I know the plant thing is just an example, not the point of the text, but it is very much a pet peeve of mine.
Yes, plants can react to stimuli, they can, to a degree, show anticipation and learning, synthesise stimuli, even give warnings to, trade nutrients with and in that sense engage in cooperation with other plants. It is seriously fucking cool.
The field, and especially its popular reporting, is currently still littered with claims on plant sentience and plant cognition and plant social structure that is so utterly beyond what the evidence actually supports, and in fact, in strong contrast to what the evidence supports, that it drives me nuts.
I managed to get what was essentially an angry rant with citations into an academic competition on this, if you are interested, though I would meanwhile update it a lot; I feel it engaged too much with straw-men at the time. There is seriously cool stuff on plants coming out, I just see calling it “thinking” “talking” “feeling” etc. as a massive disservice to the philosophical concepts there, insofar as plants are not conscious, and the difference between what they and even quite simple animals do is so vast. Every time I see someone speaking of plant neuroscience, I want to hit them about the head with pictures of individual bee neurons for comparison. And every time someone speaks of plant sentience, I am deeply worried that this will make the situation for animal rights worse by diluting the sentience term beyond reason. I also fear this will come back to bite us in the butt when we try to ascertain AI capabilities.
I know the plant thing is just an example, not the point of the text, but it is very much a pet peeve of mine.
Yes, plants can react to stimuli, they can, to a degree, show anticipation and learning, synthesise stimuli, even give warnings to, trade nutrients with and in that sense engage in cooperation with other plants. It is seriously fucking cool.
The field, and especially its popular reporting, is currently still littered with claims on plant sentience and plant cognition and plant social structure that is so utterly beyond what the evidence actually supports, and in fact, in strong contrast to what the evidence supports, that it drives me nuts.
I managed to get what was essentially an angry rant with citations into an academic competition on this, if you are interested, though I would meanwhile update it a lot; I feel it engaged too much with straw-men at the time. There is seriously cool stuff on plants coming out, I just see calling it “thinking” “talking” “feeling” etc. as a massive disservice to the philosophical concepts there, insofar as plants are not conscious, and the difference between what they and even quite simple animals do is so vast. Every time I see someone speaking of plant neuroscience, I want to hit them about the head with pictures of individual bee neurons for comparison. And every time someone speaks of plant sentience, I am deeply worried that this will make the situation for animal rights worse by diluting the sentience term beyond reason. I also fear this will come back to bite us in the butt when we try to ascertain AI capabilities.