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Comment by staticman2 | Hacker News Reader

They don't have brains or central nervous systems so it seems unlikely they feel pain.

If you assume the human-centric definition of the word "pain", perhaps. But I don't think that paints a complete picture - organisms experience and react to negative stimuli in so many different ways.

IMO, what we're seeing here could absolutely be considered "pain" in the plant kingdom, without altering or stretching the definition of the word even in the slightest.

Why would you use a human term like pain for the plant?

Here's a biologist saying not all humans experience pain, if it's not even a universal human experience I don't know why you'd apply it to plants instead of a more technical term:

"Interviewer: Right, and isn't sensing damage, even without a neural system, essentially pain?

Daniel Chamovitz: The idea that damage has to be pain is mistaken. We feel pain because we have specific types of receptors called nociceptors which are programmed to respond to pain, not to touch. People can have genetic malfunctions where they feel pressure but never feel pain because they don't have pain receptors."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en/article/xd7..."

A different article on the subject on plant pain has a biologist suggesting not to use human terms or animal terms:

""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.""

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

"We feel pain because we have specific types of receptors called nociceptors which are programmed to respond to pain, not to touch."

I assume he meant we feel pain as a response to damage. Saying we feel pain because of a response to pain makes no sense.

without altering or stretching the definition of the word even in the slightest.

The word "pain" has the concept of the mental experience of suffering pretty much baked in to it. Applying it to plants seems to very much stretch the definition when there is literally no biological structure in plants that corresponds to the neural activity organisms with a CNS when experiencing pain. An electrical pulse isn't really sufficient: plants send electric signals under a variety of circumstances.

Pain isn't merely a response to negative stimuli. That does stretch the definition.

Neurons specialize communication functions that normal cells also have, so plants could conceivably experience pain.

(Would still need to be shown, but is conceivable)

I'm not sure where this would leave vegans.

Not sure whether it's centralised, but the finding of the study in the article sounds like it's essentially that plants (or at least this type of tomato plant) do have some form of nervous system or equivalent, isn't it?

why do you assume the need for brains or even central nervous systems for a pain sense to exist?

All the neurotransmitters that are used for our CNS were originally evolved from plants.

some plants scream when cut https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/24473/20191218/a-group...

Reacting to a stimulus doesn’t necessitate the need to feel pain. A computer doesn’t feel pain when I plug in a USB drive, but it certainly sends an electrical signal to let other parts of the computer know something happened.

This research doesn’t suggest that plants suffer or are somehow sentient, just that they react to stimuli in a way that’s advantageous to survival.

There's also no evidence that plants (or computers) don't feel pain. We really have very little knowledge of what does or does not cause conscious experience.

We also don’t know if rocks feel pain, but it’s a safe assumption since we don’t see them attempt to avoid being destroyed.

If you try to cut an animal, it runs away or fights back. If you try to cut a plant, it sits there are lets you cut it. A plant may have some electrochemical response to ensure that a predator doesn’t kill it (which could simply be the result of natural selection), but that isn’t good evidence for us to even begin to entertain the idea that a plant feels pain.

In the absence of evidence, we shouldn’t make up wild ideas that don’t fit our best current understanding.

Some plants even leak delicious fluids that encourage more cuts (maple trees)

Spend some time looking at sped up videos of plants and then state that same feeling about their lack of reactivity with the same feeling of absolute certainty.

Some species have been shown to communicate using pheromones to increase tannins in the leaves of their neighbours.

Agreed about in the absence of evidence, but in the absence of much study being done we could maybe have a closer look?

I guess "feel" might not be the exactly right word here but the "pain" is.

I don't think you can separate "feel" from the concept of pain. That's pretty much baked in. Maybe there just needs to be another word to encompass plant signalling of this sort.

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