4/2/2023 0 Comments Plant sentience![]() ![]() Nonetheless, for Regan at least, the assignment of basic rights to non-human animals requires more than just awareness. Plant consciousness would entail respect and care for plants, perhaps even the assignment of specific fundamental rights to them. This reality would force us to radically reconsider the subject of plant ethics, adding weight to the notion that plants have inherent worth independent of their utility to sentient beings. This could still mean that we have indirect moral obligations towards non-sentient life, given that our decimation of plant species and habitats harms non-human animals and humans alike, but I understand why some might be motivated to locate consciousness in plants, as this would revolutionise – as well as deeply complicate – our relationship with them. However, philosophically, some theories do state we can only reasonably have direct moral obligations towards beings with interests since a non-conscious being without interests cannot experience harms or benefits (the animal rights philosopher Tom Regan defends this view). It is possible to defend the value and worth of plants without supposing they are loci of consciousness and beings with interests. ![]() I’m very sympathetic to the motivations, but it is clouding their objectivity.” “They want to raise people’s consciousness about plants as living organisms and reach them on an emotional level. Lincoln Taiz, one of the coauthors of the 2019 paper, told The Guardian : “Our criticism of the plant neurobiologists is they have failed to consider the importance of brain organisation, complexity and specialisation for the phenomenon of consciousness.” Taiz adds that plant neurobiology is motivated by environmental concerns. It’s also worth stressing that plant neurobiology defined as such is not committed to the view that plants are conscious this is a view propounded by some plant neurobiologists. One of the key researchers in this field, Monica Gagliano, of the University of Sydney, prefers to use the term Plant Cognitive Ecology to clear up this confusing use of ‘neurobiology’ when referring to plants. The term ‘neurobiology’ here is metaphorical plants don’t have neurons, of course, but proponents use this term as a way to compare electrical signalling in plants with the nervous systems of animals. These authors criticise the proponents of ‘plant neurobiology’, a relatively new interdisciplinary field that views plants as information processing organisms. In a paper published in Trends in Plant Science in 2019, a group of 36 prominent plant biologists stated: “There is no evidence that plants require, and thus have evolved, energy-expensive mental faculties, such as consciousness, feelings, and intentionality, to survive or to reproduce.” They further rejected the notion of plant intelligence because “there is no evidence for structures such as neurons, synapses, or a brain in plants.” We see this too in the activity of microbes, lifeforms that most of us would generally assume are non-conscious.Ĭrucially, plants lack a nervous system, which is the biological architecture considered necessary for sense experience. Plant communication occurs, as far as we can tell, through purely chemical, mechanistic means – plants can send and receive chemical signals that alter their activity, without needing conscious states to underpin these processes. ![]() The ‘communication’ that plants engage in is not the kind of communication that we are used to experiencing as conscious creatures and which we witness in other sentient animals. When the media reports that plants “talk to each other”, this creates the impression that they possess an awareness that makes such vegetal dialogue possible but such reports can be misleading. In spite of curious experiments highlighting the phenomena of plant communication, plant memory, and plant preferences, mainstream plant biologists generally agree that plants do not have consciousness. At the same time, the proposal of plant consciousness has invited pushback and strong criticism from the scientific community the notion that plants have a subjectivity – an inner life – and could experience feelings can, understandably, appear absurd. How could an organism without a nervous system or brain possess these capacities? A minority of scientists are challenging this assumption, however, leading some people to accept the possibility that the spectrum of sentience is more inclusive than previously imagined. The idea that plants have consciousness, sentience, or intelligence would be unthinkable to most people. ![]()
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