Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[psyreporter]

Recent scientific discoveries increasingly indicate that plants are intelligent creatures that can "talk" to animals, including humans. Plants may even be capable of interspecies "love" (i.e. the forming of meaningful relationships in real-time).

Plants can see, hear and smell – and respond

Plants, according to professor Jack C Schultz, "are just very slow animals".

This is not a misunderstanding of basic biology. Schultz is a professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and has spent four decades investigating the interactions between plants and insects. He knows his stuff.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109 ... nd-respond

(2019) Flowers are talking to animals—and humans are just starting to listen

Scientists increasingly believe that trees and plants communicate with each other, various living things, and the environment. Now there’s additional evidence thanks to a new study on “natural language”. Researchers from three Tel-Aviv University schools—plant sciences and food security, zoology, and mechanical engineering—collaborated on a study that measures how evening primroses, or Oenothera drummondii, respond to sound.

https://qz.com/1522637/humans-are-learn ... d-animals/

(2018) A debate over plant consciousness

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano insists that plants are intelligent, and she’s not speaking metaphorically. “My work is not about metaphors at all,” Gagliano tells Forbes. “When I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.”

Gagliano’s behavioral experiments on plants suggest that—while plants don’t have a central nervous system or a brain—they behave like intelligent beings.

Gagliano, who began her career as a marine scientist, says her work with plants triggered a profound epiphany. “The main realization for me wasn’t the fact that plants themselves must be something more than we give them credit for, but what if everything around us is much more than we give it credit for, whether it’s animal, plant, bacteria, whatever.”

https://qz.com/1294941/a-debate-over-pl ... uman-mind/

I have noticed that this information does not find ground by many people, the reason being that Vegans are naturally inclined to suppress the information out of fear that their food plate becomes emptied further, or out of fear that they have been doing harm to conscious creatures.

Recent societal developments show that people are increasingly shunning meat consumption for ethical motives.

(2018) Millennials Are Driving The Worldwide Shift Away From Meat

A global reduction in meat consumption between 2016 and 2050 could save up to eight million lives per year and $31 trillion in reduced costs from health care and climate change. (National Academy of Sciences).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpel ... 0b03f3a4a4

Animal ethics/morality is a flourishing branch of academic philosophy.

(2019) Animal Ethics: an important emerging topic for society

Another reason for scientists to engage with the philosophy of animal ethics is that it might help them confront topics that have been traditionally off-limits: in particular, the notion of animal minds. While minds are difficult enough to talk about in humans, this difficulty is exacerbated when it comes to non-human animals.

... animal minds and consciousness have been consigned to a “black box”, an entity too complex or confusing to delve into, but whose inputs and outputs become the object of study.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/society/anim ... and-ethics

Questions:

1) Do plants deserve the same moral status as animals if plants are proven to be conscious and capable of meaningful interaction with humans?

2) What are the implications when plants are given the same moral status as animals?

[Sy Borg]

Given the way animals in factory "farms" are treated, being given similar status hardly guarantees wellbeing.

Ultimately we cannot avoid killing. If you don't kill weeds and vermin, they kill our plants and animals, or us.

Organisms kill organisms. That's nature. In terms of ethics, I would certainly not prioritise plants with animals even though the description of plants as "very slow animals" has occurred to me. However, I think tempo of life matters. Pain is pointless for an organisms that is unable to move, hence their lack of nociception.

[psyreporter]

Considering that pain is an emotion that is related to the concept 'self', it may be logical that plants are capable of experiencing something within the scope of the meaning of pain when it is said that plants are conscious creatures that can think and form meaningful relations with animals. The presence of the concept 'self' is evident when it is proven that plants can talk.

There are several studies that claim to prove that plants feel pain.

