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I’d wish my plant scream when they need something so they would stop the fucking dying.
They do, you can’t hear it though.
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
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.”
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.
This is the plot of an episode of the anime “mushishi” called “tree of eternity”, IIRC.
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!
There is and it’s called The Lord of the Rings…
“A Monster Calls” has a very similar premise. Mother, Child, and psychic Tree.
I strongly recommend it.
The inclusion of Mycelium as a plant here is very triggering.
But the inclusion of Peter Wohlleben as a plant makes perfect sense?
Of course; he’s the other kind of plant. Mycelium is neither.
Average omni trying to dismantle veganism by claiming that plants are conscious/sentient to justify eating animals
That could literally be an alternate title for the bingo card, and is almost certainly the motivation for like 90% of the people who wish plants were conscious. And even if their flawed logic were true, it’s just more testament to how morally bankrupt they are. Because all they’re saying is “since we might be causing suffering on an incomprehensibly massive scale in this hypothetical case, that means it’s perfectly fine to also keep causing suffering on an incomprehensibly massive scale in this other case where it for sure is happening undeniably. Gotcha, vegan!”
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.
Yeah but they cry like babies when you call them carnists
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.
Fair enough
Maybe everything is conscious
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?
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.
Panpsychism seems logically more possible than the alternative. If consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, the universe is probably conscious because it’s the most complex system there is.
It depends on if you think consciousness is something that emerges from information exchange systems or some higher level “thing” we don’t understand yet, and I lean towards the idea that consciousness emerges from information exchange systems. If that’s the case, then the universe, while containing massive areas of complexity, isn’t entirely exchanging information, only in isolated areas that are borrowing energy even as entropy broadly increases. I would be more open the idea of some possibility of consciousness occurring in the hyper-low entropy state of the very early universe when everything was much closer together and there was enough energy to connect a whole universe worth of information in localized states.
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…
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.
Yes most definitely, I’d imagine most animals are conscious.
In fact my definition of sapience means several animals like crows and parrots and rats are capable of sapience.
“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.
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.
it could be several spectra and what we call consciousness is a series of multiple phenomena
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.
Cells are very diverse, though. Some can get over your first divide.
That’s not a problem. The idea is to define practical categories along the spectrum of consciousness so that they can be discussed without having to re-define terms prior to every discussion. There’s no reason any given organism should or shouldn’t fall into a particular category except for its properties directly regarding that category.
I’m inclined to believe every dynamic interconnected system is “conscious” to some degree. Not 1:1 with human consciousness obviously, but the same base phenomenon.
The main problem is that there aren’t very good metrics to distinguish how primitive a consciousness is. Where do you draw the line between consciousness and reflex? Is each of your cells conscious in its own impossibly tiny way?
The line is it being a conscious effort.
Reflexes weren’t a conscious effort.
Sure, how do you detect conscious effort from outside?
Straw man gish gallop
Ah yes, non-sequitur
It’s also worth noting that science can’t prove humans are conscious.
There’s a reason it’s called “the hard problem.”
It’s all a figment of my imagination after all
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.
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
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.Does this come up often?
Yes.
Groot
