Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked | Hacker News Reader

Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked

nytimes.com

104 pointsdnetesn53 comments

It seems to me that AI is more plant than animal, and the specific biological response mechanisms that plants use have explanatory power toward understanding and communicating about AI in a more productive way than the popular conception of GAI as sentient.

Really? Considering AI has (or will soon have) the best "brain" when it comes to adapting its default heuristics based on new information, plants don't seem to fit the right explanatory model.

I would like to know in what way you think they are a better model than animals.

Similarly to the fallacies of anthropomorphism, the amygdala-hijacking that often occurs when ascribing sentience undermines the effectiveness of the animal model for AI. The central-nervous system ('best "brain"') analogy fallaciously assumes advanced executive function in a natural (ie. not rule-based) environment that confuses the role of currently tenable AI applications.

Robotics and agent-based systems may provide some counterarguments. My original comment was more about explanatory reasoning for machine learning systems than about development paradigms or goals.

Interesting... Care to elaborate?

I am not prepared to properly address this at the moment, but at root it has to do with the great complexity of plant's adaptation without the advantages of locomotion. Certainly interested in your thoughts and others'.

As our testing procedures improve, we find out more and more about the cognitive abilities of animals, and have since found self-awareness in chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, magpies, and recently, through sniff tests, dogs. I find it not far fetched that at some point, we start to recognize (some) plants as sentinent beings, maybe on a different timescale than us. Would be interesting to know why you think they are so different from animals that they are better models for AI?

Primarily because their mechanisms of action are easier to study in vivo. Sentience is a red herring.

I addressed this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000854

Dogs are not self aware, otherwise I would love a source. That just sounds like some feelgood popsci.

Web sources seem to agree with justtopost:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/2017...

Dogs fail the mirror test.

They are certainly quite intelligent, but technically don't meet the criteria for self-awareness.

And the scent thing where they spend less time on their own scent, or don't mark over their own scent, is dissmissed as a reflexive action.

I'm referring to the "Sniff test of self-recognition" (STSR), which has been proposed by Gatti in [Gat16] and run on a very small sample of dogs. Horowitz has proposed another testing method, derived from STSR, in [Hor17]. [Hor17] has been criticized by Gallup et al. in [Gal18] for lacking evidence according to their framework of self-awareness (dogs need to sniff on themselves after exposure to their own scent). But the authors agree that the "olfactory mirror" test is a valid extension of the "mirror test", a self-awareness test based on visual clues. Gatti has shared some of the criticism recently [Gat18], but attributes the lack of evidence to formal problems, namely [Hor17] failing to cite important aspects of his original work in [Gat16]. And indeed, while [Gal18] cites [Hor17], and [Hor17] cites [Gat16], [Gal18] makes no mention of results by Gatti in [Gat16], which would support their framework: "[...] when released together inside the enclosure and left free to move and interact with each other and with the five samples, the four dogs repetitively sniffed the excretory organs of the others and the containers, sometimes stopping to sniff themselves."

I'm no expert, so I don't want to make any strong assertions here. But it seems that only recently, alternative self-awareness testing procedures (to the "mirror test") have become acceptable by researchers. Now new tests will be designed, and there is a body of evidence to be gathered for each of those tests. I personally believe that, given that the defense of human exclusivity for cognitive features has been a running fight, self-awareness will eventually suffer a similar fate.

[Gat16] Cazzolla Gatti, Roberto. Self-consciousness: beyond the looking-glass and what dogs found there. Ethology Ecology & Evolution, 2016

[Hor17] Alexandra Horowitz. Smelling themselves: Dogs investigate their own odours longer when modified in an "olfactory mirror" test. Behavioural Processes, 2017

[Gal18] Gordon G. Gallup Jr. & James R. Anderson. The "olfactory mirror" and other recent attempts to demonstrate self-recognition in non-primate species. Behavioural Processes, 2018

[Gat18] https://robertocazzollagatti.com/2018/06/07/self-awareness-i... - 2018

So the signal passes from the attacked leave to other leaves, what do the other leaves do with this information though? What can they defend against?

They can produce noxious chemicals or retrieve resources from threatened parts among other responses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_defense_against_herbivor...

