated by the body and its senses.” Specifcally, Pernau writes, a space incites emotional knowledge, memory that the body stores. Te experience of a space is processed through Barrett’s input-output emotional mechanism, where preexisting THE SPACE WE SHARE

emotional knowledge informs Scarantino’s test for a “correct” reaction. 3 So, emotion is a schema physically built from memories of the spaces the body has experienced: it is not just fundamentally tied to physical space, but requires and occupies it. Pernau’s paper focuses on cultural geography with respect to city planning, which extrapolates well into the burgeoning, busy spaces of inter-tree network infrastructure.

If emotions occupy space, wouldn’t creatures that document physical social connections—with more permanence than chemosignal exchange— qualify to “feel” for more than us? Only two decades ago, Suzanne Simard, an ecologist, discovered that trees are nearly universally connected by what the media has called the “Wood Wide Web.” More formally, these webs, or mycorrhizal networks, are underground systems created through the symbiotic relationships of mycorrhizal fungi connecting similar and diferent plant species. Since her initial discovery, Simard has continued to advance the frontier of research in mycorrhizal networks. In her 2018 paper, “Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication, Learning, and Memory,” Simard draws similarities between the neural network of the brain and the topology of mycorrhizal networks, suggesting that trees can communi

EMMA JAMES cate and create collective memories. Trees can even process information like humans can, to learn schemas to prepare the correct reactions to the physical space (“emotions”) from it in the form of interplant signaling, and create associations with their space in the form of the mycorrhizal network. If this idea seems unreasonable, consider the irrationality of the human superiority complex. Te idea of sentience as human-exclusive, to which generations of theologians and scientists alike have defensively clung, implies a hierarchy of species. Te most substantiated argument that sets humans above other animals is that of “cumulative culture,” our ability to build upon the cultural progress of our predecessors, but even that has given rise to counterexamples in the habits of homing pigeons and Koshima monkeys. Te anthropocentrist illusion, namely that we have a monopoly on emotions, results from the winning of a game for which we set the rules. “D eep ecology,” an environmental philosophy that realizes nature has inherent value apart from its utility

EMMA JAMES to humans, establishes an “ecological self ”: the self-realization that humans are embedded in the interconnected, equal fabric of the ecosystem. Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, writes that in the “inescapable process of identifcation with others… not only other humans [but also to all organisms]... the self is widened and deepened.” In recognizing and embracing the ecosystem’s metaphysical holism— that we’re not much diferent, even in how we technically “feel”—we gain a new layer of empathetic depth and appreciation. Perhaps, though, reducing emotion to its physical qualities does not satisfy the problem of parts, and especially not for melodramatic ideas such as “heartbreak.” After all, the word itself, associated with the loss of one’s love, is uniquely and metaphysically positioned to bridge the two components (physical and abstract) of “emotion.” To avoid falling into another epistemic rabbit hole, I ofer Annette Baier’s defnition of love as “a complex tying together of emotions that two or a few people have… a special form of emotional interdependence.” Forests do not exist without mycorrhizal networks, that is they are entirely interdependent and the closer two trees are, the more mycorrhizal connections they share. On the contrary, following Baier’s defnition, heartbreak must be an emotional reaction to severed ties. So, if a tree falls in a forest, its closest partner, having lost the companion tree with which it communicated intimately, shared essential resources, and grew (physically) close to, might well feel “heartbroken.” Tis is not to make a pathetic fallacy out of creatures and systems far more complex than we know. Rather, my aim in thinking about trees and mycorrhizal networks in human terms is to refute our exclusive conception of emotions themselves. Ultimately, I want to undermine our anthropocentric dominance over other species and their emotions. S till, it might be useful to translate this new, biocentric conception of emotions back into the human realm, specifcally regarding this “feeling” of heartbreak. Tough people we love tend to take up space—in our brains, our schedules, our beds— they also teach us new dimensions and languages. Tey certainly lighten our load. Te more load they lighten, though, the harder the task of flling their absence. Te space that someone (perhaps they were a little over 6’0”, perhaps, at times, they were a little hysterical) flled will always remain emotionally colored by those memories. Like a tree fallen, logged, or rotted down, it takes some time for the one closest to the fallen tree to recover. Nevertheless, the forest still stands because it can.

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