The Plant Consciousness Wars

Mind should be understood by its works.  Mind is the structuring of future or past probabilities into current actualities - directly - via the generation of information objects (thoughts if you like).  
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Seeing mind as an activity, which scientifically is measured by information transformations is already taking shape.

Mind is not really "understood" by such methods, or for that matter by any scientific methods requiring observation and experiment. Repeating the quote from Nobel laureate Wald's lecture offered by Sciborg in #60, puts the response more eloquently than I could:

Consciousness is not part of that universe of space and time, of observable and measurable quantities, that is amenable to scientific investigation. For a scientist, it would be a relief to dismiss it as unreal or irrelevant. I have heard distinguished scientists do both. In a discussion with the physicist P. W. Bridgman some years ago, he spoke of consciousness as “just a way of talking.” His thesis was that only terms that can be defined operationally have meaning; and there are no operations that define consciousness. In the same discussion, the psychologist B. F. Skinner dismissed consciousness as irrelevant to science, since confined to a private world, not accessible to others.

Unfortunately for such attitudes, consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon, a strange concomitant of our neural activity that we project onto physical reality. On the contrary, all that we know, including all our science, is in our consciousness. It is part, not of the superstructure, but of the foundations. No consciousness, no science. Perhaps, indeed, no consciousness, no reality -- of which more later....

Why plants don’t die from cancer

Stuart Thompson

Most parts of the cell are replaceable if damaged, but DNA is a crucial exception. At higher radiation doses, DNA becomes garbled and cells die quickly. Lower doses can cause subtler damage in the form of mutations altering the way that the cell functions – for example, causing it to become cancerous, multiply uncontrollably, and spread to other parts of the body.

In animals this is often fatal, because their cells and systems are highly specialised and inflexible. Think of animal biology as an intricate machine in which each cell and organ has a place and purpose, and all parts must work and cooperate for the individual to survive. A human cannot manage without a brain, heart or lungs.

Plants, however, develop in a much more flexible and organic way. Because they can’t move, they have no choice but to adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves. Rather than having a defined structure as an animal does, plants make it up as they go along. Whether they grow deeper roots or a taller stem depends on the balance of chemical signals from other parts of the plant and the “wood wide web”, as well as light, temperature, water and nutrient conditions.

Critically, unlike animal cells, almost all plant cells are able to create new cells of whatever type the plant needs. This is why a gardener can grow new plants from cuttings, with roots sprouting from what was once a stem or leaf.

All of this means that plants can replace dead cells or tissues much more easily than animals, whether the damage is due to being attacked by an animal or to radiation.

And while radiation and other types of DNA damage can cause tumours in plants, mutated cells are generally not able to spread from one part of the plant to another as cancers do, thanks to the rigid, interconnecting walls surrounding plant cells. Nor are such tumours fatal in the vast majority of cases, because the plant can find ways to work around the malfunctioning tissue.

The Fascinating Science of How Trees Communicate, Animated

Maria Papova

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter. Walt Whitman found in trees a model of existential authenticity. Hermann Hesse saw them as the wisest of teachers. Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her noble work of planting trees as resistance and empowerment.

But trees are much more than what they are to us, or for us, or in relation to us. They are relational miracles all their own, entangled in complex, symbiotic webs of interbeing, constantly communicating with one another through chemical signals dispatched along the fungal networks that live in their roots — an invisible, astonishing underworld only recently discovered, thanks to the work of Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard.

In this lovely short animation from TED-Ed and animator Avi Ofer, Camille Defrenne — one of Simard’s doctoral students at the University of British Columbia, studying how the interaction and architecture of root systems relate to forest dynamics and climate change — synthesizes the fascinating, almost otherworldly findings of Simard’s lab..

Mind is not really "understood" by such methods, or for that matter by any scientific methods requiring observation and experiment. Repeating the quote from Nobel laureate Wald's lecture offered by Sciborg in #60, puts the response more eloquently than I could:

I respect all of the consideration and research invested in consciousness.  However, as you and Wald agree, it is not easy to observe subjective experience.   Hence, a lack of progress.

On the other hand, mind - as the subject of study - does yield to measurement and to having its data patterns analyzed.  Patterns in decision-making, ability to plan ahead and adapt to environs are observable traits.  Mind takes input from the senses and outputs instructions for behavior.  Mentation is the processes that delineates mind's role in shaping environments.  Input of messages act as stimuli to permit knowing and understanding by an agent, who outputs responses.  Evaluating the patterns of communications, as mutual information between environment and agent, is well served by Bayesian analysis.

For all living things there are possible messages coming in from the physical environment that are addressed by agency.  The flow is stimulus -> information processing -> message selection -> behavioral output, all which express the mind of the agent.  The science of observing the behavior of living things and the perceptional systems that stimulate mental responses are well documented.  So are the signals that trigger movement and basic responses of a living organism.

Plants are being measured as to all these aspects.

Into a Quiet Within: Reflections on Arboreal Phenomenology

Laura Pustarfi

Trees deserve more philosophical attention both because this new scientific research shows that plants have previously unknown capacities and because deforestation continues to impact environmental and social systems planet-wide. With its focus on embodied perception, phenomenology is a practice tool from within the Western lineage that can reopen questions around trees themselves.

Trees appear in the works of phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Reconsidering arboreal phenomenology has implications for our human relationships to trees and forests, both personal and societal.

