Do plants have minds?

Curious for folks take on one aspect on the consciousness down to what level/all levels.

It feels like we're a short time away from seeing mechanical entities with enough AI-centric intelligence to easily pass the Turing test.  So they will appear to be conscious to us.  As Laird put it their "behavior" will indicate as much.  Play, laughter, sadness, empathy, etc.  Yet, will we deem these entities to be living beings?  I mean we're almost there today with this type of tech as you all know.

So, what I'm curious about here, is how do we really know any non-human life form is "conscious" in the way we view ourselves to be?  Yes, we see what plainly appears to be fear, reaction to pain, "suffering" as it were in lots of animals.  But how do we know the inner experience is the same/similar to ours?  Again, thinking about a robotic machine programmed to show these same outward signs of fear, pain, suffering, do we put these in a different, perhaps non-moral category while keeping animals in a separate, moral category of consideration?

Curious for folks take on one aspect on the consciousness down to what level/all levels.

It feels like we're a short time away from seeing mechanical entities with enough AI-centric intelligence to easily pass the Turing test.  So they will appear to be conscious to us.  As Laird put it their "behavior" will indicate as much.  Play, laughter, sadness, empathy, etc.  Yet, will we deem these entities to be living beings?  I mean we're almost there today with this type of tech as you all know.

So, what I'm curious about here, is how do we really know any non-human life form is "conscious" in the way we view ourselves to be?  Yes, we see what plainly appears to be fear, reaction to pain, "suffering" as it were in lots of animals.  But how do we know the inner experience is the same/similar to ours?  Again, thinking about a robotic machine programmed to show these same outward signs of fear, pain, suffering, do we put these in a different, perhaps non-moral category while keeping animals in a separate, moral category of consideration?

Well without telepathy (or at least psychic empathy) I could say only I am conscious.

The Turing Test is drawn from Turing's paper Computing Machinery & Intelligence, in which he says:

9. The Argument from Extrasensory Perception

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas.

How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming...

...If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up.

But lacking a telepathy test of course it's entirely possible we'll have people claiming (wrongly IMO) that programs run on a non-conscious Turing Machine somehow makes said machine conscious.

It would be nice to do a verifiable telepathy test, or some other Psi-based test, but we're obviously not even close to being able to do anything like that as a species.

If we believe in evolution it is hard to see where exactly consciousness appears as the idea of vague "sorta" consciousness doesn't really make sense. (It's also yet another reason Physicalism is false)

OTOH even if accepted particle consciousness it wouldn't be clear when the arrangements of particles create an entity that itself is conscious.

I guess for me programs can't be conscious, but animals and plants have some subjective feeling and sense of self? I want to say anything has a soul is conscious, but that I suspect doesn't help at all. Perhaps all systems that can be considered self-propelling agents? That might include androids or some other kind of synthetic life, even if programs on their own lack any such capacity.

I suspect we may have to utilize some measurement from Information Science, akin to Integrated Information Theory...though not even I am convinced that IIT is correct...

[Laird]

Curious for folks take on one aspect on the consciousness down to what level/all levels.

It feels like we're a short time away from seeing mechanical entities with enough AI-centric intelligence to easily pass the Turing test.  So they will appear to be conscious to us.  As Laird put it their "behavior" will indicate as much.  Play, laughter, sadness, empathy, etc.  Yet, will we deem these entities to be living beings?  I mean we're almost there today with this type of tech as you all know.

So, what I'm curious about here, is how do we really know any non-human life form is "conscious" in the way we view ourselves to be?  Yes, we see what plainly appears to be fear, reaction to pain, "suffering" as it were in lots of animals.  But how do we know the inner experience is the same/similar to ours?  Again, thinking about a robotic machine programmed to show these same outward signs of fear, pain, suffering, do we put these in a different, perhaps non-moral category while keeping animals in a separate, moral category of consideration?

It's fairly simple to me:

It is reasonable to induce from similar behaviour in beings who are similar to us in relevant senses - those of having a biological nature and of having arisen on the same planet in the same ecosystems as us - that it has similar causes as in us: namely, mental states, and especially affective states, but also cognitive states and cognition in general.

