The case against plant consciousness

Us humans are kind of undergoing that experiment right now with climate change and everything else, and even with the strategies available to us it is unclear whether humans will survive the coming hundreds of years :)

From a philosophical standpoint, and considering the spirit rather than the details: Is this hypothetical experiment just giving plants a challenge at them which they're too dumb or helpless to solve?

It seems there are plenty of analogous challenges which humans alone or in groups are unequipped to deal with.

Is any "challenge" humans respond to not a homeostatic correction, like if everything were perfectly perfect for a person would they do anything different at all? Considering also the homeostases we're built to maintain "just because", like novelty vs boredom.

If a thing "decided" to change its reproductive rate, or selected different sexual partners based on environmental conditions, is this necessarily a phenomenon unconnected to individual agency? Humans do this too.

Developmental neuroscience strongly supports the claim that physical brain architecture requires environmental stimuli, and psychology strongly supports the importance of "nurture" contributing to a person's "self". Do these stimulus responses have no bearing on consciousness?

If your conscious experience suddenly became transferred to a tree, and a lumberjack came to cut you down, how could you convince them you're conscious using the behaviors available to you?

Consider a conscious alien unfamiliar with human society, or a Stone age tribesperson who somehow doesn't embody human cognitive biases like assuming consciousness of things that look like them. If they observe a financial services office for a few hours, do they think the workers are modifying the environment in an individually considered manner?

If plants and humans were both considered by definition to be conscious, would life change?

Is this the correct film? The links & the wiki page on it talk exclusively about insect interaction.

> how plants reach out their vines and leaves, moving and feeling the world around them

I could argue cold water dropped into a very hot pan 'spreads out' to 'feel' its environment, 'withdrawing' from the metal where it can.

In my humble opinion, in a nutshell:

There is no such thing as consciousness, i.e. a mechanism that defines consiousness.

There is only a simulation process inside organisms that tries to mimic reality in order to predict the outcome of the current situation and subsequently produce a 'get away'-oriented or 'stay'-oriented response.

This simulation process' complexity is relative to the complexity of the organism.

The more complex the simulation is, the clearer the definition of objects in it is.

The clearer the definition of objects is, the clearer the definition of self is.

The clearer the definition of self is the higher the degree of 'consciousness' is.

I.e. consciousness can be defined as the ability of something to perceive itself.

With that definition, it is clear that that ability of self-perception changes from organism to organism.

Thus plants have a low ability to perceive themselves, and humans have the highest.

If we are searching for the mechanism of consciousness, we will never find it, because it doesn't exist: consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that arises from the operations of an organism.

A big portion of the film is about insects - it also contains some wonderful footage (with some high-tech macro photography) of plants and the garden where it all takes place.

Good point about a water droplet's behavior, how it seems to be "alive" in some aspects - all due to physical/chemical reations. I think it's related to the question of what "alive" means, and how it's different from inert, non-living material.

With slime mold, much of its behavior is just like water - spreading, dripping, with surface tension, etc. - but there's definitely a difference (perhaps only subjectively), that an observer would say it "feels its way" toward a food source. I suppose the fact that we ascribe "feeling" to it, means we consider it alive, aware, and perhaps conscious.

Ah, I love slime moulds (I thought "mold" was American spelling, but apparently even Scientific American spells it "mould") - thank you for the article. It's funny to think of moulds making irrational decisions.

> slime moulds make decisions through comparison to the other available options, rather than having an intrinsic value for things

That sense of subjectivity and "thought" process to make decisions, sure sounds like consciousness to me - but then again, a stream flowing down a mountain also "makes decisions", and I'm not sure if there's a quantifiable difference.

I just read the article you linked elsewhere: How 300 Matchboxes Learned to Play Tic-Tac-Toe [0]. When we call a completely mechanical process "learning", it seems to imply some kind of subjectivity and "thinking".

It's hard for me to pinpoint, what is the difference between a human and a machine learning? The difference seems merely the level of complexity.

Discussion about consciousness usually breaks down, I think, because the root of this concept is in our belief systems and philosophical view of life. At one end of the spectrum, all of existence is "conscious" in varying degrees; at the other end, nothing is really "conscious", it can all be explained as mechanical processes. The latter used to be a "heretical" worldview, to deny the "spirit" pervading all creation. These days, I'd say the former view is the odd one out, being unscientific (without experimental evidence) and based on an iffy definition of consciousness.

https://opendatascience.com/menace-donald-michie-tic-tac-toe...

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Edit: Here's a quote I just came across:

> Freeman Dyson argued that "mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron."

..And a comment elsewhere mentioned, "consciousness as an emergent property of physical systems". That seems to be getting closer to a reasonable definition/explanation.