Plants communicate distress using their own kind of nervous system
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09 ... ous-system

Plants’ Response To Being Eaten Is Very Similar To Our Response To Pain, Researchers Prove
https://allthatsinteresting.com/plants- ... -mechanism

Do Plants Have Something To Say?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/styl ... -talk.html

Pain is an emotion that follows valuing of "good" per se in relation to a 'self'. It may be that the 'self' of certain plants resides within a complex system consisting of many individual entities. Perhaps individual blades of grass perceive the value of existence in the health of a bigger whole (e.g. a field of grass). If a horse walks on grass, blades of grass that are destroyed may not experience pain. But perhaps they do in events that could damage the health of the whole of which each individual blade of grass is a part.

[Terrapin Station]

(2018) A debate over plant consciousness

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano insists that plants are intelligent, and she’s not speaking metaphorically. “My work is not about metaphors at all,” Gagliano tells Forbes. “When I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.”

Gagliano’s behavioral experiments on plants suggest that—while plants don’t have a central nervous system or a brain—they behave like intelligent beings.

Gagliano, who began her career as a marine scientist, says her work with plants triggered a profound epiphany. “The main realization for me wasn’t the fact that plants themselves must be something more than we give them credit for, but what if everything around us is much more than we give it credit for, whether it’s animal, plant, bacteria, whatever.”

https://qz.com/1294941/a-debate-over-pl ... uman-mind/

Gagliano would presumably be someone who would be stumped over philosophical debates re how we can know that other humans have subjective mental lives.

[psyreporter]

Gagliano would presumably be someone who would be stumped over philosophical debates re how we can know that other humans have subjective mental lives.

It appears that she does study philosophy. Her book is named The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (ISBN 978-1517901851)

Perhaps philosophy is the only 'science' (i.e. plausible method) that can foster a cultural change that improves human interaction with plants with regard to morality.

How can empirical science possibly formulate a reason for morality? A scientist with a heart is respected by many people in society and can have an effect on culture, but why? Does empirical science support her efficiency for cultural change? Where does 'heart' originate from?

The multi-trillion USD synthetic biology revolution, primarily driven by the empirical essence of science, reduces plants to meaningless humps of matter that can be 'done better' by a company.

How can empirical science possibly provide argumentative resistance for the claim that plant life is meaningless?

Can a plant be 'done'? Can empirical science answer that question? Can empirical science study the essence of a plant?

As it appears to me, philosophy is essential if the goal is to improve the moral status of plants.

[h_k_s]

Recent scientific discoveries increasingly indicate that plants are intelligent creatures that can "talk" to animals, including humans. Plants may even be capable of interspecies "love" (i.e. the forming of meaningful relationships in real-time).

Plants can see, hear and smell – and respond

Plants, according to professor Jack C Schultz, "are just very slow animals".

This is not a misunderstanding of basic biology. Schultz is a professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and has spent four decades investigating the interactions between plants and insects. He knows his stuff.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109 ... nd-respond

(2019) Flowers are talking to animals—and humans are just starting to listen

Scientists increasingly believe that trees and plants communicate with each other, various living things, and the environment. Now there’s additional evidence thanks to a new study on “natural language”. Researchers from three Tel-Aviv University schools—plant sciences and food security, zoology, and mechanical engineering—collaborated on a study that measures how evening primroses, or Oenothera drummondii, respond to sound.

https://qz.com/1522637/humans-are-learn ... d-animals/

(2018) A debate over plant consciousness

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano insists that plants are intelligent, and she’s not speaking metaphorically. “My work is not about metaphors at all,” Gagliano tells Forbes. “When I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.”

Gagliano’s behavioral experiments on plants suggest that—while plants don’t have a central nervous system or a brain—they behave like intelligent beings.

Gagliano, who began her career as a marine scientist, says her work with plants triggered a profound epiphany. “The main realization for me wasn’t the fact that plants themselves must be something more than we give them credit for, but what if everything around us is much more than we give it credit for, whether it’s animal, plant, bacteria, whatever.”

https://qz.com/1294941/a-debate-over-pl ... uman-mind/

I have noticed that this information does not find ground by many people, the reason being that Vegans are naturally inclined to suppress the information out of fear that their food plate becomes emptied further, or out of fear that they have been doing harm to conscious creatures.

