Natures wonders: plants sense what's happening (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, May 07, 2021, 16:08 (1294 days ago) @ David Turell

But the scientists do not accept plant consciousness:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/can-plants-feel-pain

"plants — like every form of life — have evolved tools to avoid and mitigate damage to themselves. Over the past few decades, biologists have learned much about their astonishing ability to sense and react to danger in their environments. Easy as it is to imagine ourselves in their roots, though, we must remember the immense physiological gap between humans and plants. “We anthropomorphize so readily, and that’s why we use the word ‘pain’,” says Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh, a professor of biology at the University of Washington. “But it’s not appropriate to apply to a similar response in plants.”

"In the 1970s and 80s, a rift opened which still divides plant scientists to this day. It began with The Secret Life of Trees, a 1973 book in which the journalist Peter Tompkins espoused — among other pseudoscientific claims — the concept of plant sentience. A few years later, while Van Volkenburgh was a graduate student at UW, a researcher there named David Rhoades discovered that plants, when wounded, emit “volatile compounds” as a kind of distress signal and warning to their neighbors. In other words, they could communicate their condition to other plants.

"Rhoades’ work was genuinely scientific and, it seems, accurate. But when the popular press relayed it in terms of “talking trees” — a shade too close to sentience — establishment academics promptly sterilized the line of inquiry. “Those scientists could no longer get funded,” Van Volkenburgh says. “The subject became taboo.” In recent years, however, there’s been a resurgence of investigation into the idea that plants are intelligent in ways we’ve historically overlooked.

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"Lincoln Taiz, a professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, accepted the invitation. In 2019, he and his colleagues published a paper titled “Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness.” Arguing that plant neurobiology lacked an “intellectually rigorous foundation,” they gave their assessment: “We consider the likelihood that plants, with their relative organizational simplicity and lack of neurons and brains, have consciousness to be effectively nil.”

"Plants clearly sense the world around them. They are “aware,” in whatever alien way. A few examples, like the Venus flytrap and the aptly named "sensitive plant", or Mimosa pudica, demonstrate this plainly. Others are subtler. But none imply a sensation of pain (or anything else) that we would recognize as akin to our own. Most biologists doubt that shrubs and flowers possess the complexity necessary for such subjective experience. “Plants don’t have that part of intelligence that we call emotional intelligence,” Van Volkenburgh says. (She still keeps an open mind, though: “Who knows? We could be missing it.”)

"Van Volkenburgh says, “Plants can detect light, but I don’t think you can say plants can ‘see.’” The same goes for hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling. The terms we use to describe our own interface with the world don’t seem transferable to plants. They describe the contours of a human-centric reality, made possible by our animal anatomy.

"Looking at our respective evolutionary histories, it may be as Taiz suggests: Plants simply don’t need consciousness, nor pain. While disagreeable sensations taught our ancestors to avoid imminent threat — to withdraw their hands from the fire, so to speak — plants developed their own, unconscious strategies. Besides, bodily injury isn’t a grave concern for an organism that can regenerate at will. “When tissues are damaged in a plant,” Van Volkenburgh says, “it’s not as dire a situation as in an animal.'”

Comment: Using terms that apply to humans confuses the issue as usual. Plants are sentient but not conscious in our sense of the word.