I highly recommend that anyone concerned about causing suffering to plants by eating them read about Kirtimukha. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtimukha

I was unfamiliar with this. Great story. I appreciated the inclusion in the article of the related myth of Ouruboros.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

I read about Kirtimukha, but what does that have to do with concern over causing plants suffering by eating them?

I never realized that the chemical signals could travel so quickly through a plant, and previously thought this process took hours instead of a few minutes. While we as humans feel almost instantaneous pain, there's a short delay before the spike in calcium ions are then propagated to the rest of the plant's structure. Will be interesting to see how the related knowledge we can learn from simpler eukaryotes could eventually be expanded to include all sorts of more complex ones.

Some people love to use this information as a fallacious argument of futility against veganism, i.e. that suffering cannot be avoided because "plants suffer too!". But this misses the point. Plants can respond to stimuli, but it doesn't mean that they feel pain, suffer and have a consciousness and emotions like animals do.

> Plants have no eyes, no ears, no mouth and no hands. They do not have a brain or a nervous system.

That again, they respond to stimuli but don't feel pain like an animal.

If vegans were serious about stopping suffering, they'd create a machine that instantly destroys earth.

Edit: While I'm perfectly fine with being downvoted for this and understand why - this was meant as a joke, and you shouldn't joke on HN - I need to point out that this Doomsday Machine Argument is a standard argument against Negative Utilitarianism, which was first published by R.N. Smart, and anyone with a negative utilitarian doctrine (incl. many vegans) needs to address this argument.

Speaking as a vegan: The reason I am vegan is for utilitarian reasons. Neuroscientists agree that there is firm evidence that all animals (NOT PLANTS) are sentient to varying degrees. I believe that in the future it will be possible to quantify exactly how sentient each species is (e.g. a dog is 1/4 of a person or a cow is 1/5 of a person). Furthermore, through technology such as EEG, fMRI, and intravenous monitoring of hormone levels, it will be possible to quantify whether a given species is, on average, happy more than sad. Speaking as a living being, I believe that life is on the whole vastly more positive than negative. The balance only tips for the worse when factors such as slavery and torture come into play, which is why I choose not to consume products produced in factory farms, which are the modern implementation of slavery.

I’m also a vegan. There wasn’t any singular reason that led me to this resolution, but many factors. For instance, I probably wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for modern medicines use of animals. But that’s more of a survival issue than killing an animal because it’s protein is preferable to a plants. To an extent, I realized how little enjoyment I got out of eating meat compared to the suffering animals face. I read of the health benefits of going first vegetarian and ultimately vegan. Why eat cholesterol if I don’t have to eat it?

Having said that, there is often a benefit to plants from human cultivation - but it’s not an absolute benefit. Our love of fruit results in their trees/plants being cared for by humans. Many of the plant products we eat don’t result in the death of the plant. If those plants could speak I think they’d thankful of their caretakers. Sure we’re not planting most of their seeds, but they do have a maintained population.

I wish no animals ever suffered at the hands of humans. This world is full of beauty, and it’s awful that so much of human activity results in life’s death and extinction - including deforestation for crops.

> and it’s awful that so much of human activity results in life’s death and extinction

What you mean is nature not just humans. Life death cycle is natural thing.

World is full of beauty, but it is also full of suffering and pain, large portion of it not having to do anything with humans. Animals can starve in nature, get mutilated etc.

Nature is both sides of the coin, not just the pretty one.

As for what you eat, it’s very hard to scientifically prove what’s healthier for you. There are way too many outside factors that influence that. A lot of plants you buy in a shop are treated with chemicals in unhealthy way. Apple, carrots, tomatoes are all treated to ripe when they need to cos they are usually harvested before fully ripe.

And third thing, just cos you don’t need something doesn’t mean humans won’t do it, that’s, once again, in our nature.

It's so easy to convince ourselves that eating meat is completely fine. Maybe it wouldn't be that easy if every time you wanted to eat meat you had to go yourself to the slaughterhouse and see the horrors caused by those you pay to.

Second, is proven that growing vegetables is more sustainable that growing meat.

Typical Appeal to emotion nonsense

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

"Appeal to emotion or argumentum ad passiones is a logical fallacy characterized by the manipulation of the recipient's emotions in order to win an argument, especially in the absence of factual evidence."

