Plant Pain (Post-consideration?)

[ModVegan]

which have complex interconnected systems designed for communication, etc.,

First, this verges on circular reasoning; communication implies understanding. Plants are not really communicating (no more than is one rock "communicating" temperature information to another rock by conducting heat, or one domino communicates to the next one in a row that it's time to fall with a gentle tap), and they weren't designed to do it; it's an 'accident' of evolution that usually works better than it hinders the plants.
When we use language like that, the topic can get loaded really quickly with implications of intelligence, and that will lead you astray.

The systems are far from complex; it's just an interplay of hormones that trigger or repress gene expression, which is programmed in. The only thing that makes them opaque is that they're kind of hard to study. It's entirely mechanical, not intelligent; horticulturalists take advantage of them constantly. Like when you cut a higher stem it can trigger the lower buds to grow because you've removed the source of hormones preventing them from doing so. It's not that they've been told or decided to grow, it's that mechanically that hormone suppresses growth, and mechanically, it originated from another stem...

...In order to form an information processing system necessary for true intelligence, consciousness, and sentience, you need to be able to channel those outputs to a particular cell or cells which will reprocess them based on other inputs, then provides a different output, and so on and so forth to a certain minimum system size that it becomes capable of generating conscious experience by letting the reactions and structures change themselves.
This is why our nerves are connected as such with insulated transmission lines to prevent signal loss or noise creation for other nearby neurons. The structural capacity to do this is lacking in plants and bacterium.

I appreciate you taking so much time to respond to my comment, and I apologize that I simply don't have time to respond adequately.

But I would like to state that I in no way intended to imply that plants have some sort of mysterious cognition that is beyond our understanding.

When you state that plant responses to stimuli are reflexes, I think this is generally true, although exceptions like the Mimosa plant show that plants are capable of "learning" an alternative response to stimuli that can be remembered for months.

Recent experiments using pea shoots http://www.nature.com/articles/srep38427demonstrate that plants are able to acquire learned associations that go beyond the type of simple hormonal triggering you are discussing here. Epigenetic reprogramming is thought to be the simplest explanation for how this happens, but it's definitely more complex than turning on a hormone that results in a predictable outcome.

Obviously plants don't have the neural pathways that animals do, but their communication systems are clearly more complex than simple heat conduction. And I find the discovery of memristors in plants very interesting from a computational perspective: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/15592324.2014.982029. As that article states,"Voltage-gated ionic channels control the plasma membrane potential and the movement of ions across membranes thereby regulating various biological functions. These biological nanodevices play vital roles in signal transduction in higher plants. Propagation of action potentials in Mimosa pudica along petioles, pulvini and in the stem is documented in literature." As you say, these are merely reactions to stimuli, but the level of complexity is greater than scientists initially believed, so our collective understanding of this information exchange continues to grow (yeah, even yours).

I'm a materialist when it comes to consciousness/sentience, in that I believe that if we could design a system with the same complexity as a human brain, it would be sentient (i.e., I don't believe in any special "spark" of consciousness). But I also believe that logically any computational ability would indicate some level of consciousness, or "consciousness capacity" even if expressed in a form that is virtually non-existent.

Basically, computation is the foundation of all intelligence (and it seems you agree). Plants appear to have vastly less computational ability than animals, but they do have the structural capacity to process information.

Sentience requires subjective experience, but if you believe in the possibility of machine sentience, you are pretty much required to accept that sentience is a spectrum, and that drawing the line at having a central nerve ganglia or a central nervous system is arbitrary (although quite justifiable).

So, I see sentience as computational ability, with bacteria at the low end, and higher mammals at the other end of the spectrum. We do have to draw a line somewhere, but even the smallest level of information processing requires moral consideration (and I do mean "consideration" in the most basic sense, as in, "huh", not in a Francione-esque sense of saying that it's a moral being that can't be used, etc.). I would give more consideration to obliterating a planet filled with single celled organisms vs. one with zero life.

Sorry if my language seemed a little "woo"-ish. I hope this clarifies things a bit?

