plant breeding and the quantum computer between our ears

I have been doing a lot of culling the last two days. In just finished a brutal thinning of my horribly over planted corn plot which involved killing probably 75% of the seedlings (I have a mental imbalance that forces me to plant corn on about 2 in spacing no matter how hard I try not to...perhaps the first selective pressure my corn encounters). In this, the quantum randomness that determined relative location in each line played a major role ( this, already influenced by our central role - as observer - in collapsing local probability waves into solid particles) but at each future corn stalk site on almost inevitably had to make a choice. Using sensory input and a holographic wave we call memory I had to decide which plant best suited my desires.

Yesterday, I did a first culling of a breeding population of male plants from a flowering herb. In that case very few of the important features sought from the plant are visible (flower form, color, aroma as well as production data) but space and sanity require minimizing the breeding male population.

In both these cases we were identifying smells, leaf forms, tissue coloration patterns, apparent vigor, and an unknowable degree of energetic waveforms to infer future performance results. We are engaged with an archetypal plant form, and perhaps a desired future form, on a level beyond intellectual cognition and we are active participants in the evolution of life and in the eternal conversation of an ecosystem.

I always feel that planting a seed is an act of faith (my inability to plant a reasonable amount of corn perhaps a tell to my lack of it) and these moments of garden work and culling are rites and prayers to the one true God, the creation. This immeasurable, ineffable, unmistakable, inescapable syntropic storm of being. Its overwhelmingly humbling to have the honor of participating

s. lowe wrote:
In both these cases we were identifying smells, leaf forms, tissue coloration patterns, apparent vigor, and an unknowable degree of energetic waveforms to infer future performance results. We are engaged with an archetypal plant form, and perhaps a desired future form, on a level beyond intellectual cognition and we are active participants in the evolution of life and in the eternal conversation of an ecosystem.

Reading your post, I was reminded of research into unconscious knowledge and how we apply it. When choosing which plants to cull, you may be drawing from your unconscious knowledge of past plants selections and their success. A "gut feeling" or "just knowing" may be your brain telling you about memories and information stored in your brain but not consciously accessible.  

For example, I can correctly use the English articles a/an/the, but can't explain the rules. Articles are a struggle for non-native english speakers, and the most common corrections I give when proofreading. But when they ask why, most of the time I don't know, it just is.

You might find this review interesting: Uncounscious Knowledge: A Survey

In general terms, implicit learning is the ability to acquire knowledge that is not reportable, or is only reportable with difficulty and imperfectly. Implicit memory is the memory that affects behaviour and judgements without the subject being able to intentionally recall it. In other words, implicit learning is the non-intentional and incidental acquisition of information about structural relations between objects or events, whereas implicit memory is the non-intentional recourse to a prior learning episode in the performance of a more or less related task

Amy Arnett wrote:
Reading your post, I was reminded of research into unconscious knowledge and how we apply it. When choosing which plants to cull, you may be drawing from your unconscious knowledge of past plants selections and their success. A "gut feeling" or "just knowing" may be your brain telling you about memories and information stored in your brain but not consciously accessible.  

I agree completely, I also suspect we might be able to access ancestral experiences with these plants that our species goes back centuries and millenia with. If we allow ourselves to relax out of our typical, industrialized, viewpoint we find that we have access to all sorts of knowledge that we ''shouldn't'' know.