That you don't want to see it doesn't mean there is not factual evidence. Do you want evidence? Start caring about looking for it. You can start here [1].

[1] H.O.P.E. documentary: https://youtu.be/pDg7tlEJD64

And you repeat the same logical fallacy by linking that silly documentary HOPE

and no, i have zero problem to pay a visit to a slaughterhouse each time i want to eat a juicy steak.

Without making a claim against veganism/vegetarianism, you do realize that people have been killing their own animals and eating them for many years. I'd wager most of the people who work in factory farms still eat meat. You don't find a huge proportion of butchers going vegetarian/vegan. I don't think that evidence supports that seeing how your food is killed has any impact on most adults, although it can be traumatic for children. The meet your meat campaign was largely ineffective, whereas making vegetarianism/veganism easy to do has shown actual upticks in vegetarianism that seem to be self fulfilling cycles. People aren't generally monsters, but that doesn't mean they want to sacrifice if they don't have to. Make a product that competes with meat on price, taste, and texture and I think most people will choose the vegetarian option unless there's significant social pressure not to.

Personally, I'm not directly against the small farmer nor the local butchery. But I'm shocked by what the big meat industry is doing. And I didn't have a clue until when I woke up recently.

The bigger problem is that eating meat, even if from small butchers, helps promoting meat consumption which, in turns, helps big industry continue making big money out of animal abuse and at the expense of everybody's natural environment.

Here you have what some former butchers have to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDg7tlEJD64&t=4213

I slaughtered my own chicken when i was a kid cos i grew up partially in a village.

Based on the largest study currently available[0], there does not seem to be any evidence supporting a vegan or vegetarian diet having any protective effect on all cause mortality. There's a lot of pseudoscience in the health and wellness community so I would remain skeptical when reading about any alleged health benefits of a particular diet.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312055008_Vegetaria...

Literature supporting a whole foods, plant based diet has already been documented and discussed in the book “How not to die.”

You have ONE study, and a cohort one at that.

How would you feel about raising (for example) cattle in a perfect, free range setting—giving them plenty of quality feed, as well as breeding opportunities—and then eventually slaughtering them painlessly in their sleep? So the cow would live what is presumably an excellent cow life, which would then, unbeknownst to it, be cut short. The alternative of course, without the farm, is that the cow would not have existed at all.

From a utilitarian perspective, ISTM such a situation could only be considered a net good for the cow, let alone the people who eat the meat. A good but truncated life has to be better than no life at all. The counter-argument would appear to be one of moral absolutism rather than utilitarianism—that killing a sentient being unnecessarily is simply wrong. Which isn't to say that that argument is necessarily flawed; I'm not sure there's even an argument to be had once you get to the level of disagreement on moral absolutes. But I do think the utilitarian aspect is interesting to consider.

Edit: As an aside, I recognize that the vast majority of farms (ie factory farms) are nothing like the idyllic farm described.

However good their life was before, you're still taking it against their will.

You forgot that life could be outside of Earth too. It would be foolish to wipe oneself out before wiping them.

I disagree. The doomsday machine “argument” is invalid - it’s probably some dual argument to solipsism based on the near zero thought I’m willing to expend.

"That again, they respond to stimuli but don't feel pain like an animal."

I don't feel this is a valid argument. We only really know how pain feels to us, but we can guess it also applies to other humans, animals, etc. That we cannot imagine how it feels to respond to negative stimuli as a plant should not invalidate the possibility that it is unpleasant.

It seems vanishingly unlikely that a plant could experience pain. To the best of our knowledge, you need a brain of some sort to experience anything. Even that may not be sufficient: an unconscious human doesn't appear to experience pain.

You could argue that plants may have some unknown structure that allows them to experience pain or other phenomena, but that's no very useful. You could argue the same about rocks. It's impossible to prove a negative.

A robot can be designed to respond to stimuli. For instance, an advanced robotic vacuum cleaner moves away when it hits an object that was not supposed to be there, or move away from a source of heat or from water. In what sense are these responses different from the response of a plant or an insect?

Plants struggle to survive and reproduce as animals do, with different strategies adapted to their circumstances. Pain is just a specific mechanism toward that end, as is sentience. Why should we privilege those mechanisms when deciding which organisms are worthy of our concern? It's as if birds decided that flight is the key feature important to determining interspecies concern. Chauvinism based on anthropoid characteristics is still chauvinism.

