The Sensory Biology of Plants
The Sensory Biology of Plants
62 comments
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What does old stumps mean?
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When a tree is cut down or falls over due to age, the surrounding trees can help keep the stump and root network alive long beyond what we think is possible.
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I'd wish my plant scream when they need something so they would stop the fucking dying.
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As a cat keeper.
Oh no you don't. Little shits think that I control the weather.
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Can confirm. My cat literally yells at me when it's raining bc she doesn't like going to the screened in porch while it rains. I guess they see us use the sinks and shower and assume that we control the rain as well
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They do, you can't hear it though.
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The inclusion of Mycelium as a plant here is very triggering.
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One day, mycelium may be able to prove that it is not the only conscious lifeform on earth.
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Didn't make this, so only a guess, but the concept of plants "communicating" via mycorrhizae is probably why it's there.
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But the inclusion of Peter Wohlleben as a plant makes perfect sense?
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Of course; he's the other kind of plant. Mycelium is neither.
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Wouldn't it be cool tho? You could go up to a tree that's super old and ask it about the world, and it would take an entire day to spell a word in a language you don't understand. And house plants would be chit chatting and making all kinds of noise inaudible to us, kinda like WiFi, but with sound instead of light. It's like a fantasy setting
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That's basically just how it is though. This meme is not at all supported by science
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You're basically describing elephants.
They have a deep, rich language of sub-acoustic rumbling and vibrations that can travel long distances. They have names for each other, and they have words for things like "human" and "bad human."
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When I was a little kid my mother always stopped by ancient trees to admire them. "Imagine if it could tell us what it has seen".
I think there's plot material in your comment.
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There is and it's called The Lord of the Rings...
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This is the plot of an episode of the anime "mushishi" called "tree of eternity", IIRC.
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I remember reading an old sci-fi novel about a specific type of alien ancient sentient tree... The Leaves of October.
It was... Okay. More of a collection of short stories around the central theme. Still interesting, though. Haven't thought about that book in decades!
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"A Monster Calls" has a very similar premise. Mother, Child, and psychic Tree.
I strongly recommend it.
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It all depends on what you mean by "conscious", which IMO doesn't fall under "Maybe everything is conscious" because that's wrongly assuming that "conscious" is a binary property instead of a spectrum that humans and plants are both on while clearly being at vastly different levels. Maybe I just have a much looser definition of "conscious" than most people, but why don't tropisms count as a very primitive form of consciousness?
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Personally, I’m more a fan of the binary/discrete idea. I tend to go with the following definitions:
- Animate: capable of responding to stimuli
- Sentient: capable of recognizing experiences and debating the next best action to take
- Conscious: aware of the delineation between self and not self
- Sapient: capable of using abstract thinking and logic to solve problems without relying solely on memory or hardcoded actions (being able to apply knowledge abstractly to different but related problems)
If you could prove that plants have the ability to choose to scream rather than it being a reflexive response, then they would be sentient. Like a tree “screaming” only when other trees are around to hear.
If I cut myself my body will move away reflexively, it with scab over the wound. My immune system might “remember” some of the bacteria or viruses that get in and respond accordingly. But I don’t experience it as an action under my control. I’m not aware of all the work my body does in the background. I’m not sentient because my body can live on its own and respond to stimuli, I’m sentient because I am aware that stimuli exist and can choose how to react to some of them.
If you could prove that the tree as a whole or that part of a centralized control system in the tree could recognize the difference between itself and another plant or some mycorrhiza, and choose to respond to those encounters, then it would be conscious. But it seems more likely that the sharing of nutrients with others, the networking of the forest is not controlled by the tree but by the natural reflexive responses built into its genome.
Also, If something is conscious, then it will exhibit individuality. You should be able to identify changes in behavior due to the self referential systems required for the recognition of self. Plants and fungi grown in different circumstances should respond differently to the same circumstances.
If you taught a conscious fungus to play chess and then put it in a typical environment, you would expect to see it respond very differently than another member of its species who was not cursed with the knowledge of chess.
If a plant is conscious, you should be able to teach it to collaborate in ways that it normally would not, and again after placing it in a natural environment you should see it attempt those collaborations while it’s untrained peers would not.
Damn now I want to do some biology experiments…
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When you say "aware of the delineation between self and not self", what do you mean by "aware"? I've found that it's often a circular definition, maybe with a few extra words thrown in to obscure the chain, like "know", "comprehend", "perceive", etc.
Also, is a computer program that knows which process it is self aware? If not, why? It's so simple, and yet without a concrete definition it's hard to really reject that.
On the other extreme, are we truly self aware? As you point out, our bodies just kind of do stuff without our knowledge. Would an alien species laugh at the idea of us being self-aware, having just faint glimmers of self awareness compared to them, much like the computer program seems to us?
