French bean plants show signs of intent, say scientists | Hacker News Reader

French bean plants show signs of intent, say scientists

theguardian.com

8 pointsdariosalvi783 comments

One fact that seems lost on detractors is that concentrating information processing tissue in a thing called a brain has value solely if it might need to make choices in a hurry; nerve impulses are slow, so where you are sending them had better be nearby if you are in a hurry.

When time urgency is removed from the picture, distributing that tissue throughout the organism is the safer course, despite how it inconveniences study by Kingdom Animalia. However, the strategy is not limited to Plantae; starfish have nothing recognizable as a brain, but display very definite intentional behavior.

Furthermore: if you don't need to be thinking all the time, you can re-use cells whose main job is something else the rest of the time, and probably get along with many times fewer.

It is not hard to imagine a world filled with nothing but plants and their products, where everything is done 100-1000x more slowly. Visit, and it looks like everything is frozen in time. But what is the all-fired hurry? It's a big universe.

Interstellar travel would be no big deal, for them. 1000 years to the nearest star? Time enough for a nap on the way, then. Their ships would be controlled by computers that work faster than they do. Like ours, really.

There is no objective reason to believe that Sequoias are not thinking. We just don't know.

> In a separate paper, Calvo and his colleagues set out a theory of plant consciousness based on integrated information theory (IIT) – a leading theory of consciousness – which posits that we can identify a person’s (or any system’s) level of consciousness from the complexity of the interactions between its individual parts.

> Others rebut such claims. IIT is based on an assumption that everything material has an element of consciousness, even nonliving complex systems: “It cannot have any special significance for plants,” said Jon Mallatt at the University of Washington, US. He believes claims about sentient plants are misleading, and risk misdirecting scientific funding and government policy decisions.

This sounds like crankery, then?

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