The Thinking Plant's Man (2025)

One of the most interesting adaptations I've been learning about is the various adaptations that these trees and their lianas have to lightning strikes. For us they seem like rare one-off events but if you are a stationary being that lives hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, lightning strikes might be the primary driver of disturbance.

Some organisms think on really long time scales and it's hard for us to appreciate their "intelligence". If AGI does ever come around, I wonder if hyper-intelligent fast-thinking robots will one day look at humans and go "wait, there's actually a lot of intelligent behavior in these creatures that we didn't notice because they think on much different timescales"

Kind of incredible how nothing has really changed since then. Discussions of plant consciousness are nearly always dominated by very loud self-proclaimed skeptics - more of a social identity than an intellectual one at this point. They are strict materialists to a fault - any theory that appears to threaten materialism is dismissed. Even if it doesn’t actually threaten “materialism” but rather expands the set of objects considered “material” or in this case “thinking” (which is too dangerous for them to consider because “thinking” quickly bleeds into “conscious”). It’s telling that Einstein and Kelvin were impressed by his work, but these days any self proclaimed skeptic can just dismiss these ideas out of hand.

This is demonstrated clearly later on:

“Among these contemporaries, there was little room for what Bose himself described as “the inherent bent of the Indian mind towards mysticism and unchecked imagination.””

This is not only racist but also demonstrates the exact skeptic bent I just described. By lumping in a new science grounded in physiology with “mysticism” they are poisoning the well very insidiously.

I guess science has probably always been like this. Peoples entire careers become dependent on the flimsy theories of today so anything unorthodox is automatically threatening to them. For what it’s worth I’m not saying skepticism isn’t warranted especially for new claims but it seems to me that Bose was treated very unfairly, and I suspect that his theories would’ve held up well if his field had expanded over the last hundred years. I also think we’ll see some studies soon that absolutely blow the lid off this stuff and Bose will be remembered as a Galileo type figure of his field.

Well put.

Pop science is what it is, but I'm bewildered when the rhetoric around plants "screaming in pain" weasels its way into my conversations. Then it's a game of understanding whether my correspondent sees it as a funny way of straining language, or whether they think it's close to the truth.