
Plants Can Hear Animals Using Their Flowers - jelliclesfarm
https://www.theatlantic.com/article/579964/
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pvaldes
Is intriguing, but can be also just a mechanical efect of the vibration.

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empath75
Is that not what hearing is?

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harshreality
The concept of plants (or fungi) "sensing" or "thinking" is contaminated by
new-age quacks. When someone says "plants can hear", what they mean (other
than that they're not interested in sticking to common meanings of words) is
that plants exhibit some kind of intelligence or thought based on sounds.
That's where the analogy breaks down. A higher animal with a central nervous
system can _learn_ in interesting ways, depending on the complexity and
structure of their brains. A CNS in a primitive animal is probably not much
more than a biological-analogue of a DNN stuck in between nerve inputs and
outputs, the sorts of thing you could (and people are) training DNNs running
on graphics cards to do.

Anything _without_ a CNS, like plants, are a clear step down in capabilities.
That doesn't mean they have no capabilities. It doesn't mean that they don't
have capabilities that we aren't aware of yet. It only means that their
processing of environmental signals is going to be less capable than a lot of
insects', and certainly reptiles' and birds'. If someone has set their
expectations artificially low, however, then the news that plants can do
anything other than sit in place and grow could be amazing and newsworthy.

It shouldn't be surprising though. Even single-celled organisms are amazingly
complex biological machines, that we only understand isolated parts of. I
mean, it took us until this decade to identify and really start to understand
CRISPR. If single-celled organisms have mysteries like that (and many more no
doubt left to discover), why is anyone surprised if plants have interesting
things about them that we haven't discovered yet? That doesn't make them
intelligent, and doesn't mean they can sense in colloquial way that animals
can (and react quickly to, and learn from, what they sense).

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FakeComments
It sounds like plants hear as much as infants:

They receive a vibrational stimulus and respond to it.

I think it’s you who is projecting too much into then topic, saying that we
must accept your entire conception of intelligence hierarchies or else we’re
abusing the word “hear”.

No.

My Echo hears me. Plants hear flower usage. Etc.

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harshreality
If you define "hear" as "reacts to sound waves", then the Earth hears. Certain
sound waves could cause tectonic shifts. How is that an interesting way to
define the word?

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FakeComments
Can you explain how the Earth reacts to sound waves?

In the sense that babies, plants, and my Echo do, by engaging in a prolonged
process in response, after the wave itself has dissipated.

We’re not talking about pollen being blown off, we’re talking about a
biological process that’s activated in response.

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sf2
This is very interesting! I had no idea plants could communicate through
vibrations and send airborne, chemical signals to warn relatives of danger.

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newnewpdro
Related [https://allthatsinteresting.com/plants-defense-
mechanism](https://allthatsinteresting.com/plants-defense-mechanism)

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deytempo
This stinks of anthropomorphic wishing

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thatoneuser
K

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abbabba45
That is literally the first sentence on the page.