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Conscious: aware of the delineation between self and not self
I don't know whether this applies to plants and fungi, but it applies to just about every animal. There's a minimum basic sense of self required in distinguishing one's own movements from the approach of an attacker. Even earthworms react differently when they touch something vs when something touches them.
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it could be several spectra and what we call consciousness is a series of multiple phenomena
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"Conscious" means being aware of oneself, one's surroundings, thoughts, or feelings, being awake, or acting with deliberate intention, like a "conscious effort". It refers to subjective experience and internal knowledge, differentiating from unconsciousness (sleep, coma).
It’s a spectrum, sure. But the spectrum is between ants and humans; not animals and plants.
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What does "aware" mean, or "knowledge"? I think those are going to be circular definitions, maybe filtered through a few other words like "comprehend" or "perceive".
Does a plant act with deliberate intention when it starts growing from a seed?
To be clear, my beef is more with the definition of "conscious" being useless and/or circular in most cases. I'm not saying "woah, what if plants have thoughts dude" as in the meme, but whatever definition you come up with, you have to evaluate why it does or doesn't include plants, simple animals, or AI.
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The foundational idea behind what the user is talking about is called panpsychism, it's the idea that consciousness or awareness is actually a fundamental quality of the universe like fields or forces, in that it's in everything, but only complex systems have actual thoughts.
The theory(?) states that even a single electron or proton has a state of awareness, but without any functional way to remember any information or think it's just like some kind of flash of experience like if you suddenly developed perpetual amnesia about literally everything... while you were hurtling through the universe at high speed. You would still have a conscious experience, it would just be radically limited in what that "means."
I get the concept, but I don't get the usefulness of it. It feels too close to people wishing The Force was real.
Guys. You are not getting your light sabers this way.
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I think the big dividing line between what many animals do and what cells or plants do is the ability to react in different ways by considering stimuli in conjunction with memory, and then the next big divide is metacognition. I feel like there should be concrete words for these categories. "Sentient" and "conscious" have pretty much lost meaning at this point, as demonstrated by this discussion's existence.
I will call them reactive awareness, decisive awareness, and reflective awareness in the absence of a better idea.
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Not sure if you know that what you're describing has a name it's called Panpsychism and it is gaining some popularity but that's not because there's any reason to believe in it or any evidence, it's a fanciful idea about the universe that doesn't really help or connect anything. IE: panpsychism doesn't make for a better explanation for anything than the idea that you are just a singular consciousness living in it's most probable state to be able to observe or experience anything.
I'm not shooting it down, it's one of those things we just will never know, but that's a pretty huge list of things and possibilities so I just don't know if it's more or less useful than any other philosophical view.
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I don't think I'm talking about panpsychism. To me, that's just giving up and hand wavey. I'm much more interested in trying to come up with a more concrete, empirical definition. I think questions like "Well, why aren't plants conscious" or "Why isn't an LLM conscious" are good ways to explore the limits of any particular definition and find things it fails to explain properly.
I don't think a rock or electron could be considered conscious, for example. Neither has an internal model of the world in any way.
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Since you so clearly elucidated it, you may know this is actually a thing called panprotopsychism. I'm fully on board with it but of course, the Internet knows with absolute certainty it's complete and utter bullshit, so ¯(ツ)/¯.
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It's also worth noting that science can't prove humans are conscious.
There's a reason it's called "the hard problem."
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It's all a figment of my imagination after all
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I will admit I get enjoyment from guiding pseudo intelligent down the path of discovering that absolutely nothing is real and for as far as we are able to detect everything may as well be the fever dream of a turtle.
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Average omni trying to dismantle veganism by claiming that plants are conscious/sentient to justify eating animals
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Just a little nitpick: vegans are omnivores too. Afaik, being omnivorous describes the biological ability to digest plant matter and meat. Voluntarily restricting ones diet for whatever reason does not remove this ability.
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Carnivores can digest plant matter too, and herbivores can digest meat.
Omnivore is a behavioural classification mostly. It means an animal (or person) that eats both plants and animals for energy.
So vegans are herbivores in practice, even though as a species humans are practicing omnivores.
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Yeah but they cry like babies when you call them carnists
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Fair enough
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Maybe everything is conscious
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Gish gallop
A rhetorical technique in which a dishonest speaker lists a string of falsehoods or misleading items so that their opponent will be unable to counter each one and still be able to make their own counterpoints. -
Straw man gish gallop
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Ah yes, non-sequitur
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Maybe the acid square should be Mimosa hostilis/Peyote instead to keep with the plant theme, but either way that one hits the hardest for me
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Groot
62 comments
What is this? The 17th century? Descartes’ machine view of everything nonhuman?