We have no reason to induce this for the similar behaviour of programmed machines because (1) we already have an obvious alternative explanation for that behaviour: that we programmed it in (even if further "training" under the programming was required), and (2) the mental states would have to be epiphenomenal, and epiphenomenal consciousness is a form of consciousness that we have no preexisting reason to expect to exist.

There might be other reasons that I'm not bringing to mind right now. If they do come to mind, I'll update this post.

As to plant eating and killing and the apparent life force and probably very dim level of consciousness of plants, I would just not worry about it.

Well I have almost given up on this discussion, but is the dimness or brightness a way of discussing the consciousness continuum?

I want to leave the morals of eating different types completely to one side, and try get at the nature of this continuum - after all consciousness has to be at the heart of what PscienceQuest is all about.

Incidentally one of the brighter plants (I guess) must be the Venus Fly Trap - which eats insects!

David

One way to get a continuum is to propose that creatures such as termites (for example) have a consciousness which is primarily stored in what Rupert Sheldrake would call a morphic field. Creatures like termites (say) would share most of their consciousness in their morphic field, while for us most of our consciousness would be on-board, so to speak.

My personal guess is that every conscious entity is a full soul but as souls bodily incarnate into this universe they enter into forms that only allow for part of their Mind to be expressed. At the level of bees we can see some reasoning ability (assuming the research is correct) that expands in humans. Arguably, as the Nobel Biologist George Wald noted, there seems to be some reasoning even in amoebas.

Could all this "extra mentality", so to speak, be stored in morphic fields or even just beyond this corporeal universe altogether?

I do suspect something like this is going on though I admit the evidence is scant to non-existent.

It's not even clear what you mean by "degrees" of consciousness and why you think consciousness even comes in "degrees". Would a "low degree" of consciousness be akin to something like the feeling just before fainting, or on the borderline between being asleep and waking up?

Well what is the difference in terms of consciousness between a tiny ant and you? The fact that I'm a bit stuck on what terminology to use, doesn't mean there isn't one!

Sci makes the interesting suggestion that the consciousness is the same but it is configured so that only a small part of its full mentality is functioning. I guess I baulk at that a bit because of Occam's Razor.

There is clearly something interesting to discuss here - particularly if we are to include plants.

David

Well what is the difference in terms of consciousness between a tiny ant and you? The fact that I'm a bit stuck on what terminology to use, doesn't mean there isn't one!

Sci makes the interesting suggestion that the consciousness is the same but it is configured so that only a small part of its full mentality is functioning. I guess I baulk at that a bit because of Occam's Razor.

There is clearly something interesting to discuss here - particularly if we are to include plants.

David

Could you expand on the "Occam's Razor" part?

Because there seem to be less entities needed if every conscious agent is a soul IMO.

Could you expand on the "Occam's Razor" part?

Because there seem to be less entities needed if every conscious agent is a soul IMO.

Well what we see is a mass of creatures - such as ants - that obviously have some sort of cognition, but not like ours. Your answer requires that we have a good understanding of what a soul is. I think that understanding may be fairly concrete in the case of humans, but once again, it gets fuzzy as we fan out to other creatures.

I suppose I feel a little like I do about Dualism. When the facts are rather vague, it is better to use concrete, simple theories that are flawed at the edges (Dualism) rather than complex mechanisms such as Idealism.

David

[Laird]

At the suggestion of @Typoz (which I'd also privately contemplated myself), and with the endorsement of @Sciborg_S_Patel, I've split a bunch of posts out into another thread: Dietary (and related) ethics [split from Do plants have minds?]. Let's keep this one for discussing whether plants have minds.

At the suggestion of @Typoz (which I'd also privately contemplated myself), and with the endorsement of @Sciborg_S_Patel, I've split a bunch of posts out into another thread: Dietary (and related) ethics [split from Do plants have minds?]. Let's keep this one for discussing whether plants have minds.

Should we move discussion about the morality and limitations of the Designers to a different thread as well?