Plants have already shown us that relational significance does not require a nervous system.
Trees take the idea further.
A tree is not simply a large plant.
It is a long-lived, modular organism whose growth, physiology and relationships extend across space and time.
Its world is therefore distributed.
The question becomes:
What does a topology of relational significance look like when its participants live on the scale of decades or centuries?
A tree is a process spread through space
A tree does not have a single obvious centre from which everything is controlled.
Its roots, trunk, branches and leaves are physically connected, but different regions experience different conditions.
Water availability varies.
Light varies.
Damage may occur in one part while the rest remains intact.
Plants coordinate local events with systemic responses through hydraulic, chemical and electrical signalling pathways. Long-distance electrical signals, for example, can propagate information about local stress and contribute to coordinated responses elsewhere in the plant. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
The tree therefore maintains its organisation through distributed coordination.
The tree has a history
Trees also make time visible.
A plant can respond differently to a later stress because of earlier experience. Plant environmental "memory" is understood in terms of persistent physiological, molecular and developmental changes that alter subsequent responses. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
This need not mean remembering in the psychological sense.
It means that:
what happened before can alter what the organism can do next.
History has therefore become part of biological organisation.
That is already important for our concept of relational significance.
The forest is not merely background
A tree also grows among other living organisms.
Other plants alter available light.
Roots occupy shared soil.
Fungi colonise roots.
Herbivores damage leaves.
Microorganisms alter nutrient availability.
These are not merely "environmental factors" in an undifferentiated sense.
They are other organised systems whose activities can alter the tree's own possibilities.
The ecological environment is therefore already a field of relational significance.
Trees and other plants
Plants can respond to cues associated with neighbouring plants, including changes in light and chemical signals, with consequences for growth and defence. Such signalling is context-dependent rather than a simple universal language. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
A tree can therefore occupy a relational environment containing other plants without any need to imagine symbolic communication.
Again:
signal is not sign.
The relation remains biological.
The fungal topology
The relationship between trees and fungi takes us somewhere more interesting.
Mycorrhizal fungi form persistent associations with plant roots and participate in exchanges involving nutrients and other resources. These relationships can extend through fungal networks connecting plants with microbial communities in the surrounding soil. (nature.com)
The resulting system is not easily represented as:
tree → environment.
It looks more like:
tree ↔ fungus ↔ soil ↔ microorganisms ↔ other plants
The tree participates in a network of relationships that crosses biological boundaries.
A topology larger than the organism
Our earlier topology of mattering was mainly social.
Here the topology is ecological.
Different organisms remain distinct, yet their possibilities are linked.
A tree may depend upon fungal partners for access to resources.
The fungi depend upon plants for carbon.
Microorganisms influence both.
The interactions can be reciprocal, asymmetric and persistent.
This is relational organisation without necessarily being social mattering.
That distinction is now one of the central achievements of the series.
The topology also changes
The tree is not simply situated within a fixed ecological network.
It grows.
Roots extend.
Branches spread.
Shade changes.
Resources are redistributed.
Organisms enter and leave.
The topology therefore changes as the organism develops.
Growth is simultaneously:
growth of the organism
and:
reconfiguration of its relations.
The tree changes its topology by growing into it.
Time enlarges the topology
This may be the most distinctive feature of trees.
A rapid animal interaction can unfold in seconds.
A tree's important relationships may unfold over years.
A root can encounter a fungal partner.
A branch can alter the light available to neighbouring plants.
A damaged tree can change its physiology long after the original event.
A previous drought can affect later responses through persistent physiological and molecular changes. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
The topology is therefore extended in time as well as space.
Memory without a nervous system
This makes trees especially useful for our earlier distinction between information and value.
A prior environmental event can alter later behaviour.
But we need not call this memory in the psychological sense.
The relevant fact is:
the organism's present organisation contains consequences of its past.
The tree has become historically organised.
Its future possibilities partly depend upon its history.
That gives us another possible bridge between biological value and repertoire.
A plant repertoire?
We should be cautious here.
A tree does not have a repertoire in the human sense.
But its developmental history can alter the range and likelihood of future responses.
Different environmental histories can produce different response capacities.
In that weak structural sense, we might say that the organism acquires a history-shaped repertoire of physiological possibilities.
The phrase is metaphorical.
But it connects plant biology with a broader principle:
history can become organised as future capacity.
The extended topology is not a social topology
This is important enough to state explicitly.
A forest can contain:
signalling;
competition;
facilitation;
symbiosis;
resource exchange;
persistent dependencies.
None of these automatically establishes a society.
The topology is ecological before it is social.
The organisms are relationally significant to one another without necessarily constituting social participants in our stronger sense.
This distinction prevents us from making the same anthropomorphic leap we resisted with plants and LLMs.
But something has changed
At the beginning of the series, biological value was largely a property of an individual organism.
Now we have reached a much richer picture.
A tree's possibilities are shaped by a web of persistent relations with:
other plants;
fungi;
microbes;
herbivores;
climate;
soil;
water.
Its value-sensitive organisation is therefore ecologically embedded.
The organism remains an individual.
But its life cannot be understood without the topology in which it participates.
The natural history is becoming recursive
We can now see the larger trajectory.
biological value
became:
relational significance
which became:
collective coordination
which sometimes became:
integration
and sometimes:
higher-level individuality
while in other cases producing:
persistent ecological networks.
Only one route leads specifically toward social mattering.
There is no single ladder.
There is a branching natural history.
And this brings us back to the original question
We began by asking how biological value might become social mattering.
The answer now seems more complicated — and more interesting.
There is no direct jump.
Between them lie multiple organisational possibilities:
signalling;
relational dependence;
symbiosis;
collective coordination;
integration;
multicellularity;
ecological networks;
social organisation.
Social mattering is one particular way of organising the relational significance that biological value makes possible.
The next question
We have now followed biological value from the isolated cell to organisms embedded in extraordinarily extended relational networks.
The final task is to gather the distinctions.
What exactly have we learned about the path from:
value
to:
relational significance
to:
social mattering
and eventually, in the human case:
meaning?
That is where the series comes together.
From Value to Mattering — The Natural History
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