Anesthesia works on plants too, and we don’t know why
medium.com
medium.com
By Roald Dahl
September 10, 1949
A man named Klausner invents a machine that can hear sound the human ear cannot hear. It reproduces the sounds on a lower pitch so that human beings can hear it. With this machine he hears roses scream as his neighbor cuts them. The next morning he hears a tree scream when he cuts into it with an axe. He calls his doctor excitedly and asks him to come over at once. The doctor comes and Klausner says he wants him to listen to the tree's screams. He starts cutting into it with an axe and a large branch begins to fall. They barely get out of the way in time. He asks the doctor if he heard the scream but the doctor will not say that he did. Klausner is very upset and demands that the doctor paint the two gashes with iodine.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...
I liked when the tree tried to kill them by dropping a branch too.
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
> Neurons... transfer information about sensation and motion from peripheral parts of the body to the brain and back. By sending electro-chemical signals in the form of atomic ions, neurons can communicate great distances through the body... Most of this information is passed as sodium ions — atom-sized charged particles that pass through channels to zap from one neuron to the other. Lidocaine, a local anesthetic commonly used by dentists, blocks these sodium channels, stopping neurons from sending information to each other. That’s why they make your mouth numb, the neurons there can’t send pain sensations to your brain. They’re stopped.
> ...they [Plants] do pass information from cell to cell just like we do, via ion channels. That’s probably where lidocaine does its work in plants, blocking these channels and cutting off communication. That’s why the hair cells in the Venus flytrap can’t tell the motor cells to contract, there’s no signal being passed between them.
And ether works by blocking cell membranes in both plants and animals. I think there are some specifics about how organisms with cell walls are blocked by ether - but that's more of a "how?" rather than a "why?"
In summary: even though plants don't have nervous systems like animals, their motor functions are still ultimately controlled by ion channels with are blocked (or their cell membranes are blocked, thus blocking the ion channel) by certain anesthetics.
This post (of all things) seems to be rate limited:
> Sorry, I'm confused. What's the difference between "how" and "why" here?
We know the cause and effect behind why anesthesia works in plants: plants' motor functions are controlled by ion channels, and anesthetics block those ion channels. We know that Lidocaine blocks the sodium channels themselves, and that ether seems to block the entire cell membrane. The remaining unknown is how ether blocks the cell walls in plants.
In short the answer to why anesthetics works in plants is known: because it blocks ion channels. Saying we don't know how anesthetics work in plants is sort of like saying we don't know how asymmetric encryption works because we still haven't solved whether P = NP. There exist remaining unknowns, but we do have an understanding of why it works.
I agree, and that's my point. The parent poster seems to make a distinction that I am struggling to understand.
For an ion channel there is a clear thing that can be blocked: the pore, but I don't think "blocking" a membrane in this context is meaningful. That's the crux of why we don't know how/why many anaesthetics work. We have some ideas, the obvious ones seem to be wrong, the less obvious ones are harder to test with the current level of technology.
https://academic.oup.com/aob/article-abstract/125/1/173/5611...
https://www.botany.one/2020/01/anaesthetic-blocks-trap-closu...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
> Within intra-protein hydrophobic regions, anesthetic gas molecules bind by London force dipole couplings, and thereby (somehow) exert their effects on consciousness. Historically, views of anesthetic action have focused on neuronal membrane proteins, but actual evidence (e.g. from genomics and proteomics), points to anesthetic action in microtubules. In the most definitive anesthetic experiment yet performed, Emerson et al. used fluorescent anthracene as an anesthetic in tadpoles, and showed cessation of tadpole behavior occurs specifically via anthracene anesthetic binding in tadpole brain microtubules. Despite prevailing assumptions, actual evidence supports anesthetic action on microtubules.[1]
> I talked about paramecium, single cell organisms which could swim nimbly, find food and mates, avoid obstacles and predators, learn, and have sex, all without synapses, using their microtubules. For information capacity we calculated a billion tubulins per neuron switching at, for example, 10 megahertz, giving 1016 operations per second per neuron, 1027 ‘ops/sec’ in the brain. This pushed the AI target for brain equivalence in computers far into the future. ‘Simulate a paramecium before worrying about a brain!’, I insisted — I became unpopular among AI people, and remain so.[2]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106451...
[2] https://www.quantumconsciousness.org/sites/default/files/SHa...
Consciousness isn't even particularly well defined, let alone proven to be a requirement for strong AI.
This is an attempt to model the behavior of a 1mm worm with 302 neurons. The idea that we are going to jump from failing at this to succeeding at something comparable to human intelligence is pretty far fetched.
The fact that they're struggling to do this would indicate that we're nowhere near being able to simulate a human brain bottom up. But there are other approaches being tried to implement strong AI that don't involve brain simulation - for example, machine learning approaches that don't involve any human-brain data.
