I cannot for love of god understand why humans are so insecure to admit non-human animals and plants are "intelligent" and "sentient"?
I mean how bloody boring the world will be for me and others, If I keep talking about myself and nothing else? That's exactly what most of the so-called philosophers (from the beginning of humanity) to current day scientists to common folks - do - talk about the glory of humanity while unable to sniff a scent which came naturally to Max.
One man - Rene Descrates without an iota of humanity nor without evidence unleashed an idea and that stupid idea refuses to die till date. Mind, Body, Consciousness - if you have heard those terms then blame that dude.
Thank goodness for so many good humans who are working hard to subside those bullshit philosophies which caused (and still causing) immense pain and suffering on all living beings.
This is probably one of the most important essays you will read in your life that has the power to change your mind from the horrible idea instilled for centuries about consciousness, mind, intelligence et al.
Congrats on reading my rant so far.
Are plants clever? Maybe. Adaptive? Sure. But sentient? Aware? Conscious? Listen closely and you can hear the scoffing.
For one thing, they can sense their surroundings. Plants have photoreceptors that respond to different wavelengths of light, allowing them to differentiate not only brightness but color. Tiny grains of starch in organelles called amyloplasts shift around in response to gravity, so the plants know which way is up. Chemical receptors detect odor molecules; mechanoreceptors respond to touch; the stress and strain of specific cells track the plant’s own ever-changing shape, while the deformation of others monitors outside forces, like wind. Plants can sense humidity, nutrients, competition, predators, microorganisms, magnetic fields, salt, and temperature, and can track how all of those things are changing over time. They watch for meaningful trends—Is the soil depleting? Is the salt content rising?—then alter their growth and behavior through gene expression to compensate.
Plants’ abilities to sense and respond to their surroundings lead to what seems like intelligent behavior. Their roots can avoid obstacles. They can distinguish self from non-self, stranger from kin. If a plant finds itself in a crowd, it will invest resources in vertical growth to remain in light; if nutrients are on the decline, it will opt for root expansion instead. Leaves munched on by insects send electrochemical signals to warn the rest of the foliage, and they’re quicker to react to threats if they’ve encountered them in the past. Plants chat among themselves and with other species. They release volatile organic compounds with a lexicon, Calvo says, of more than 1,700 “words”—allowing them to shout things that a human might translate as “caterpillar incoming” or “*$@#, lawn mower!”
Their behavior isn’t merely reactive—plants anticipate, too. They can turn their leaves in the direction of the sun before it rises, and accurately trace its location in the sky even when they’re kept in the dark. They can predict, based on prior experience, when pollinators are most likely to show up and time their pollen production accordingly. A plant’s form is a record of its history. Its cells—shaped by experience—remember.
Chat? Anticipate? Remember? It’s tempting to tame all those words with scare quotes, as if they can’t mean for plants what they mean for us. For plants, we say, it’s biochemistry, just physiology and brute mechanics—as if that’s not true for us, too.
Besides, Calvo says, plant behavior can’t be reduced to mere reflexes. Plants don’t react to stimuli in predetermined ways—they’d never have made it this far, evolutionarily speaking, if they did. Having to deal with a changing environment while being rooted to one spot means having to set priorities, strike compromises, change course on the fly.
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To feel alive, to have a subjective experience of your surroundings, to be an organism whose lights are on and someone’s home—that’s reserved for creatures with brains, or so says traditional cognitive science. Only brains, the theory goes, can encode mental representations, models of the world that brains experience as the world. As Jon Mallatt, a biologist at the University of Washington, and colleagues put it in their 2021 critique of Calvo’s work, “Debunking a Myth: Plant Consciousness,” to be conscious requires “experiencing a mental image or representation of the sensed world,” which brainless plants have no means of doing.4
But for Calvo, that’s exactly the point. If the representational theory of the mind says that plants can’t perform intelligent, cognitive behaviors, and the evidence shows that plants do perform intelligent, cognitive behaviors, maybe it’s time to rethink the theory. “We have plants doing amazing things and they have no neurons,” he says. “So maybe we should question the very premise that neurons are needed for cognition at all.”