[brimstoneSalad]

When you state that plant responses to stimuli are reflexes, I think this is generally true, although exceptions like the Mimosa plant show that plants are capable of "learning" an alternative response to stimuli that can be remembered for months.

I appreciate that you put it in quotes.
What you're talking about are sensitization and habituation. This isn't true learning (associative learning), it's non-associative; basically expression of programmed variables which is easily explained by basic chemistry.
Even associative learning isn't necessarily learning when it's only classical conditioning, and particularly when it involves situations that might occur naturally.

No amount of non-associative learning implies sentience of any kind (the only smoking gun is operant conditioning). It's not really useful to cite examples like this, and can be confusing to people who don't know the difference.

Recent experiments using pea shoots http://www.nature.com/articles/srep38427demonstrate that plants are able to acquire learned associations that go beyond the type of simple hormonal triggering you are discussing here.

I'm aware of that experiment. If your goal is to break my nose via triggering explosive facepalming, you're doing a good job,
Have you read it?
It's a terrible study, it uses very poor methodology, and it does not demonstrate what they claim unequivocally that it does.

Whilst the possibility that plants also learn by association has been considered by earlier studies21,22, our current study provides the first unequivocal evidence.

Thus, the first experiment has shown that plants are able to form associations to enhance foraging success.

No, no it does not.

It shows at best that when you randomly blow air on a pea shoot as it's nearing a fork, the path it takes is more or less random too:

Before the testing day, the seedlings were further subdivided randomly into a test group (n = 26) and a control group (n = 19; the numbers are unequal due to a technical problem).[...] in the test group, the majority of seedlings exhibited a conditioned response to the fan (green bars; Fig. 2). In the [F + L] group, 62% of the seedlings grew towards the fan (Fig. 2A), whereas in the [F vs L] group, 69% of the seedlings grew in the direction opposite to the fan (Fig. 2B).

That's 8 and 9 plants out of 26 total that did what they wanted them to. 17 out of 26. A very poor sample. With a perfect representation of 50-50 odds, we would already expect 13 of them.
Odds like that OR better have something like a one in ten chance of happening with 50-50 actual odds. E.g. the chances of 17 or more out of 26 flipped coins landing on heads is around one in ten.

Anyway, they got those results with the test, whereas if you leave it undisturbed it will grow in the direction it was last exposed to light in. The control is not a control!
They failed to expose "controls" to any turbulence.

That's assuming their methodology wasn't as clumsy as their proof reading:

Throughout the three sessions, the fan was positioned either on the same ([F + L]) or the opposite arm of the maze ([F vs L]), where the pea had been exposed to light during its last training session (Fig. 1A). This was done to ensure that a possible conditioned response was not confounded by the innate phototropic response to grow into the side of the maze where the light had been presented on the last training session.

If they actually did what they said they did in the first sentence, and not what they imply in the second, that's an even bigger problem.
I wonder what the technical problem was, and how many they disqualified after the fact too.

The bias of the people doing the study should make it suspect alone, even if not for the bad methodology (these are insane plant "neurobiology" people who are convinced that plants are conscious and even communicate using a fungus internet vibrations)

Gagliano imagines that root-to-root alerts could transform a forest into an organic switchboard. “Considering that entire forests are all interconnected by networks of fungi, maybe plants are using fungi the way we use the Internet and sending acoustic signals through this Web. From here, who knows,” she said.

These people have woo out the wazoo. They're a few rungs down the ladder from cryptozoologists, and competing for craziest pseudoscientist with parapsychologists.
The language they used in the study should be a giveaway.

Epigenetic reprogramming is thought to be the simplest explanation for how this happens, but it's definitely more complex than turning on a hormone that results in a predictable outcome.

The simplest explanation is that it doesn't happen at all, and you're citing a poor study done by crazy people for media attention. People do this kind of stuff all the time to prove anything from psychic powers to homeopathy to energy healing. Do enough very small trials with random results and eventually you'll get what you're looking for.

If you find that credible, how do you dismiss the work of renowned quack Masaru Emoto who "proved" that water has memory and feelings with his study on ice crystals?

