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Comment by why_at | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.

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What the average person thinks is a very low barrier but I do not think plants have crossed that yet.

Some variety of learnings over the last several years. Many of them are sensationalized; but my simple statement was "plants feel"; and many of these values imply some level of "feeling":

Plants scream when harmed:

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-lou...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stressed-plants-c...

Plants release VOCs when harmed:

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lzg4x9/...

(OP's main comment has several sources)

Plants respond to audio stimuli (hearing, sorta):

[3] https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=24-P13-00035&s...

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4102826/

A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"

I think this is a huge error which collapses the most urgently important distinction at the heart of the entire issue. Plants do complex, interesting things, and we borrow from an already existing vocabulary to make analogies. So people will say plants "feel" or "communicate" or "see".

But those are automatic biological reflexes, and using words with connotations to conscious awareness to describe them makes people think they're the same thing. But a plant "feeling pain" is repurposing words about consciousness to mean new and different things. And I think people are seduced by it because it feels like being open-minded to new possibilities.

I think that there was a relatively recent panic to stop anthropomorphizing the rest of creation and that that rebellion against anthropomorphism clings so hard to "that's not how humans do it and stop thinking it is" that we commit the sin in the opposite direction - and declare everything as "definitely not a lived experience of another being" and "just rote programming" too early.

Of course plants have feelings and conscious experience, it's obvious to anyone who has spent time living with them. Plants literally think and solve problems, too. But you won't succeed in convincing anyone who doesn't understand such basic truths. Reducing a living being to a mere machine is so 19th century, but just as religions still influence how people see the world, it's going to take generations for science to "prove" it to satisfaction, and for the general public to accept it. We're still missing fundamental concepts, much less ability to measure and quantify it.

You'll probably like the biologist Michael Levin and his research, exploring what a mind actually is and seeing beyond what he calls our "mind blindness". https://www.drmichaellevin.org/

Interesting to me that you employ religion as the pejorative comparison here, when it's the inherent human religions that have perceived in plants gods and spirits since before the beginning of recorded time.

Perceiving plant gods and spirits is closer to experimental science, attempts to describe and make sense of your actual lived experience. Dismissing them without any evidence or experience, just because they don't fit in the worldview you grew up in, is closer to religion.

Perceiving plant gods and spirits is religion.

It's spirituality. Religions tend to have creeds.

You wouldn't call every animist belief the same religion's name. That's a loooot of religions that believe those things - the vast, vast majority of them, in fact.

I don't think it's as obvious as you make it out to be. For one, what we consider evidence of "thinking" is autonomous action by a being as a whole. For as far as I know, there is no evidence that a plant's movements are governed by a central coordinating authority. Can your evidence distinguish between a plant having a single mind or each branch having decision authority of its own?

Why does a plant’s movements need to be governed by a “central, coordinating authority”? Isn’t that employing another anthropomorphism onto a plant?

Octopi have, what, 9 minds? Would we consider them a single or multiple creatures?

And to think of plants, some single organisms span *acres* of connected root structures.

So, why would one need to distinguish between a single mind and multiple minds in one creature? To what end does it serve, except managing a narrow, specific definition of thought and/or memory that doesn’t even model the whole of creatures we generally agree are living and thinking?

I’m not saying I know if they’re a “self-replicating, autonomous food source” or not; but I am saying it’s quite presumptuous to declare they’re not and then to gradually narrow the definitions when a plant surpasses some line in the sand we didn’t think it would pass.

It reminds me of all the human exceptionalism stances we had over the centuries, “humans are special because they use tools” and the like.

Science if finally catching up to Werner Herzog

>Of course there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.

But seriously, the articles you posted are inappropriately repurposing words normally associated with conscious experience, in order to get attention.

There is lots of evidence plants react to stimuli. There is no evidence they feel.

There's no reason to think that birds and trees don't routinely exuberate with joy, since cooperating with our needs in needful proportion brings us humans exuberance.

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