There are some people who don't feel pain (congenital insensitivity to pain). If there was a way to raise animals such that they lack the ability to feel pain and emotions, would it be acceptable to vegans to then consume animals?

Lab grown meat will hopefully become a thing in the next decade.

There’s an interesting contingent of vegans who don’t think lab grown meat is a good idea ethically.

https://www.thoughtco.com/laboratory-grown-meat-is-not-vegan...

In my view, what’s futile about it is the fact that for many veganism has to do with moral choice against animal suffering but gets conflated with “living healthy”.

Skin of an apple that you buy in standard shop is anything but healthy due to the amount of chemicals applied to it. Even the home grown plants can be treated in a way that is unhealthy.

And thirdly, things like avocado plantations are anything but environment friendly.

Are you seriously suggesting that (all else being equal) a mixed diet is healthier than a vegetarian diet because in a mixed diet you consume less chemicals through fruit and vegetables?

No, I am saying eating plants != healthy per se.

I have seen people suggesting all meat diet is healthier then all plant diet, and to those people i also say depends how the meat was produced, treated and kept before selling.

You give antibiotics to animals, take animal manure for you bio plants which take up some of those antibiotics and now you have plant that also has it...

I have seen people put pesticides on fruits which usually takes 15 days to degrade and sell them in couple of days. That fruit is technically poisonous.

So what I am suggesting that unless you know how you food was grown and treated you don’t know it is healthy.

So moral choices does not mean healthy choices just cos.

Ok. What about: sea sponges, starfish, jellyfish, and octopi? (If you’re drawing a seemingly arbitrary line at “has brain / nervous system => able to feel suffering”)

Which signalling molecules would qualify?

FWIW, among vegans, there is a bit of controversy over certain bivalves. Oysters and Mussels both lack a sophisticated central nervous system and likely are closer to plants than even higher invertebrates in terms of anything like pain perception. There's a reasonable case to be made that ethical vegans should be able to eat them, especially considering that oyster and mussel farming actually removes pollution from the water and has a positive environmental impact (unsurprisingly, there is plenty of disagreement though).

I don't know much about sea sponges, starfish, or jellyfish so I won't comment on those. Octopuses though are actually very intelligent compared to most other invertebrates. There are examples of complex problem solving, observational learning, and even tool use. Their intelligence is very "different" than what we are used to and hard to compare apples to apples, but is probably closer to the level of mice/rats/dogs than to insects or fish.

You're shifting the burden of culpability to a specific and more concrete definition of "pain" and "suffering" than our current science recognizes.

The neuroscience of pain and suffering isn't binary and is extremely complicated and multi-variate [1].

For example in humans, nociceptors [2] – tissue sensing nerve cells – respond to damaging or potentially damaging stimuli by sending “possible threat” signals to the spinal cord and the brain. This is interpreted on a spectrum of what we interpret semantically as "pain." What is shown in the videos of the plants, is effectively no different than the nociception process in humans, which could safely be classified as "pain."

If you want to define a distinguishing point for pain/suffering differently, that's fine, but it wouldn't have much basis scientifically.

[1] http://clbb.mgh.harvard.edu/pain/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociceptor

What does veganism have to do with HN or the article? This seems like basically a political discussion hijacking a science post.

A huge percentage of HN comments are only tangentially related to the link.

It's also a moot argument because animals that are raised for meat... eat plants. Lots of plants. Meat is incredibly inefficient in that sense. Most farmland in the US is for animal feed.

So if someone really is worried that plants feel pain and wants to reduce the amount of plants being killed, the most effective thing they could do would be to stop eating meat.

In Jainism some of the more strict followers do not eat root vegetables (like potatoes) because it is considered violence against plants. If you eat an apple you are not killing the plant and actually helping it to spread its seeds. If you dig up root vegetables you most likely end up killing the plant.

Mushrooms and other fungi are considered violence against plants as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

I’ve grow plants the whole life and I’m pretty sure they feel pain. I know that, you start observing them and you understand with time their emotions. Pain is the easiest to spot. We don’t need to wait the scientists answer about that.

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