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The word "consciousness" has important connotations that are not captured by the generic definition. As others noted, an air conditioner with a built in thermostat can fit the generic definition of consciousness.

When I say an entity is conscious, I mean to say it not only has the ability to react to stimuli, but it can also abstractly choose how to react. It can rewire its own reactions, not just in a Pavlovian sense, but it can also develop internal thought frameworks and route its reactions through the frameworks it prefers.

The only mechanism plants have for improving the way they react to their environment is biological evolution. You could call that mechanism a type of consciousness, but in doing so you would have to treat the species as the conscious entity, not the individual plant; individual plants are like passing thoughts.

Thus I don't think individual plants are conscious unless they have some way to improve their reaction to their environment outside of biological evolution.

David Chalmers discusses the consciousness of theromostats here: http://consc.net/notes/lloyd-comments.html

I tend to agree, but at the same time an entity capable of choosing how to react would violate the law of cause and effect. So, can conscious beings really choose how to react, or is consciousness just the illusion that we can make choices?

I'm not sure I understand the question. You might be right if there is no passage of time, but thanks to time, the effect of one instant can be a cause in the next instant. The choice of reaction develops with time.

It sounds like you're starting from an assumption that thoughts are somehow inherently different from responses. But we don't actually know if they are. Nothing that we've ever learned about how brains work has ever shown that choices, really all thoughts, are anything other than automatic. Our behaviors are tremendously complex, but that doesn't demonstrate that we have free will.

So the question shouldn't be whether we can adapt in ways that plants can't but rather what degree of adaptability feels sufficiently thoughtful to our meat computers.

> Our behaviors are tremendously complex, but that doesn't demonstrate that we have free will.

If by "free will", you do mean what I think you mean, it would be very surprising we have it. It would basically imply dualism, which I have dismissed a long time ago.

Of course our thoughts are entirely automatic. They're physical processes like any other. It would still be nice to understand their structure. I for one would be thrilled to learn how choices actually happen.

How does an electron decide where to go in the dual hole experiment?

Like the double slit experiment with a photon, or the semi-transparent mirror?

Simple: it goes both ways. Then decoherence happens, the universe splits in half, and we experience being in either one of those halves. What we observe is but a glimpse of what actually happen. We don't have access to the other side (split universes don't communicate with each other, contrary to what much sci-fi material describes).

That may sound weird, but the alternative (that half the amplitude is "not real", or that it "collapses" (in a way that is non-local, that is, exceeds the speed of light), is even weirder.

Or you could just refuse to answer the question, and stick to "this equations mean I should observe this with those statistics".

Plants engage actively with their environment, and communicate with other plants. Usually by secreting some kind of chemical ("secondary metabolite"), which makes sense given they don't move very fast.

Things that don't move very fast are at an advantage where energy efficiency is important. The general trend is that low-energy things modify their environment chemically and high-energy things modify their environment mechanically. Compare the diversity of human-discovered secondary metabolites from plants/fungi (low power), insects/reptiles/amphibians (medium power), mammals/birds (high power)

https://www.mpg.de/15791/Plants_and_environment

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

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6b23/df2807a0fb8e77c4922377...

Plant communication is certainly fascinating, but I wouldn't call it a sign of consciousness. Isn't it just another reaction to stimuli?

I can imagine an experiment where some plants are placed in an environment where the communication chemical they secrete interacts with a gas in the air, slowly poisoning the plants. Would the plants adapt by changing their own behavior, or would some later generation survive due to a mutation? If they changed their own behavior, that might point toward a kind of individual consciousness.

The medical definition of conciseness includes things like responding to bright light by constructing the iris. It’s not high on the scale, but it’s very much part of the current definition in active usage. So, in practice it’s useful have level of consciousness and as such the minimum can be extremely low without becoming less meaningful.

More importantly as we understand more about the brain we may eventually understand how everything works. Any definition that would then exclude humans as conscious becomes irrelevant.

That's a very helpful clarification. Thanks!

> The medical definition of conciseness includes things like responding to bright light by constructing the iris.

Which has an interesting parallel with many plant's ability to rotate the face of their leaves towards the current position of the sun.

Mimosa Pudica and the Venus Fly Trap respond even faster (in iris response like times).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLTcVNyOhUc

Us humans are kind of undergoing that experiment right now with climate change and everything else, and even with the strategies available to us it is unclear whether humans will survive the coming hundreds of years :)

From a philosophical standpoint, and considering the spirit rather than the details: Is this hypothetical experiment just giving plants a challenge at them which they're too dumb or helpless to solve?

It seems there are plenty of analogous challenges which humans alone or in groups are unequipped to deal with.

Is any "challenge" humans respond to not a homeostatic correction, like if everything were perfectly perfect for a person would they do anything different at all? Considering also the homeostases we're built to maintain "just because", like novelty vs boredom.

If a thing "decided" to change its reproductive rate, or selected different sexual partners based on environmental conditions, is this necessarily a phenomenon unconnected to individual agency? Humans do this too.