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4433

Something resembling associative learning from natural stimuli (where the mechanisms to associate them have been pre-determined by evolution based on natural associations recorded in systems like you mentioned) may exist in plants, but it wouldn't mean anything if it did, and this 'research' certainly doesn't show it does.

Obviously plants don't have the neural pathways that animals do, but their communication systems are clearly more complex than simple heat conduction.

And a 1975 digital watch is a bit more complex than a pickle jar; doesn't make it any more capable of running Windows though.

And I find the discovery of memristors in plants very interesting from a computational perspective:

This stuff is already addressed in the consensus paper I linked you to on how plant neurobiology is bullshit. All cells engage in electrical and chemical interactions. That doesn't mean they have the structural capacity to form large adaptive networks or transmit destination specific signals to neighbors.

Something like a plant brain could evolve, just as animal brains did, but current plants lack them. This is something we'd be able to dissect and look at.

I'm a materialist when it comes to consciousness/sentience, in that I believe that if we could design a system with the same complexity as a human brain, it would be sentient

Mere complexity doesn't make something sentient; sentience is a particular adaptive behavior. You can be a supercomputer and be completely non-sentient.

But I also believe that logically any computational ability would indicate some level of consciousness, or "consciousness capacity" even if expressed in a form that is virtually non-existent.

This fails to take into account the basic hardware requirements. There's no reason to believe it's a gradual continuum; there are certain benchmarks and abilities which can arise quite suddenly.

Basically, computation is the foundation of all intelligence (and it seems you agree). Plants appear to have vastly less computational ability than animals, but they do have the structural capacity to process information.

So does a rock or a water drop, but not in any way useful to sentience.

Sentience requires subjective experience, but if you believe in the possibility of machine sentience, you are pretty much required to accept that sentience is a spectrum, and that drawing the line at having a central nerve ganglia or a central nervous system is arbitrary (although quite justifiable).

There's a spectrum to it, but zero lies somewhere around small insects and worms, not in flora or bacterium.

So, I see sentience as computational ability, with bacteria at the low end, and higher mammals at the other end of the spectrum.

Sentience is not computational ability. A calculator or a computer have no place on there, despite large capacity, unless they are running the necessary software, and bacteria lack completely the mechanisms to make that possible.
Reflexive information processing is not adequate to qualify as having interests and self-awareness.

We do have to draw a line somewhere, but even the smallest level of information processing requires moral consideration (and I do mean "consideration" in the most basic sense, as in, "huh", not in a Francione-esque sense of saying that it's a moral being that can't be used, etc.). I would give more consideration to obliterating a planet filled with single celled organisms vs. one with zero life.

How about one filled with calculators?
Information processing itself is not a mind.

You might give consideration to the planet based on the value of the life to science, but regarding it as having moral value in itself is extreme.

I'll put it another way: The whole is worth more than the sum of the parts, and sometimes the whole can have moral value where the parts themselves have none. I think you may have failed to really consider that or what it means, but instead assumed that a small part of something sentient is a tiny bit sentient.
A brain is sentient (or rather can be), a neuron is not (and if a neuron isn't sentient, a bacterium sure isn't).
A computer is potentially sentient, a logic gate is not sentient at all (not even potentially).

If you take *any* information processing capacity to be potential sentience, you'd have to regard single logic gates as potentially a tiny bit sentient.
A NOT gate that just outputs the opposite of what it gets, or an AND gate, which outputs a positive if both inputs are positive. Basically, a bill potentially fit by very simple crystals, in just such a formation with the right elements in them. In all of the Earth and cosmos, I guarantee you there are natural logic gates, uncreated by man but perfectly functional if they were put to the right use, lying waiting in rocks.
If you think logic gates are a tiny bit sentient, you really can't dismiss what I was saying about rocks... which speaks to my point: This all gets very silly very fast when we lose touch with reality.

