Invert Perceptions to Shift Perspective, with Jonathon Keats | Big Think
Invert Perceptions to Shift Perspective, with Jonathon Keats
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In an example of turning an absurd inquiry into a philosophical exploration, Jonathon Keats once opened a restaurant for plants so that they could experience their own sort of five-course meal. The way he did it was by altering the ways the plants were exposed to nutrient-granting colors of light. By splitting the spectrum over time, Keats was able to “surprise” plants in the process of feeding them.
While no one would ever confuse Keats for Julia Child, he does offer a unique perspective on the joy of “cooking” for plants. His naive question (How can we let plants experience the excitement of good cuisine?) transformed into an exploration of the nature of humanity’s relationship with food as well as the overall question of what makes us human. Keats says this is just one example of how we can shift our perspective to tackle bigger philosophical questions.
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JONATHON KEATS:
Jonathon Keats is a San Francisco-based experimental philosopher who has, over the years, sold real estate in the extra dimensions of space-time proposed by string theory (he sold a hundred and seventy-two extra-dimensional lots in the Bay Area in a single day); made an attempt to genetically engineer God (God turns out to be related to the cyanobacterium); and copyrighted his own mind (in order to get a seventy-year post-life extension.
Keats’s bold experiments raise serious questions and put into practice his conviction that the world needs more “curious amateurs,” willing to explore publicly whatever intrigues them, in defiance of a culture that increasingly forecloses on wonder and siloes knowledge into narrowly defined areas of expertise.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Jonathon Keats: I love to eat. I like just about everything and to me cuisine is really one of the signal achievements of our society. Plants play an essential role in that process by giving us the goods, the fruits and vegetables that provide much of the raw material for our cuisine. And yet plants themselves never get to experience cuisine as we do. And to me that seemed always to be kind of a shame I suppose that they should give us something as extraordinary as they do and not get it in turn. So I started to think about how planets might get their own form of cuisine that would go beyond the everyday experience that they have of gouging themselves on sunlight. If you think about it our cuisine is simply a fancy way in which the basic nutrients that we need are articulated in balance with each other to provide an aesthetically pleasing experience. I figured that there’s no reason why you can’t do the same thing for a plant, given that plants are consuming the full spectrum of sunlight and that different parts of the spectrum give plants different essential elements in their diet. So I started to look at some of the leading cookbooks by Julia Child and others and trying to reverse engineer from those cookbooks the various ways in which different ingredients work together, the way in which different food stocks that are necessary for our sustenance are put together to transform them into cuisine. At the same time I started looking at sunlight and the way in which different parts of the spectrum are essential to plants and plant respond to different parts of the spectrum in different ways. And then I started to map the one onto the other in order to make a photosynthetic cuisine, a photosynthetic restaurant for planets. The idea was to build a meal that the plant would experience over the course of the day by filtering sunlight through colored filters. Where the order in which the colors were exposed to the plant would be the cuisine that would have all of the nutritive value that the plants would get were they exposed to the full spectrum for the entire day but would put those nutrient in relationship to each other in a way that would have a sort of culinary satisfaction in addition to simply a metabolic satisfaction.
So in the case of a comfort food for plants or a French sort of style cuisine, a Continental cuisine what I can do is I can take the sunlight that occurs over the course of the day naturally where it moves from more in the red to more in the blue range and then back again. And I can increase the redness and the blueness. And I can make it so that it’s a more extreme version of what happens in nature….
To read the transcript, please go to https://bigthink.com/videos/invert-perceptions-to-shift-perspective-with-jonathon-keats
@hansenmarc
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
enDOTmDOTwikipediaDOTorgSLASHwikiSLASHJonathon_Keats
@WolfKin85
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
I want whatever he smokes
@warpedmind6363
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
If this is what my tax would go towards studying….I would go off grid and stop paying tax
@jaylittle6465
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
Seeing the comments here has shown me that what he’s talking about is absolutely necessary. We’re so hopelessly locked inside our own rules of perception and speech, we can’t fathom this man’s deviations without dismissing him as insane. Shame on us.
@MrKrisvandegoor
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
He basically shows that behaviourism is false!
@shamanou
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
He forgets that sunlight alone does NOT make a plant grow, you also need soil nutrients, bacteria and water
@jacksters19
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
✌👏
@blerimi79
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
the biggest dump thing that i ever heard. i hate to give bad rating to the people but this one is so dump that he could not read
@Shawnstradamus
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
This guy only blinked his eyes 10 times in the first three minutes.
@matthewsweeney4162
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
ARE YOU WONDERING? This a a parody of philosophy. It typifies how philosophy has been superseded by science (plants do not use blue light)
@SophieDainty
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
These are the kind of people who should be going to university, I bet his head is just filled with so much interesting crap! If doctor who was real, he would be like this guy!
@madsteeez
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
Way beyond the box
@air28uk
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
gorging*
@IMakeBoringVideos
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
I wonder if this guy smokes weed
@edmundprieto9892
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
I am 100% sure that this guy is a virgin.
@CountDookuful
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
I am oddly compelled to sympathies with this guy and his Idea. Frankly I think he is awesome.
@flyingmobias
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
I suggest him and you folks who think his words here have value to look up what anthropomorphism is. A common human bias/fallacy.
@havenbastion
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
This guy is not an experimental philosopher, he is an artist, and the aesthetic value of his "work" is dubious. You want to think outside of the box? Talk to a stranger, don't waste money fucking around with plants.
@wh1skeyj4ck
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
TL;DR This is the first video that I've seen on this channel that I have found stupid and almost useless
@DoctorReptar
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
Amazing; really great.
@stevenotic1
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
The title of this video is misleading.
@GianfrancoFronzi
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
Mr. Keats is a genius . His train of thought is boundless . I know nothing of him or haven't ever heard of him except for this video . The way he explains his train of thought is where you'll see the ingenuity . A t.v. dinner for plants , actually aired . Bless you Mr. Keats , and keep those Ideas coming , I'm sure you'll find what we're looking for .
Protect this man .
@leandroatherino5557
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
This seems to be a result of that day you ate a bit to much of them brownies.
@nyanishh
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
I was totally amazed by his point of view. Really. I don't really know what else to say 🙂
@OnTheRailTV
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
Give a dog a choice of a bowl of dog food and a bowl with steak in it and see what he chooses or give your cat the choice of cat food or freshly cooked salmon. Hmmm….
@FlashTrance
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
Interesting. I think about this kind of thing pretty much every day (not plants necessarily). Like, how weird life is when you look at it from an outside perspective. For example, I brush my teeth every night. With this weird toothbrush thing, which I put a glob of strange paste on which I then move in a circular motion around in my mouth to clean my teeth. Lol this is impossible to explain over text… just doing it isn't weird, I guess, but when you think about the things you actually do every day in a literal sense, they suddenly become really random and it's all like… bruh, what even is existence? We may as well all be plants o.o
@Zaphod23
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
Great Video! It's nice to hear someone talk about what it means to be human. It's not so obvious is it! 🙂
@aaronzimpel
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
This sounds like an idea I would have after blazing a number.
@tongmaa
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 am
When a plant is getting less light than it needs, is it schadenfreude that takes you outside of yourself …? Not that anyone would be so cruel as to starve a plant …. goodness that would be a form of water-boarding the poor things …
Comments are closed.