Plants monitor the integrity of their barrier by sensing gas diffusion
28 comments
·July 5, 2025spacephysics
signa11
you might find this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose quite interesting.
mr jc-bose explored exactly these ideas more than a century ago !
bullfightonmars
Stimulus-response is not consciousness. There is nothing subjective about this mechanical and chemical response to injury.
xelxebar
Good try, plant. We're onto you.
If we're going to agree on anything, I just wish consciousness discussions could agree on some phenomenological referent(s) for the term "consciousness". The word is used in a way that is little more than a sed-replace for elan vital, regaling all discourse to little more than a volley of solipsistic value proclamations IMHO.
stouset
I don't really disagree. But I also can't help but imagine a hyper-advanced alien species thinking the same thing about us due to us lacking some notionally critical (to them) aspect of intelligence/consciousness and paving over the solar system to make room for a hyperspace bypass.
londons_explore
Science hasn't really understood consciousness.
If you don't understand consciousness, how to make it from first principles and how it works, then I don't think you can confidently say "this isn't conscious" about much.
hombre_fatal
We can explain plant behavior through known physical processes though.
We don't need to lean on consciousness nor other mysteries at all. Nor we do have to when a rock changes color as it gets wet.
And without this parsimony, then we could claim that any unexplained mystery underlies any well-understood phenomenon which doesn't sound like much of an epistemic standard.
nemonemo
Wikipedia article about Consciousness opens with an interesting line: "Defining consciousness is challenging; about forty meanings are attributed to the term."
Perhaps "consciousness" is just a poor term to use in a scientific discussion.
danwills
I think it's pretty clear that plants have agency, and maybe that can be regarded as a phenomena that is on the same spectrum as consciousness, just at a lower intensity (and maybe slower too)?
gerdesj
"I think it's pretty clear that plants have agency"
Why (and define agency)?
Plants worry about stimuli such as light and water and not what is on BBC2.
CGMthrowaway
This is hormones - which, in humans, are usually explained as working AGAINST active consciousness (e.g. blinded by lust) rather than as an example of it
bdamm
Consciousness is surely more than just cold calculating antipathy.
morkalork
There's a fun movie "The Creeping Garden" that asks that question about slime mold which can solve mazes but doesn't have any sort of brain.
jazzyjackson
What is art?
At what point will we see that plants are conscious, just in a different manner than animals colloquially?