Recent societal developments show that people are increasingly shunning meat consumption for ethical motives.

(2018) Millennials Are Driving The Worldwide Shift Away From Meat

A global reduction in meat consumption between 2016 and 2050 could save up to eight million lives per year and $31 trillion in reduced costs from health care and climate change. (National Academy of Sciences).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpel ... 0b03f3a4a4

Animal ethics/morality is a flourishing branch of academic philosophy.

(2019) Animal Ethics: an important emerging topic for society

Another reason for scientists to engage with the philosophy of animal ethics is that it might help them confront topics that have been traditionally off-limits: in particular, the notion of animal minds. While minds are difficult enough to talk about in humans, this difficulty is exacerbated when it comes to non-human animals.

... animal minds and consciousness have been consigned to a “black box”, an entity too complex or confusing to delve into, but whose inputs and outputs become the object of study.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/society/anim ... and-ethics

Questions:

1) Do plants deserve the same moral status as animals if plants are proven to be conscious and capable of meaningful interaction with humans?

2) What are the implications when plants are given the same moral status as animals?

The philosophy of conservation begs us to take care of the Earth and leave it better than we found it.

This goes for the Earth's animals, plants, rocks, rivers, lakes, forests, coastline, air, and all other resources and aspects of the Earth.

From this philosophical basis, plants should be cultivated and conserved, not wasted nor damaged.

Classic science divides all organisms and materials as "living" or "nonliving."

"Living" used to mean animal or plant life, but has since morphed further to include microbes as well.

"Nonliving" means everything else: rocks, minerals, elements, resources, etc.

When I was a kid, we used to say, "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" It was a game that kids played.

Now we would need to modify this as: "Animal, plant, microbe, mineral, natural resource, etc." The game got more complicated over the years and decades.

Today's kids seem to be smarter, and more versed on personal computer/tablet use.

They just keep getting smarter.

[h_k_s]

Gagliano would presumably be someone who would be stumped over philosophical debates re how we can know that other humans have subjective mental lives.

It appears that she does study philosophy. Her book is named The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (ISBN 978-1517901851)

Perhaps philosophy is the only 'science' (i.e. plausible method) that can foster a cultural change that improves human interaction with plants with regard to morality.

How can empirical science possibly formulate a reason for morality? A scientist with a heart is respected by many people in society and can have an effect on culture, but why? Does empirical science support her efficiency for cultural change? Where does 'heart' originate from?

The multi-trillion USD synthetic biology revolution, primarily driven by the empirical essence of science, reduces plants to meaningless humps of matter that can be 'done better' by a company.

How can empirical science possibly provide argumentative resistance for the claim that plant life is meaningless?

Can a plant be 'done'? Can empirical science answer that question? Can empirical science study the essence of a plant?

As it appears to me, philosophy is essential if the goal is to improve the moral status of plants.

Philosophy is NOT a science.

But science IS a philosophy. Science is the application of philosophical thought to the physical world.

Be careful that you don't put the cart in front of the horse.

For further reading, read "History Of Western Philosophy," by Bertrand Russell. He discusses in great depth the difference between philosophy, science, and religion in his preface.

[h_k_s]

Given the way animals in factory "farms" are treated, being given similar status hardly guarantees wellbeing.

Ultimately we cannot avoid killing. If you don't kill weeds and vermin, they kill our plants and animals, or us.

Organisms kill organisms. That's nature. In terms of ethics, I would certainly not prioritise plants with animals even though the description of plants as "very slow animals" has occurred to me. However, I think tempo of life matters. Pain is pointless for an organisms that is unable to move, hence their lack of nociception.

I can envision the populations of the Earth someday progressing to the level of protein farming, such as with soy beans, peanuts, other beans, meal worms, etc.

But it would require a radical shift away from capitalism and warfare first.

