26 comments

  • spacephysics 4 hours ago

    At what point will we see that plants are conscious, just in a different manner than animals colloquially?

    • bullfightonmars 4 hours ago

      Stimulus-response is not consciousness. There is nothing subjective about this mechanical and chemical response to injury.

      • xelxebar 3 minutes ago

        Good try, plant. We're onto you.

        If we're going to agree on anything, I just wish consciousness discussions could agree on some phenomenological referent(s) for "consciousness". The term is used in a way that is little more than a sed-replace for elan vital, regaling all discourse to little more than a volley of solipsistic value proclamations IMHO.

      • stouset 2 hours ago

        I don't really disagree. But I also can't help but imagine a hyper-advanced alien species thinking the same thing about us due to us lacking some notionally critical (to them) aspect of intelligence/consciousness and paving over the solar system to make room for a hyperspace bypass.

      • londons_explore 4 hours ago

        Science hasn't really understood consciousness.

        If you don't understand consciousness, how to make it from first principles and how it works, then I don't think you can confidently say "this isn't conscious" about much.

        • hombre_fatal 4 hours ago

          We can explain plant behavior through known physical processes though.

          We don't need to lean on consciousness nor other mysteries at all. Nor we do have to when a rock changes color as it gets wet.

          And without this parsimony, then we could claim that any unexplained mystery underlies any well-understood phenomenon which doesn't sound like much of an epistemic standard.

          • Etheryte 3 hours ago

            You could just as well make the same argument about human behavior in a broad perspective. Not understanding every minute interaction in our brain is a fairly secondary point when the overarching themes are all the same.

            • Brian_K_White 3 hours ago

              You can not make the same argument just as well about human behavior.

              You can observe that a human and a record player can both say "hello", but you can not make the argument from that that there is no way to disprove that a record player might wish to express a greeting to a fellow being.

              A simple process can duplicate the outward appearance and effect of a complex one (an mp3 player can talk), and a complex process can duplicate the outward appearance and effect of a simple one (a human can crank a drive shaft), and neither of these means that one might just as well be the other. They don't mean anything at all by themselves either for proving or disproving.

              Humans reacting to stimuli in largely similar ways to a plant, or even plain physical process like water filling a vessel or diffusion, neither proves nor disproves, nor even merely implies or suggests, nor even merely opens any doors to any room for doubts about anything.

              It could be that there is no fundamental difference between a human and a plant and a toaster, but this observation about similar behavior provides nothing towards the argument.

              • Bluestein 2 hours ago

                Chinese room, etc., etc. ...

            • justonceokay 3 hours ago

              To your point, we have a great understanding of human/mammalian injury and injury recovery. We know what proteins and structures cause blood clots and we can even manipulate them to help peoples blood clot better. We know about nerves and reflexes and nociceptors.

              But if I cut myself, no amount of science can currently assess how much pain I feel or how much it bothers me.

              • toast0 15 minutes ago

                > But if I cut myself, no amount of science can currently assess how much pain I feel or how much it bothers me.

                The same for a plant; if you cut it, science won't tell you how much pain it feels, or how much it's bothered by your act of violence.

            • treve 3 hours ago

              Even if there's no hard measurable rule on the limits of what we consider consciousness, that doesn't mean that definition includes anything that exhibits chemical reactions.

              Ultimately it's a bit of an inprecise human concept. The boundaries of what fits in there might be somewhat unclear, but we definitely things that intuitively are (humans) and aren't (plants, rocks) in this set.

              • kulahan 3 hours ago

                We have a strong habit of anthropomorphizing anything, so this confusion isn’t especially surprising

          • bongodongobob 2 hours ago

            Brains work with chemical gradients and hormones. There's no magic involved, we just don't understand the meta, and are probably incapable of doing so.

            • Bluestein an hour ago

              > and are probably incapable of doing so.

              You mean, incapable of understanding? Why would this be so?

        • nemonemo 2 hours ago

          Wikipedia article about Consciousness opens with an interesting line: "Defining consciousness is challenging; about forty meanings are attributed to the term."

          Perhaps "consciousness" is just a poor term to use in a scientific discussion.

    • danwills 2 hours ago

      I think it's pretty clear that plants have agency, and maybe that can be regarded as a phenomena that is on the same spectrum as consciousness, just at a lower intensity (and maybe slower too)?

      • gerdesj 2 hours ago

        "I think it's pretty clear that plants have agency"

        Why (and define agency)?

        Plants worry about stimuli such as light and water and not what is on BBC2.

    • CGMthrowaway an hour ago

      This is hormones - which, in humans, are usually explained as working AGAINST active consciousness (e.g. blinded by lust) rather than as an example of it

      • bdamm an hour ago

        Consciousness is surely more than just cold calculating antipathy.

    • morkalork an hour ago

      There's a fun movie "The Creeping Garden" that asks that question about slime mold which can solve mazes but doesn't have any sort of brain.

    • jazzyjackson 2 hours ago

      What is art?

      • bgilroy26 2 hours ago

        Art is fashion. It's something someone makes on purpose.

  • keernan an hour ago

    I find the subject of plant signaling - internal signaling as well as signaling between plants - even between different plant species - to be absolutely fascinating.