Developmental neuroscience strongly supports the claim that physical brain architecture requires environmental stimuli, and psychology strongly supports the importance of "nurture" contributing to a person's "self". Do these stimulus responses have no bearing on consciousness?

If your conscious experience suddenly became transferred to a tree, and a lumberjack came to cut you down, how could you convince them you're conscious using the behaviors available to you?

Consider a conscious alien unfamiliar with human society, or a Stone age tribesperson who somehow doesn't embody human cognitive biases like assuming consciousness of things that look like them. If they observe a financial services office for a few hours, do they think the workers are modifying the environment in an individually considered manner?

If plants and humans were both considered by definition to be conscious, would life change?

> When I say an entity is conscious, I mean to say it not only has the ability to react to stimuli, but it can also abstractly choose how to react. It can rewire its own reactions, not just in a Pavlovian sense, but it can also develop internal thought frameworks and route its reactions through the frameworks it prefers.

These are just reactions with a memory component. This would include any computers, and so is too broad. I think consciousness will end up being a specific type of information process, with certain properties including those you describe, but it must have more properties and so be more specific than what you outline.

Also if you unpack “prefers”, there’s nothing there which is not based on current biochemistry, genetic make up, instinctive responses, conditioning, trauma and experiences until a fraction of a second ago, and environment.

Saying this because the definition seems to beer toward “free will”.

Gee, under that definition I'm not sure I'm conscious!

What I described matches the Disney/Pixar movie Inside Out, which most people readily identify with. :-)

I feel like evolution of a species is way too simple a process to claim it has a conscience. I believe if you simply combine variations (from either mutations or cross-breeding) along with “survival of the fittest” you essentially get evolution. There’s nothing more magical happening. Each of those processes is extremely boring and entirely mechanical.

> At the most abstract interpretation I think consciousness can be defined as a closed system that contain both input and output, in which information is gathered and alters some component of the system itself.

This seems like a reductio ad absurdum definition of consciousness, to echo rotrux's "By this definition my air conditioning system is conscious" comment.

Consciousness may be hard to define, but it certainly is something that at least appears "special", and I think it's a big mistake to not include at least some level of self-awareness in the definition.

I reduced it to a minimum so we could find points that we can agree on. I think self-awareness is a more complex system of consciousness, such as sentience. Which I do not believe an air conditioner is.

For example, is nature (evolution) conscious?

I mean this in the most literal sense, the system which created your definition of "consciousness", is that system itself consciousness?

The material that makes up our neurons once came from a non self-aware system. (basic minerals, etc.)

I'm not so against considering an air conditioning system to be conscious. If the goal is to define "consciousness" deliberately in such a way that you get to keep considering only a certain set of things to be conscious, then you might as well just define it as exactly that set of things.

That's a straw man, no one has that goal. And it's pretty clear a definition of consciousness that would include a thermostat is so broad as to be nearly worthless.

I think it's a big mistake to not include at least some level of self-awareness in the definition

These are the most boring sorts of arguments. You want to talk about only systems that have self awareness? Fine, you go do that on this side of the room. You want to talk about systems that don't necessarily have self awareness? Okay, do that on the other side of the room.

If you can't decide on common definitions for words, you can't play together.

You seem to be saying that there's a "special" thing, and that thing must include self awareness by your reckoning, and you call that thing "consciousness". Instead of arguing about whose definition of the word "consciousness" is better, just define that thing rigorously, call it anything you want, and then we can talk about it.

Following Thomas Nagel, I understand 'x is conscious' to mean roughly 'there is something that it is like to be x'. In this sense, a system can be intelligent without being conscious. Consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness might all be orthogonal. We currently know vastly more about how to build an intelligent machine (extremely low as the level of intelligence may be) than about how to build a conscious machine (we know nothing at all about that).

Imagine waking up from deep sleep. In the first few seconds, there is virtually no intelligence present other than basic autonomous body survival intelligence, which is also present during deep sleep. So what has changed? What is the difference between being in deep sleep and being in the state of unintelligent awareness a second after waking from deep sleep? There is not something that it is like to be in deep sleep. There is something that it is like to be just awakened from deep sleep.

There is a lot of confusion in most conversations between consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness. The three are different concepts and the relationships between them are poorly understod.

I can imagine a human-level intelligence that lacks consciousness (this is sort of what is meant by the term 'p-zombie'). I can imagine a being that almost or completely lacks intelligence (in the sense of problem-solving ability, pattern recognition, etc.), yet is conscious.

Humanity currently has a lot of knowledge about how various material phenomena (drugs, being hit in the head with a brick, etc.) affect consciousness, but as far as I know humanity currently has zero knowledge about the mechanisms by which material phenomena affect consciousness. Consciousness in its essence is not understood at all and may be fundamentally beyond the reach of science.

There is no reason to assume that it is in principle possible to objectively evaluate whether some entity is conscious.

> Consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness might all be orthogonal.

Maybe, but probably not!

> I can imagine a human-level intelligence that lacks consciousness (this is sort of what is meant by the term 'p-zombie'). I can imagine a being that almost or completely lacks intelligence (in the sense of problem-solving ability, pattern recognition, etc.), yet is conscious.