[Gertie]

Whether plants deserve moral consideration depends firstly on the foundational purpose of morality.

I go with ''The well-being of conscious creatures'', so the question then becomes are plants conscious? Do they have a 'quality of life'?

That they interact with their environment in ways which can be analogised as 'intelligent' 'talking' or 'loving' needs breaking down, are there alternative non-conscious explanations of these behaviours? And the answer will be yes, because there are non-conscious explanations for my behaviours too, so where do we look for the tell-tale feature that indicates conscious experience? Nobody knows.

Could it be that plants don't need the sophisticated systems we usually associate with consciousness, precisely because they don't move around, and therefore don't have to make myriad 'decisions' almost every moment in order to navigate their environment. The brain system where we observe the physical correlates of conscious experiential states is essentially an animal's decision-making organ, if a plant isn't faced with enough 'decisions' to necessitate a resource-hungry dedicated system for that, is it missing a necessary condition for consciousness?

Even then, it seems unlikely that if plant consciousness exists, it's going to be much like human consciousness, and our moral duties would have to be tailored to fit a plant's specific needs for well-being. Which we could only guess at.

The basic problem is that we don't know the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness, so we're reduced to looking for these types of similarities (structural, behavioural) to us. We see such similarities in many animals, some more than others, and make reasonable working assumptions based on that, adapting as we learn more. Plants are so different, structurally and behaviourally, it's much harder to reason your way to a satisfying working assumption.

But perhaps consciousness is fundamental to all stuff, or all systems. Including plants. And rocks and computers and toasters and particles... who knows.

[creation]

What moral 'status' do animals actually have anyway?

For example, the animal human is known to kill one another sometimes just for the simple reason because one thinks differently than another one does. What 'moral status' does this animal actually have, and hold?

Do plants really deserve to be lowered down to this obviously complete absurd, stupid, and ridiculous 'moral status' that the human animal shows that it sometimes has, and holds?

Do plants really deserve this 'moral status'?

To me, all plants and all other animals deserve a much higher 'moral standard' than the ones regularly shown by the animal, 'human'.

[Sy Borg]

Given the way animals in factory "farms" are treated, being given similar status hardly guarantees wellbeing.

Ultimately we cannot avoid killing. If you don't kill weeds and vermin, they kill our plants and animals, or us.

Organisms kill organisms. That's nature. In terms of ethics, I would certainly not prioritise plants with animals even though the description of plants as "very slow animals" has occurred to me. However, I think tempo of life matters. Pain is pointless for an organisms that is unable to move, hence their lack of nociception.

I can envision the populations of the Earth someday progressing to the level of protein farming, such as with soy beans, peanuts, other beans, meal worms, etc.

But it would require a radical shift away from capitalism and warfare first.

If climate change and mining continue to reduce the amount of arable land available, then your prediction may come true sooner than expected.

[LuckyR]

Why not? Seems completely reasonable, philosophically. Thus eating fruits, nuts and beans are more like eating dairy and eggs.

[Sculptor1]

Recent scientific discoveries increasingly indicate that plants are intelligent creatures that can "talk" to animals, including humans.

"talk" in this context is an abuse of langauge.

Plants may even be capable of interspecies "love" (i.e. the forming of meaningful relationships in real-time).

My BS detector has gone haywire now!
There is, and could not be ANY ,evidence possible to support this travesty of a statement.

Plants can see, hear and smell – and respond

no, no, no, and no.
They simply do not have the sensory nor the cognitive apparatus to achieve this.
Responses are fully autonomic. No more than a knee jerk.

Plants, according to professor Jack C Schultz, "are just very slow animals".

