
Do Plants Think? - rosser
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-plants-think-daniel-chamovitz
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pygy_
One of the most amazing feat of plants regarding information processing is the
way the leaves optimize the gas exchange process. They do this by opening and
closing small gates known as _stomata_ [0].

Each stoma integrate their local state with the current atmospheric conditions
and the state of their neighbors, behaving as the cells of a cellular
automaton [1].

Plant leaves literally compute.

\--

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma>

[1] <http://www.pnas.org/content/101/4/918.full>

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greenyoda
It's an interesting article, but the title is a bit misleading. The article is
mostly about how plants react to various sensory stimuli.

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rosser
Admittedly, "think" is perhaps an inapt word choice, but how is response to
stimuli not, in some fashion, awareness?

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greenyoda
Think of the "knee-jerk" reflex you get when the doctor hits you on the knee.
It's a response to a stimulus, but it happens without even any involvement
from your brain: it's just a round trip to the spinal cord.[1] I don't think
that's what we usually think of as "awareness", which happens at the cognitive
level. Reflexes like eye-blinking are even operational when you're
unconscious.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_reflex>

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Falling3
As a vegetarian, I constantly have to suffer through idiotic arguments based
on headlines like this. I know this happens in all areas of life, but this is
definitely the one to which I am exposed most often and it drives me
absolutely nuts.

Journalists, please stop giving people ammo for their stupid guns.

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whichdan
Strangely, I've never had anyone argue this to me, but I do get asked, several
times per year, if I eat seafood.

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derleth
> if I eat seafood

Do you kill invasive insects? Frankly, a shrimp or a lobster is pretty much on
a level with a cockroach, when you get down to neural complexity and
everything relevant to _moral_ vegetarianism, as opposed to vegetarianism for
health reasons.

Bony fish are not much more complex.

Things like sea cucumber don't even have brains: They have nerves, but they
lack any centralized structure for them to converge on. Same with jellyfish.

So I suppose my point is that it isn't a dumb question, at least if you're a
vegetarian for moral reasons related to killing a living being with emotions.

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jamesbritt
Lobsters may feel pain.

[http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/does-a-
lobs...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7536/does-a-lobster-feel-
little-no-pain-when-boiled-alive)

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derleth
If you define 'feel pain' correctly, single-celled organisms have been
observed to feel pain in that they move away from noxious chemicals.

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tathagatadg
I particularly enjoyed the memory part - where they mention a venus fly trap
remembers the contact with one leg of the insect then confirms that another
leg has touched, and then the trap closes. Then 15-20 mins later it'd open
again. This eliminates false positives, conserves energy!

while(1): if (get_count_contact()!=2) continue; else close_trap(); sleep(15);
set_count_contact(0);

If nature wrote this kinda code, Evolution is like debugging! But this is
really really oversimplified ...

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fallous
I think (no pun intended) that plants and some other species that lack central
brains operate more like BEAM robots
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics> in that the behaviors they
exhibit can be remarkably similar to intentional behavior.

If you believe that a Turing test is sufficient to judge an AI as
"intelligent" then in the same way you'd have to conclude that the behavior is
the measure, which seems to disallow certain assumptions regarding intent.

Then again, given the recent research into how the gut flora can affect all
manner of processes in humans, it certainly looks like Me(tm) is a product of
a whole host of complex systems whose interactions display an emergent
"intentional" system.

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maeon3
If Aliens visit us, they will likely classify us as "Non thinking creatures",
just as we classify plants as non thinking. Everything rests on a spectrum and
trying to classify everything into bins as "thinking" or "non thinking" is a
childish way to go about explaining how the world works.

If you generate a 200 hz signal around the root systems of cabbage, the roots
will grow toward the source. The plants can generate that signal as well, so
yes, certain plants communicate with a very rudimentary audio communication
system.

Do plants think? It depends on your definition, but yes, Plants think,
computers think, humans think. A better word might be "plants calculate the
best course of action to achieve a goal just like humans do.".

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derleth
> If Aliens visit us, they will likely classify us as "Non thinking creatures"

No. Obviously not. We obviously manipulate our environment in complex ways.

> "plants calculate the best course of action to achieve a goal just like
> humans do.".

If you truly believed this you could never justify eating them.