> Orch OR was harshly criticized from its inception, as the brain was considered too "warm, wet, and noisy" for seemingly delicate quantum processes. However, evidence has now shown warm quantum coherence in plant photosynthesis, bird brain navigation, our sense of smell, and brain microtubules. The recent discovery of warm temperature quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons by the research group led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay, PhD, at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan (and now at MIT), corroborates the pair's theory and suggests that EEG rhythms also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations. In addition, work from the laboratory of Roderick G. Eckenhoff, MD, at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that anesthesia, which selectively erases consciousness while sparing non-conscious brain activities, acts via microtubules in brain neurons.
https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-j...
That is true. On the other hand it sounds like you are saying it is because “ Receptors and transmitters are highly conserved across the evolutionary hierarchy”. The most commonly used explanation for poisonous plants and fungi is that they make these chemicals as a defence mechanism. The mamal eats the thing, the mamal has a bad time and learns to avoid eating the thing. The thing thrives, which provides positive selection pressure for the fungi/plant which can make nasty chemicals. So it is not an accident that mamals react to the secreted chemicals, and it is not because “transmitters are conserved” or something like that.
In addition to trying lots of similar substances that don't have anesthetic properties in animals, it would be interesting to try xenon, which is all but inert chemically but still works as an anesthetic.
Interesting (and more up to date) article here: https://theconversation.com/science-lesson-how-anesthetics-w...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4334147/
"Finally, metabolomic and pharmacological data failed to detect either the presence or any physiological action of serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, adrenaline, octopamine, acetylcholine or histamine – consistent with the hypothesis that ctenophore neural systems evolved independently from those in other animals."
And some things are important enough that they've evolved several different times. At the bottom it's all chemistry and quantum mechanics. If you can make a chlorine or an iron atom do something interesting, nature will find a way to make that happen.
edit /
Here is an interesting article on Plant consciousness https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/science/plants-consciousn...
Those mistakes are just details. But I'm a physicist, so I can't tell if there are more serious mistakes that break the whole argument. Any biologists want to comment?
My understanding of Jainism is that one of it's ultimate goals is the eradication of suffering on earth. However, they take this radically. You cannot be violent for any reason at all (and yes, this has kept the number of Jains throughout history to be quite small). This prohibition against violence is so extreme that they have a word for "Kitchen Violence" which is the violence that they accidentally exert onto the remaining plant matter when they are wishing their plates after eating. At least they acknowledge the impossibility of truly eliminating all violence on earth (you must clean things), so it's a little bit of necessary violence but it also leads to aestheticism and a general desire to not waste resources.
I think Jainism is the only religion in the world that has a belief system which is similar of that to Negative Utilitarianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_utilitarianism) which I strongly believe is that most intuitive and authentically ethically compassionate doctrine in our current society. Many of the folks who believe in negative util do so with further specifications that pain and pleasure (the hedonistic form) are one very good way of measuring this.
Maybe it sounds absurd to give Anesthesia to a plant before cutting away at it or something, but the possibility that plants feel pain and have something ackin to an experience of reality was quite concerning for people ancient and modern - and those who think strongly enough about it may believe in plants as holding some sort of ethical value (no matter how small).
I hope that sometime in the far future, we may eliminate pain and displeasure from the universe. Jainists, Negative Utilitarians, Anti-natalists, and others who recognize the possible horrors inherit to reality (and it's negative nature e.g. it tries to negate you if you take no actions via entropy), would be some of the most ethical actors in a society where we find out that "Plants feel things too" or "It's possible to imagine, or simulate the experience of being a plant that is harmed"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahavira
https://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Buddhism_and_Jain...
Not quite, the answer is due to quantum mechanical-electro-chemical dynamics. That we know, since cells are such constructs, including all derivative conglomerate entities.
A better way to put it: “Right now, anesthesia science is like astronomy before the invention of space based telescopes.”
Are there fewer ethical issues in plants than animals? Or might we just know less about plant sentience than we think we do?
To play devil's advocate (panpsychist's advocate?), how do we know that we aren't causing immense bacterial suffering each day? Your argument mainly appears to be a pragmatic decision to assume that suffering doesn't exist unless it's obviously apparent to our monkey brains.
Yes. There are no ethical issues in plants. Nobody gives a flying ducks about individual plants wellbeing... (not the same as environment and plants ecosystems in general).
Do autumn leaves falling off of the trees constitute suffering or self-inflicted harm too?
(Never the mind that morality is culturally constructed, and there's no agreed upon universal one, not even for things like murder, theft, or incest).
It strips everything out and provides a plain text file.
Alternatively, there's always Ctrl-A or Ctrl-U.
My main concern was the image of the molecules obviously not fitting with a black background. I fear that will get lost in translation entirely but I’ll give it a shot when I’m back on desktop.