This is not a misunderstanding of basic biology. Schultz is a professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and has spent four decades investigating the interactions between plants and insects. He knows his stuff.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109 ... nd-respond

(2019) Flowers are talking to animals—and humans are just starting to listen

Scientists increasingly believe that trees and plants communicate with each other, various living things, and the environment. Now there’s additional evidence thanks to a new study on “natural language”. Researchers from three Tel-Aviv University schools—plant sciences and food security, zoology, and mechanical engineering—collaborated on a study that measures how evening primroses, or Oenothera drummondii, respond to sound.

https://qz.com/1522637/humans-are-learn ... d-animals/

(2018) A debate over plant consciousness

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano insists that plants are intelligent, and she’s not speaking metaphorically. “My work is not about metaphors at all,” Gagliano tells Forbes. “When I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.”

Gagliano’s behavioral experiments on plants suggest that—while plants don’t have a central nervous system or a brain—they behave like intelligent beings.

Gagliano, who began her career as a marine scientist, says her work with plants triggered a profound epiphany. “The main realization for me wasn’t the fact that plants themselves must be something more than we give them credit for, but what if everything around us is much more than we give it credit for, whether it’s animal, plant, bacteria, whatever.”

https://qz.com/1294941/a-debate-over-pl ... uman-mind/

I have noticed that this information does not find ground by many people, the reason being that Vegans are naturally inclined to suppress the information out of fear that their food plate becomes emptied further, or out of fear that they have been doing harm to conscious creatures.

Recent societal developments show that people are increasingly shunning meat consumption for ethical motives.

(2018) Millennials Are Driving The Worldwide Shift Away From Meat

A global reduction in meat consumption between 2016 and 2050 could save up to eight million lives per year and $31 trillion in reduced costs from health care and climate change. (National Academy of Sciences).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpel ... 0b03f3a4a4

Animal ethics/morality is a flourishing branch of academic philosophy.

(2019) Animal Ethics: an important emerging topic for society

Another reason for scientists to engage with the philosophy of animal ethics is that it might help them confront topics that have been traditionally off-limits: in particular, the notion of animal minds. While minds are difficult enough to talk about in humans, this difficulty is exacerbated when it comes to non-human animals.

... animal minds and consciousness have been consigned to a “black box”, an entity too complex or confusing to delve into, but whose inputs and outputs become the object of study.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/society/anim ... and-ethics

Questions:

1) Do plants deserve the same moral status as animals if plants are proven to be conscious and capable of meaningful interaction with humans?

2) What are the implications when plants are given the same moral status as animals?

You might as well give VOTING RIGHTS to the dead.

[Consul]

Recent scientific discoveries increasingly indicate that plants are intelligent creatures that can "talk" to animals, including humans.

It depends on what we mean by "intelligence". Unfortunately, there are many different definitions, none of which is the official one used by all scientists.

Plants may even be capable of interspecies "love" (i.e. the forming of meaningful relationships in real-time).

Ascribing emotions such as love to plants is nonsensical.

Plants can see, hear and smell – and respond

Plants, according to professor Jack C Schultz, "are just very slow animals".

This is not a misunderstanding of basic biology. Schultz is a professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and has spent four decades investigating the interactions between plants and insects. He knows his stuff.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109 ... nd-respond

No, animals are just very fast plants!
Seriously, plants are not animals—period.

If seeing, hearing, and smelling require nothing more than physiological reactiveness/responsiveness to optical, acoustic, or chemical stimuli, then plants can see, hear, and smell.

(2019) Flowers are talking to animals—and humans are just starting to listen

Scientists increasingly believe that trees and plants communicate with each other, various living things, and the environment. Now there’s additional evidence thanks to a new study on “natural language”. Researchers from three Tel-Aviv University schools—plant sciences and food security, zoology, and mechanical engineering—collaborated on a study that measures how evening primroses, or Oenothera drummondii, respond to sound.

https://qz.com/1522637/humans-are-learn ... d-animals/

(2018) A debate over plant consciousness

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano insists that plants are intelligent, and she’s not speaking metaphorically. “My work is not about metaphors at all,” Gagliano tells Forbes. “When I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.”

Gagliano’s behavioral experiments on plants suggest that—while plants don’t have a central nervous system or a brain—they behave like intelligent beings.

