[karajorma]

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/aug/04/plants-intelligent-sentient-book-brilliant-green-internet

Plants are intelligent. Plants deserve rights. Plants are like the Internet – or more accurately the Internet is like plants. To most of us these statements may sound, at best, insupportable or, at worst, crazy. But a new book, Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by plant neurobiologist (yes, plant neurobiologist), Stefano Mancuso and journalist, Alessandro Viola, makes a compelling and fascinating case not only for plant sentience and smarts, but also plant rights.

For centuries Western philosophy and science largely viewed animals as unthinking automatons, simple slaves to instinct. But research in recent decades has shattered that view. We now know that not only are chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants thinking, feeling and personality-driven beings, but many others are as well. Octopi can use tools, whales sing, bees can count, crows demonstrate complex reasoning, paper wasps can recognise faces and fish can differentiate types of music. All these examples have one thing in common: they are animals with brains. But plants don’t have a brain. How can they solve problems, act intelligently or respond to stimuli without a brain?

    Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and plants are amazingly good in solving their problems
    Stefano Mancuso

“Today’s view of intelligence - as the product of brain in the same way that urine is of the kidneys - is a huge oversimplification. A brain without a body produces the same amount of intelligence of the nut that it resembles,” said Mancuso, who as well as co-writing Brilliant Green, is the director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Florence.

As radical as Mancuso’s ideas may seem, he’s actually in good company. Charles Darwin, who studied plants meticulously for decades, was one of the first scientists to break from the crowd and recognise that plants move and respond to sensation – i.e., are sentient. Moreover, Darwin – who studied plants meticulously for most of his life, observed that the radicle – the root tip – “acts like the brain of one of the lower animals.”

The article goes on to make the case in much more detail but I find it amusing that the joke many people who eat meat have always said to vegetarians ("Plants are alive too") may actually have been accurate all along.

[Mikes]

Some interesting stuff in there ... but also some things that make me wonder ...

The "Each choice a plant makes ... " for example.


Are sentient beings making deliberate choices about their own genes/evolution now? Since when?
Heh ... maybe we'll get there someday, true enough ...  but the articles use of "choice" in this context just strikes me as misleading.
I.e. I wouldn't call gene selection through environmental pressure "choice" ... it's what we call evolution. Otherwise I'm sure a lot of humans would choose not to have that genetic vulnerability to cancer or all those degenerative diseases.


The points about the ecosphere and life depending on plants are sound of course.

[zookeeper]

Well, I didn't see any basis for the underlying assumption that behavior means intelligence means sentience means feeling.

Of course, I have only read the article, not the book, but that suggestion of "plant rights" sounds fundamentally confused without any clear indication of whether it's based on pragmatic (conservation of ecosystems) or moral (plants feel) concerns. It sounds like the former, but plant intelligence is not at all relevant with regards to that.

[GhylTarvoke]

Arguments regarding sentience and consciousness (words that are often abused) hold no water. The disturbing truth is, we have no way to test for consciousness in anything - even theoretically.

Arguments regarding life and intelligence are much more meaningful.

[The E]

For more weirdness about what it takes to run a human consciousness in terms of neuron count, check this out.

It happens occasionally. Someone grows up to become a construction worker or a schoolteacher, before learning that they should have been a rutabaga instead. Lewin’s paper reports that one out of ten hydrocephalus cases are so extreme that cerebrospinal fluid fills 95% of the cranium. Anyone whose brain fits into the remaining 5% should be nothing short of vegetative; yet apparently, fully half have IQs over 100.

[karajorma]

Arguments regarding life and intelligence are much more meaningful.

Ah, but that's where it gets interesting. By informing nearby plants that it is under attack and encouraging them to defend themselves, in what way is a plant acting differently from say an insect?

[Bobboau]

"plant neurobiologist"
no matter how smart they might be, they have no neurons, this is an idiotic title.

[666maslo666]

Arguments regarding sentience and consciousness (words that are often abused) hold no water. The disturbing truth is, we have no way to test for consciousness in anything - even theoretically.

Arguments regarding life and intelligence are much more meaningful.

Yet it is arguments regarding sentience and consciousness that are relevant when arguing about any rights of animals or plants.

“Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and plants are amazingly good in solving their problems,” Mancuso noted.

Id say that real intelligence is the ability to solve NEW problems. Even an unthinking automaton can solve problems it was designed to solve.

[GhylTarvoke]

Yet it is arguments regarding sentience and consciousness that are relevant when arguing about any rights of animals or plants.

I do think that consciousness is what really matters, but the concept is too slippery to have a place in ethics.

Just to be clear: what I mean is Nagel's what-it-is-like-to-be, or Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness. I don't mean wakefulness, self-awareness, or metacognition.

[666maslo666]

Yet it is arguments regarding sentience and consciousness that are relevant when arguing about any rights of animals or plants.

I do think that consciousness is what really matters, but the concept is too slippery to have a place in ethics.

Just to be clear: what I mean is Nagel's what-it-is-like-to-be, or Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness. I don't mean wakefulness, self-awareness, or metacognition.

But if consciousness is what really matters, then talking about ethics without it is meaningless.

[GhylTarvoke]

When something is so hard to pin down that we can't find any objective evidence that it exists (apart from the fact that people seem to be talking about something) or even define it clearly ("it is the only major question in the sciences that we don’t even know how to ask"), it can't fit in a practical moral framework. The best we can do is substitute possibly-related concepts like self-awareness, and hope we're in the ballpark.

What mystifies me most is that we can barely imagine what form objective evidence of consciousness would take. Apart from verbal report, the only evidence I can imagine is the discovery of something "strange" in the brain.

Aside, I love the opportunity to talk about these things. I've read a bit of David Chalmers - who I think has the right idea - Thomas Nagel, and Daniel Dennett. I also really liked Blindsight (which I first heard of in this forum). It danced around the concept a lot, but that's unavoidable.

[zookeeper]

I don't really find the lack of objective evidence for consciousness or sentience or whatever a problem when thinking about ethics. After all, I can't know whether anyone else is conscious in the same way I am, so all I can do is make educated guesses based on similarities in physiology. I feel, so it's logical to assume you feel (because you're almost like me), so it's logical to assume a mouse feels (because it's almost like me, too). When you get to insects and plants and so on, the differences become much greater.

Capacity to suffer is the only thing I really care about, and that's more or less separate from consciousness or sentience. For example, I would not agree to being tortured while the portions of my brains that consciousness and sentience are attributed to are switched off. Maybe there'd be no suffering in that case, but I'd not be comfortable taking the risk.

[-Sara-]

Vegans.   

I treat my animals right. I pay extra for meat that comes from animals which have been treated right. I deeply enjoy my meat and chewing it right down to the bone and I will keep doing so. I'm not a buddhist who watches every blade of grass she steps on, in case I step on something living. The same, I won't worry about if plants I eat feel pain, because suddenly people think that just maybe plants feel, while it's more likely they don't feel in the way where they know they suffer. If I would, I might as well start living in a bubble then, because maybe when I cough, I might injure the poor oxygen molecules around me as well. Enter occam's razor, snip snip snip.