Over the course of a year studying my consciousness as I thought about trees, I moved into slowness and stillness, into a quiet within. Only when my human pace had been bracketed could I begin to recognize the livingness of trees. Removing from my thought the ways I had seen and interacted with trees is part of what precipitated the slowing. To approach a tree, my movement slowed. I sat with a tree for hours, and nothing happened, but at the same time my inner world was alight, similar to the bevy of action unfolding beneath the bark.

Rather than being by the tree, I noticed I was in them, sitting on what seemed like ground but was actually above the roots and under the branches...

I respect all of the consideration and research invested in consciousness.  However, as you and Wald agree, it is not easy to observe subjective experience.   Hence, a lack of progress.

On the other hand, mind - as the subject of study - does yield to measurement and to having its data patterns analyzed.  Patterns in decision-making, ability to plan ahead and adapt to environs are observable traits.  Mind takes input from the senses and outputs instructions for behavior.  Mentation is the processes that delineates mind's role in shaping environments.  Input of messages act as stimuli to permit knowing and understanding by an agent, who outputs responses.  Evaluating the patterns of communications, as mutual information between environment and agent, is well served by Bayesian analysis.

For all living things there are possible messages coming in from the physical environment that are addressed by agency.  The flow is stimulus -> information processing -> message selection -> behavioral output, all which express the mind of the agent.  The science of observing the behavior of living things and the perceptional systems that stimulate mental responses are well documented.  So are the signals that trigger movement and basic responses of a living organism.

Plants are being measured as to all these aspects.

As long as we remember that "mind" defined as consciousness and subjective awareness is much more than what we can study scientifically and observationally - what you describe as the stimuli and the information processing  that leads to behavioral output. If it was, there would be more justifiable hope for conscious sentient AI.

As long as we remember that "mind" defined as consciousness and subjective awareness is much more than what we can study scientifically and observationally - what you describe as the stimuli and the information processing  that leads to behavioral output. If it was, there would be more justifiable hope for conscious sentient AI.

I have been thinking about this post for a while.  A paper by Jung has brought me back.  I assert that plant life is much more practically "aware" than currently accepted.  The idea of plant communication across a local area seems to be a key fact to support a change.  (both signalling and plant esp)

Again, the context is not to look to the essences of words and abstractions they represent, but to pragmatically parse observations of nature.  Here is C. Jung again laying the groundwork for a scientific process model for ESP for all living things.  https://archive.org/stream/223463118SYNC...g_djvu.txt

 The exaggerated skepticism in regard to ESP is really without a shred of justification. The main reason for it is simply the ignorance which nowadays, unfortunately, seems to be the inevitable accompaniment of specialism and screens off the necessarily limited horizon of specialist studies from all higher and wider points of view in the most undesirable way.  How often have we not found that the so-called "superstitions" contain a core of truth that is well worth knowing!

It may well be that the originally magical significance of the word "wish," which is still preserved in "wishing-rod"
(divining rod, or magic wand) and expresses not just wishing in the sense of desire but a magical action, and  the traditional belief in the efficacy of prayer, are both based on the experience of concomitant synchronistic phenomena. Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics.

The simple point of this is to see plants as having intentions: as wishes, purposes and generation of target states within local communities.

A new opinion piece in Trends in Plant Science:
L. Taiz et al. Plants neither possess nor require consciousness. Trends in Plant Science. Vol. 24, August 1, 2019, p. 677. doi:10.1016/j.tplants.2019.05.008. (paywall)

According to Science News (at https://www.sciencenews.org/article/plan...ist-argues ):

"Taiz and colleagues point out methodological flaws in some of the studies that claim plants have brainlike command centers, animal-like nerve cells and oscillating patterns of electricity that are reminiscent of activity in animal brains. But beyond the debate over how these studies are conducted, Taiz’s team argues that plant consciousness doesn’t even make sense from an evolutionary point of view.

Sophisticated animal brains evolved in part to help an organism catch a meal and avoid becoming one, Taiz says. But plants are rooted to the ground and rely on sunlight for energy, a sedentary lifestyle that doesn’t require quick thinking or outwitting a predator — or the energetically expensive nervous systems that enable those behaviors.

“What use would consciousness be to a plant?” Taiz asks. The energy required to power awareness would be too costly, and the benefit from such awareness too small. If a plant fretted and suffered when faced with a threat, it would be wasting so much energy that it wouldn’t have any left to do anything about that threat, Taiz says.

Imagine a forest fire. “It’s unbearable to even consider the idea that plants would be sentient, conscious beings aware of the fact that they’re being burned to ashes, watching their saplings die in front of them,” Taiz says. The horrifying scenario illustrates “what it would actually cost a plant to have consciousness.”

Besides, plants have plenty to do without having to be conscious, too. With sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, plants create the compounds that sustain much of the rest of life on Earth, Taiz points out. “Isn’t that enough?”"

I guess there isn't anything new here. Some of these claims are invalid arguments from incredulity. The main one using the "evolution of consciousness doesn't make sense in plants" gambit may have at least some small validity, in my opinion. But this kind of argument makes the usual materialistic assumption that large complex energy-hungry brains evolved by Darwinian RM + NS to generate consciousness. Both parts of that assumption are invalid - it didn't happen by Darwinian RM + NS, and the brain doesn't generate consciousness like the liver generates bile. The much more likely view is that these brains evolved in some process heavily involving ID to manifest pre-existing consciousness in the physical. Plants may just have developed different ways of manifesting a different kind of consciousness.

Their opinions against plant consciousness do nothing to invalidate all of the other studies showing that plants possess an awareness of their surroundings.

The most prominent of which are Cleve Backster's research, I think.