I can imagine living forever, but it's actually impossible. The p-zombie argument depends upon a rhetorical trick that exposes our ignorance, much like Zeno's paradox.

> There is no reason to assume that it is in principle possible to objectively evaluate whether some entity is conscious.

Whatever argument you might use to to justify this, would also suggest that it is not possible in principle to objectively evaluate whether something is healthy, or alive or feels pain. And yet we seem quite adept at this.

By this definition my air conditioning system is conscious.

I don't think so. Being turned on/powered up is not equivalent to being awake. "Awake", at minimum, implies a living subject.

That is just kicking the definition can down the "living" road.

Exactly. People do this all the time. They project their own experience onto something without taking the time to think if that even applies. Our brain has billions of neurons and trillions of axons, so many that it allows a platform of emergence, not magic. Plants having nothing like this.

How do you know that it isn't?

I'd personally back such a definition of consciousness, and reframe the question more as one of what level of consciousness (eg complexity of processing, breadth of collected inputs) must an entity possess before we consider its consciousness as being meaningful to us.

Love this way of framing the subject.

Following that line of reasoning, you could say that even the smallest particle/bit of energy has some level of consciousness.

Then you could also say that Earth (and any planet or star), is also conscious, and at a way higher level than we (humans) are.

So we've got to panpsychism. Why not? We're in the company of Thales, Plato, Spinoza and Leibniz.

Thank you for teaching me something new, had never heard of panpsychism before - fascinating.

Do you know of this concept has been incorporated into physics somehow? Are there any models in physics that consider panpsychism as fundamental? (i.e. That consider consciousness as a basic property of matter/energy, just like the 3 special dimensions or time)

https://reducing-suffering.org/is-there-suffering-in-fundame...

Then you could also say that Earth (and any planet or star), is also conscious, and at a way higher level than we (humans) are.

What's the point of the word "conscious" if it's just a synonym of the word "complex"? If it doesn't add anything, it's not worth having the word.

Good point. Don't have a good answer to that.

However, this happens very frequently in humans, we have multiple different languages and even multiple synonyms for a lot of (most?) words in every one of those languages.

At the same time, would correlation of two things make one of them worthless to have/know/understand?

Synonymous != Correlated.

If you're saying they're synonymous, then it doesn't make sense to ask whether you can have one without the other.

So ask yourself, could you imagine something being complex but not conscious, or conscious but not complex? If so, then they're not synonymous and you have something interesting to talk about.

That was exactly the point. According to panpsychism, everything has consciousness.

We us as humans on the other hand, want to compare our consciousness to the one of animals/plants/etc.

Trying to bridge the two things, you could say that everything has consciousness, but that there's a "level" of it, which to make it simple, you could attribute to (or be roughly correlated to) complexity/size.

In a way, it's exactly how gravity is defined.

> At the most abstract interpretation I think consciousness can be defined as a closed system that contain both input and output, in which information is gathered and alters some component of the system itself.

This is very similar to the definition I was given for "robot" in an embedded systems course.

I think this is the point that the poster is trying to make. They’re saying it’s difficult to declare something conscious or not using exact criteria.

A popular definition (in my experience) is the existence of a central nervous system, but we don’t really know whether or not that’s responsible for consciousness. I wonder if we’ll ever know for sure.

Well an unconscious body has a central nervous system but is clearly not conscious.

> There are things such as cellular intelligence which we know is exhibited in even the smallest of prokaryotes and eukaryotes cells

Ah, that's a biiig claim. Which may be true nonetheless. Can you be more precise in this context about 'intelligence' as distinct from action-reaction?

BTW there is a claim that plants can be conditioned a la pavlov. I'll try to dig out the ref (recently in new scientist). Amazing if verified.

> about how plants were more adaptive to radiation

Adapted in this context means adaptations so as to 'not die' I suspect. Please correct me if needed.

You might like this TED talk, The Real Reason for Brains. It goes in a similar direction to the article.

Life forms that don't move don't need brains. Sophisticated decision-making isn't a challenge that a plant has to meet. I think this is a strong point against the idea of plants being conscious.

https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for...

Completely agree that it's very hard to have conversations about implications of consciousness without first having a definition that we can all agree on.

In that line, what do you define as a "closed system"? Technically, nothing exists that doesn't somehow interact with its surroundings. Including humans (we breath, eat, absorb/exchange heat from air/sun, etc). Also black holes (Hawking radiation).

By closed system, I mean anything which you can isolate from anything else.

For example, a car and a truck are both vehicles, but a vehicle is neither a car or a truck.

The truck or car are the subject/closed system.

> At the most abstract interpretation I think consciousness can be defined as a closed system ...

Why closed? Who says it is closed? I claim it is open, and, spans the entirety of physical reality, fully entangled.

> ... that contain both input and output, in which information is gathered and alters some component of the system itself.

That sounds like a model for computation not consciousness. A JIT compiler would qualify.

Okay so based on those generic definitions, I’m practically pulling someone off life support when I turn off my Google Home. Or maybe my learning thermostat.