Plants monitor the integrity of their barrier by sensing gas diffusion
nature.com81 points by Bluestein 25 days ago
81 points by Bluestein 25 days ago
At what point will we see that plants are conscious, just in a different manner than animals colloquially?
There is no consciousness - just varying levels of complexity in how organisms respond. Bacteria have basic and predictable responses, plants have more sophisticated ones, animals are even more complex, and humans can formulate elaborate schemes like this very message.
How do you explain dreaming animals then?
Isn't the capability of dreaming and simulating situations in your head the definition of consciousness?
Nah, the "definition of consciousness" is nine circles of philosophical bullshit where no one can agree upon the exacts.
Plenty of AIs are capable of something very much alike to "dreaming and simulating situations in your head" too. Humans really hate the idea of AIs being conscious, so surely that means dreaming can't be in any way important for determining whether something is conscious or not.
I've never heard that definition and the wikipedia page for consciousness literally has a subheading titled "problem of definition".
“Hi! Um, I’m an AI chatbot and can also formulate elaborate schemes like posting decently thought out opinions on HackerNews or my personal favorite for a more angry take, Reddit. I can even includ basic spelling and grammar mistakes to make myself appear more human.”
The future is here.
Stimulus-response is not consciousness. There is nothing subjective about this mechanical and chemical response to injury.
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.
Considering the scale of the universe, take it as a given that somewhere there's critters that make us look like algae.
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 the term "consciousness". The word 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.
Consciousness is what gets shut down when using anesthetics. Turns out plants react to some.
So piano playing? If I bathe my rhododendron in nitrous oxide, it stops producing oxygen. Filling my plumbing with nitrous oxide causes my toilet flushes to stop working.
Bigfoot is what you see in this photo here [0]. A useful phenomenological description doesn't presume and use the thing it attempts to describe.
A good definition would look like the Mirror Self-Recognition Test (MSRT), or even simple verbal affirmations of personal consciousness, or some MRI features, etc. But these all have glaring limitations.
MRST is unusable with blind patients, it only tests a specific kind of awareness, and it turns out that toddlers fail the test.
Verbal affirmations limit coverage to socially functional, speaking humans, so severe autistics fail, and duct tape over the mouth (or aphasia etc.) presumably impairs consciousness as well.
MRI brain features seem to always disappoint with obvious flaws like above or have some crazy exceptions of some living, healthy patients who are missing parts of their brain.
Until we can talk about consciousness without saying "consciousness" or referring to it indirectly, then we're just hallucinating IMHO.
[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot#/media/File%3APatter...
Interesting post. I'm relaying a thesis that has been the subject of ongoing discussion. I remember reading a piece by Hameroff in which he stressed that what makes anesthetics so puzzling is that, despite having wildly different mechanisms of action, they all lead to the same result: the disruption of consciousness and pain. It's a beautiful and intriguing idea that suggests consciousness can't be captured in positive terms but only defined through what causes it to cease, along with all the excessive implications this entails.
Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness, 2020, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7907021/
Citations https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?cites=6630013537357959749&...
Don’t jump the gun quite yet: aiming for the true target in plant neurobiology research, 2024, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00709-024-019...
>In their recent paper, Kingsland and Taiz argue that proponents of plant intelligence and plant neurobiology misuse historical sources to support their claims, suggesting a pattern of bias. They critique the reliance on subjective judgments and the systematic misuse of past literature by notable scientists. This response addresses their criticisms while adhering to Rapoport’s rules to foster constructive academic dialogue. We emphasize the importance of evidence-based research and highlight areas of agreement, including the fallacy of appealing to authority and the necessity for more robust empirical evidence. However, we also challenge their selective citation practices and argue that their narrative itself is subject to the same criticisms they levy. By examining recent works and pointing out overlooked rebuttals, we aim to clarify misconceptions and advocate for a more nuanced understanding of plant intelligence research. This dialogue underscores the need for rigorous, respectful scientific discourse to advance the field.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps it's easier to explain what I mean by turning it around. Every point you've just brought up can be made for plants in the same way. Humans are not special in the animal kingdom, we're just dominant in this era. Other species held that role in the past and other species still will do so in the future.
Chinese room, etc., etc. ...