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The idea that the mind is in the brain comes to us from Descartes. The 17th-century philosopher invented our modern notion of consciousness and confined it to the interior of the skull. He saw the mind and brain as separate substances, but with no direct access to the world. The mind was reliant on the brain to encode and represent the world or conjure up its best guess as to what the world might be, based on ambiguous clues trickling in through unreliable senses. What Descartes called “cerebral impressions” are today’s “mental representations.” As cognitive scientist Ezequiel Di Paolo writes, “Western philosophical tradition since Descartes has been haunted by a pervasive mediational epistemology: the widespread assumption that one cannot have knowledge of what is outside oneself except through the ideas one has inside oneself.”5
Modern cognitive science traded Descartes’ mind-body dualism for brain-body dualism: The body is necessary for breathing, eating, and staying alive, but it’s the brain alone, in its dark, silent sanctuary, that perceives, feels, and thinks. The idea that consciousness is in the brain is so ingrained in our science, in our everyday speech, even in popular culture that it seems almost beyond question. “We just don’t even notice that we are adopting a view that is still a hypothesis,” says Louise Barrett, a biologist at the University of Lethbridge in Canada who studies cognition in humans and other primates.
And best description of consciousness I have ever heard:
When I first encountered the 4E theories, I couldn’t help thinking of consciousness. If the mind is embodied, extended, embedded, etcetera, does consciousness—that magical, misty stuff—seep out of the confines of the skull, permeate the body, pour like smoke from the ears, and leak out into the world? But then I realized that way of thinking was a hangover from the traditional view, where consciousness was treated as a noun, as something that could be located in a particular place.
“Cognition is not something that plants—or indeed animals—can possibly have,” Calvo writes in his new book, Planta Sapiens. “It is rather something created by the interaction between an organism and its environment. Don’t think of what’s going on inside the organism, but rather how the organism couples to its surroundings, for that is where experience is created.”
The mind, in that sense, is better understood as a verb. As the philosopher Alva Noë, who works in embodied cognition, puts it, “Consciousness isn’t something that happens inside us: It is something we do.”
And we do it in order to keep on living. The need to stay alive, to tread in far-from-equilibrium water—that is what separates us from machines. “Wild cognition,” as Barrett puts it, is more akin to a candle flame than to a computer. “We are ongoing processes resisting the second law of thermodynamics,” she says. We are candles desperately working to re-light ourselves, while entropy does its damnedest to blow us out. Machines are made—one and done—but living things make themselves, and they have to remake themselves so long as they want to keep living.
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“The brain fundamentally is a life regulation organ,” Thompson says. “In that sense, it’s like the heart or the kidney. When you have animal life, it’s crucially dependent for the regulation of the body, its maintenance, and all its behavioral capacities. The brain is facilitating what the organism does. Words like cognition, memory, attention, or consciousness—those words for me are properly applied to the whole organism. It’s the whole organism that’s conscious, not the brain that’s conscious. It’s the whole organism that attends or remembers. The brain makes animal cognition possible, it facilitates and enables it, but it’s not the location of it.”
A bird needs wings to fly, Thompson says, but the flight is not in the wings. Disembodied wings in a vat could never fly—it’s the whole bird, in interaction with the air currents shaped by its own movements, that takes to the sky.
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“Clearly,” Thompson says, “plants are self-organizing, self-maintaining, self-regulating, highly adaptive, they engage in complex signaling among each other, within species and across species, and they do that within a framework of multicellularity that’s different from animal life but exhibits all the same things: autonomy, intelligence, adaptivity, sense-making.” From a 4E perspective, Thompson says, “there’s no problem in talking about plant cognition.”
In the end, Calvo’s critics are right: Plants aren’t using brains to form internal representations. They have no private, conscious worlds locked up inside them. But according to 4E cognitive science, neither do we.
“The mistake was to think that cognition was in the head,” Calvo says. “It belongs to the relationship between the organism and its environment.”
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