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Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

nytimes.com

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Re: Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

#91

Post by threatofrain »

askmike wrote: post #86
serf wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's exaggeratedly simple it's simple, but I don't think that it's exaggerated. If anything I think it just speaks to the hidden power and complexity that can arise from following simple rule-sets. Although not typically used to describe such (internal) behavior, the text-book definition of 'stimulus' is just "a thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organ or tissue." -- If one were to co…

If you take that stance you also say there is no such thing as free will, since all your actions are some kind of response from the environment. Not saying that that means you're wrong.

The hard part is coming out with an interesting and discussable definition of free will that doesn't smell like the mind-brain duality, which is just a term for spirit.

Re: Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

#92

Post by iainmerrick »

PinkMilkshake wrote: post #73
visarga wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's your definition of consciousness? How about - ability to adapt to environment and select good actions depending on situation, learning from reward/loss signals.

That seems more like a definition for intelligence or learning. My favourite definition for consciousness is the following: If it is something to be like a particular thing, then that thing is conscious. If it is something to be like a bat, then a bat is conscious. If it isn’t something to be like a bat - the “lights are off” so to speak - then it’s not conscious. Edit: clarity

From Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?", right?

At least as you've stated it, that's a circular definition.

Re: Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

#94

Post by iainmerrick »

greglindahl wrote: post #81
gumby wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! I'm mocking these people. Plus fish are in the same kingdom as any other animal , which means you can hardly be a "vegetarian" unless you only eat vegetables (well, fungi and yeasts are OK too IMHO).

Do you find that any of your vegetarian friends, of which you appear to have several, find any of your "jokes" to be "funny"? Asking for a friend.

Is it okay to eat you?

Re: Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

#95

Post by kbenson »

acct1771 wrote: post #58
cjbprime wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hearing that choosing to eat plants can cause suffering ruins vegetarianism for you, it should already have been ruined by learning that harvesting land for e.g. wheat causes the death of some small animals. (Mice, rabbits, etc.) The idea that it's a worthy goal to minimize suffering caused through your food choices, however, is unaffected by learning about harvesting deaths or by learning that plants might be ver…

Some make the "minimally conscious" argument about the animals we use as food sources now. Wonder how deep that rabbit hole will be in 100 years.

As deep as it needs to be to allow people to accept lab grown meat.

The equivalent of conscientious vegetarians of the future may be those that only eat lab grown human meat, of their own grown cells. Me-steak is the meat of the future. Of course, genetics probably means some of us taste better than others...

Re: Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

#97

Post by m12k »

serf wrote: post #80
make3 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I also have a physicalist materialist view of the world but that's exaggeratedly simple

> that's exaggeratedly simple it's simple, but I don't think that it's exaggerated. If anything I think it just speaks to the hidden power and complexity that can arise from following simple rule-sets. Although not typically used to describe such (internal) behavior, the text-book definition of 'stimulus' is just "a thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organ or tissue." -- If one were to co…

I think an important distinction is whether the response to stimulus is hardcoded or not, and the degree to which it's not. Saying simply 'stimulus-response' makes it sound like a reflex like pulling back your hand when you accidentally touch a hot plate. There's a world of difference between an automaton that always reacts the same way to a given stimulus on one end and on the other end a deeply learning mind that can store memories, create internal models to predict stimuli, maybe even 'rewire' itself to change what effects future stimuli can have. Sure, you could say that the latter just reacts to stimuli over a greater period of time (e.g. experience is just old stimuli still being reacted to) but to do so would be to gloss over the enormous difference in nature and complexity of such systems. And unless you believe in a metaphysical definition of consciousness, then somewhere in that complexity gap is where consciousness arises, so it seems hardly like something to be glossed over.

Re: Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

#98

Post by jamesrcole »

taneq wrote: post #20

> “Plants are not just robotic, stimulus-response devices,” said Frantisek Baluska I don't see how this follows from the finding that sedatives can prevent plants from responding to stimuli. It just means that there's a shared mechanism behind plants' responses and animals' responses, which wouldn't be overly surprising. Of course, that doesn't mean that plants don't have a lot more going on than we usually realise,…

I'd add that "robotic" is, in most uses of the term, extremely vague. In those uses, it doesn't have a clear meaning, it's just a term for referring to things that appear like how present-day automated machinery appears to us.

It's like people who think "computer" means something that appears like the kinds of silicon-based computers we engineer at present, rather than understanding it in terms of the rigorous notion of computation, as something that can perform computation (which can be performed in such widely varying ways, in so many different media)

Re: Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

#99

Post by jamesrcole »

alexmat wrote: post #87
askmike wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take that stance you also say there is no such thing as free will, since all your actions are some kind of response from the environment. Not saying that that means you're wrong.

You can still experience "free will" without invalidating the materialist point of view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_model

> You can still experience "free will"

if you have to put quotes around it, is it really free will?

I had a look at that link and I don't see anything related to free will there... what's the link you're suggesting?

Re: Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

#100

Post by glenstein »

Complex exchange of information and response to your environment is fascinating, and should be appreciated. But if we're calling that consciousness, we've watered down the term to the point that it's just a loose metaphor for virtually any kind of complex biological mechanisms.

This really shouldn't even be a debate. It's the special kind of wrong that ought to be embarrassing, like when people equate consciousness to quantum weirdness.

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