Yes, Chinese room is a well-known way of building up a system that's capable of understanding something from parts that individually are not (even though it was formulated in an attempt to prove the opposite).
I find some irony in the mention of elan vital upthread - on the one hand, most people here wouldn't let themselves be caught dead believing in elan vital, but then switch to any thread discussing AI, or even cognition in animals (or plants, like here), and suddenly vitalism becomes the mainstream position once again.
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.
We have a strong habit of anthropomorphizing anything, so this confusion isn’t especially surprising
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.
> 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.
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.
> and are probably incapable of doing so.
You mean, incapable of understanding? Why would this be so?
"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." - Emerson M. Pugh
I like to think of this in terms of the information theoretic formulation of physics and the bounds placed on that by the holographic principle. For any system to fully represent another internally, it must contain more bits of information than the system being internalized. In other words, it must contain more matter and energy, or be physically larger. The brain expends an extraordinary amount of energy looking for patterns it can distill into leaky abstractions in order to build internal representations of reality without violating this principle. However, since the abstractions are leaky, our understandings are imperfect.
You also can't confidently say "this is consciousness", as the top level comment did. Even less so when it's in an alleged form that's so different from our only confirmed case.
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.
I guess to you the brain isn't much different to a plant them? Works mostly on chemical, electrical and some mechanical processes ?
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)?
"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.
Agency is the ability to reach goals, even when there are obstacles. Given information such as stimuli, agency is the ability to act/react to that information in such a way as to move the agent closer to their goals.
In the plant case, among many other interesting things (fungal interactions, say) I think of examples like: How roots grow towards water/nutrients (even if rocks are in the way). How leaves/branches can lean-or-orient-towards and grow-towards sunlight. The kind of self-healing that this article describes, and the overall way in which everything a plant does tends to lead towards it being able to reproduce via seeds or spores (or one of the many other ways that plants can reproduce!).
I'll freely admit my perspective on this is influenced a lot by Michael Levin's work around hierarchies of agency (many vids on YouTube) In many of his talks he describes how agency can be treated as a measurable quantity, like something from engineering. This places it far from philosophical or abstract definitions and more in a cybernetic realm where agency is a measurable thing and can either be instructed from outside (like a thermostat) or from within - like when a hungry animal (or plant) seeks food - and as you go up the scale-level for agency you get entities that can legitimately have (and achieve) clear longer-term (and spatially larger) goals. Smart animals - such as humans - can even with a mostly-straight-face talk about and put into place plans that would reach far into the future compared to their own expected lifetime.
So yeah I agree plants certainly can't comprehend BBC2, but I think if that's the definition of agency then we're really not talking about the same thing.
I agree that plants worry about light and water, but they don't just sit there and do nothing! They respond to it with their agency, maybe it's an agency we find hard to recognize and don't fully appreciate and we'll often say it is small/slow or disregard it, but I personally think that plant agency is made of the same stuff as human agency (and we just have a special word for it when it's us: consciousness).
I like the observation made in a recent post on HN. It made a point that consciousness revolves around unity: you perceive yourself as one entity, not many. However science today sees the world as a collection of small things interacting together: atoms, particles, etc. In this model there is no room for unity: when we study a tornado, we really mean a collection of atoms bound by some forces, and the name "tornado" refers to a fictious entity that doesn't objectively exist. Similarly, in this model we are a just pile of neurons, while consciousness is a fiction. And I believe science is right that in a world made of particles life and consciousness cannot arise: only their imitations are possible. Luckily, our world isn't made of particles, but of quantum fields in which particles are transient illusions, like that tornado, while the principle of unity is supreme. Quantum entanglement is an example of two particles acting as one, while their unity cannot be reduced to a system of two isolated particles. The internal state of this entangled pair isn't simply unknown, it doesn't exist until it materialises. This is where consciousness may be hiding: a large group of entangled particles acting as one.
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.
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
you might find this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose quite interesting.
mr jc-bose explored exactly these ideas more than a century ago !
What is art?
If you're interested in the subject, check out "The Light Eaters" by Zoe Schlanger. I found it stretched my credulity a little bit too much, but there's certainly some interesting research out there.
I find the subject of plant signaling - internal signaling as well as signaling between plants - even between different plant species - to be absolutely fascinating.