Gagliano, who began her career as a marine scientist, says her work with plants triggered a profound epiphany. “The main realization for me wasn’t the fact that plants themselves must be something more than we give them credit for, but what if everything around us is much more than we give it credit for, whether it’s animal, plant, bacteria, whatever.”

https://qz.com/1294941/a-debate-over-pl ... uman-mind/

Depending on how the terms used in cognitive psychology such as "cognition", "perception", "learning", "memory", "language" are defined, they can or cannot properly be applied to plants. However, if they can, we'd better speak of a cognitive physiology of plants rather than of a cognitive psychology of plants.

As for the alleged "language of plants", if any regular patterns of physical or chemical signalling are called a language, then plants have a language. But the mere processsing and communicating of signals or signal-information is not the same as the processing and communicating of meaningful signs (representations) or semantic information. Signalling processes which are nothing more than automatic and deterministic cause-effect, input-output, stimulus-response mechanisms aren't genuinely semiotic processes (sign processes), let alone genuinely linguistic ones.

That said, in 1981 Martin Krampen coined the term "phytosemiotics" to refer to the study of sign processes in plants (and between plants, or plants and nonplants). But it's still highly contentious and dubious whether plants really receive, process, produce, and communicate genuine signs—i.e. ones with semantic properties: meaning&reference—rather than merely asemantic signals.

By the way, someone even dared to write a book titled Plants as Persons. Titles such as this one seduce people into indulging into ludicrous metaphysical woo-woo!

QUOTE>
"[T]he intrinsic language of plants encompasses the modes of communication and articulation used by vegetal species to negotiate ecologically with their biotic and abiotic environments. Some examples include the language of biochemistry— plant hormones, electrical signaling, pressure cues, and so on, as well as the multisensorial expressions of plants—their visual articulations, their olfactory bouquets, or their aural enunciations, revealed in the emergent field of plant bioacoustics. Intrinsic language also includes the ecological interactions between plants and animals, soil microorganisms, and the environment, where “language,” inclusively conceived, mediates these exchanges. Hence, we view language not as the mechanical result of an individuated living subject (plant or otherwise) but as an ecology produced by organisms in an interdependent and multispecies interrelation.
…
The concept of the language of plants is neither a flight of fancy nor a figure of speech, symbol, metaphor, or allegory. Its precursors are theories that decouple language from a linguistic or verbal root and instead conceptualize it as an inherent attribute of all living and nonliving phenomena. An important precursor is the medieval notion, codified in Jakob Böhme’s The Signature of All Things (1621), that all entities bear a mark of God’s design. These “signatures” form a nonverbal language to be interpreted by human beings. In the essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” written in 1916, German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin takes Böhme’s idea further by positing a language of things, human language being just a more complex example of a generalized phenomenon. Benjamin does not employ the term language metaphorically or anthropomorphically. He suggests that everything makes use of expression, which constitutes each being’s particular language. If the language of plants is nonverbal, then, we must turn to their specific forms of articulation to gain even the most rudimentary glimpse of their modes of being as distinct from our own.

The field of biosemiotics has contributed extensively to an inclusive conception of language that transcends its rigid alignment with verbal utterance. Particularly drawing on the work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, and Danish biologist Jesper Hoff meyer, contemporary biosemiotics generally conceives of language as an evolutionary response that humans share, albeit in diff erent manifestations, with other forms of life. Peirce famously claimed that the world is “perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.” Following in Peirce’s footsteps, the biosemioticians of today have likewise argued that language is “pervasive in all life.” As semiosis (a system of meaningful signs), language is more than the audible communication carried out by humans; it encompasses the complexities of intersubjective and interspecies dialogue, involving nature (including plants) and humanity."

(Gagliano, Monica, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Vieira, eds. The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. pp. xvii-xix)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

By the way, someone even dared to write a book titled Plants as Persons. Titles such as this one seduce people into indulging into ludicrous metaphysical woo-woo!

…into romantic animism.