Narrator (TYPE III AUDIO)

Then there's grafting.

You can take a branch from an apple tree, graft it onto another apple tree's trunk, and voiler.

One tree, two sets of genes.

Most commercial apples are actually grown this way, with the rootstock from one variety supporting the fruit-bearing branches of another.

Is the resulting frankentree one individual or two?

With mushrooms, you see individual mushrooms, individual fruiting bodies popping up.

but it makes sense to conceptualize what you see as above-ground organs of a vast underground network of fungal mycelia, which can cover thousands of acres.

In a very real sense, that entire tangled mat is a single organism.

You may be wondering why I'm describing these biological curiosities.

My answer is that individuality in AI systems is often more similar to individuality in plants than in humans.

Or at least is comparably alien.

If you ask what that something growing in Pando is, there isn't an obvious unique answer.

Different considerations would lead to different answers.

For example, all Pando trees share the same code base.

From a teleological perspective, all the trees share the same purpose, to help the reproduction of their genes.

But you could also plant a disconnected clone at some other place.

Would it count?

Or you could graft a genetically different aspen branch onto a pando trunk.

Would it become part of pando?

Yet the phenomenological view of each trunk as an individual also has practical merit.