[plant]

An interesting topic!

thanks for the topic
i feel that i, as a thinking person, can still ask the hypothetical "what if plants feel pain", from a place of genuine intellectual curiosity (like, what would that imply, what would we have to do if that were the case?), as contrasted with the "gotcha"-attempt of the resistant omnivore.
any hypothetical is valid, i think (note that it's the only hypothetical in the list)

The question of which things can suffer, and so require ethical consideration, is a very interesting one, as it really comes down to the question of how subjective experiences are generated by physical systems. We have good reasons to believe that our consciousness is produced by our brain, but it’s a complete mystery how that happens (this is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness). We know that animals have nervous systems which have varying degrees of similarity to ours, and we also see behavioral evidence that (most) animals feel pain, so we have very good evidence that (most) animals do feel pain and, importantly, that they suffer from it. But it does remain possible that there are other physical systems apart from nervous systems that can also generate subjective experiences such as pain.

I don't think plants "feel" pain. And I don't think any of the evidence for this that we have so far is remotely convincing.

However, I am not willing to exclude the possibility that plants *might* feel pain. They *might* even be subjects of a form of experience/sentience that we simply cannot comprehend (the same is true of bacteria, however unlikely).

I share these perspectives and I would argue that it is important to maintain an open mind for the possibility that plants are social and intelligent creatures capable of forming a friendship with animals, with as justification that discoveries made in the emergent science field in general named "Plant Neurobiology" are fairly recent (from the past years/decades). The presence of neurochemicals in plants may be purposeless, but perhaps it isn't. I do not believe that it is plausible to hold a conviction that the presence of neurochemicals in plants is purposeless. It could be purposeless, and there may be no evidence to claim otherwise, but it may be best to maintain an open mind and to be welcoming to more research, and it may also be best to not waste time and already consider that plants could be sentient, and what it could imply.

A task of philosophy may be to explore passable roads in front of the tide. As it appears to me, the emergence of the science field "Plant Neurobiology" implies that the plausibility of the consideration of plant morality is evident.

I'm not going to hold a survival instinct against any organism,

What about the instinct to have sex and procreate? Will you hold rape against a homely and unlucky man who had no other shot at procreation? Where do you draw the line if you're permissive of "instinct" to violate morality?

The potential for ethical consideration, would be the line. Can it be said that the man could have considered the well-being of the other person or the law set by, or the well-being of, a community of people?

Similarly, when it concerns animal ethics, it may be a sign of higher intelligence when the human shows potential for ethical consideration on behalf of, or empathy for, animals. As such, it can be demanded on behalf of human dignity. A lack of care or ethical consideration can become unjust when the potential for it (in an individual) can be made evident.

An example may be found in the emergence of the field animal ethics of philosophy, and its effects on how humans in general (culturally) perceive and interact with animals.

Animal minds have long been considered a "black box" by science. It wasn't given attention and thus people in general didn't know anything about it and cannot understand a problem with treating animals in a specific way (i.e. without respect).

(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

Recent developments in animal ethics provide an increasing basis for empathy and understanding for animals and therefore the ability to formulate ethics for animals.

Then it turns to the line described above: the potential for ethical consideration in an individual can become a requirement or responsibility.

Animal ethics evolves on the basis of advancements in intelligence and empathy. It could be an argument that humans should choose wisely if they have the capacity to do so. A greater capacity in intelligence and empathy for animals may come with new responsibilities.

The same could be applicable for plants.

They aren't asking anyone to become fruitarians, they are simply interested in understanding plants better and answering questions like, "what's the best way to plant trees?"

No, they're simply interested in selling books, getting interviews, and funding in general. Plant science is hard to get money in unless you're a media whore willing to manipulate the yellow press. Follow the green, and I don't mean plants. They have a substantial motivation to lie, and they're not regarded well by their peers for doing it.

I do not believe that that is a just argument. If there is evidence that the cited professors / scientists are in fact (caught) lying, that is certainly something worthy of consideration, but I have seen not a single reference that indicates that such has been the case. So it would be a false accusation / impeachment.

I understand the fear for spiritual quackery, or a financial motive to deceive. But I do not believe that it is fair to claim that such suspicion is applicable to the emergent science field "Plant Neurobiology".

[Red]

@plant You are pretty much repeating already debunked claims. At this point it can be reasonable to consider it spam.