I see this term a lot, people saying “that’s just vulgar materialism!” I haven’t seen an explanation of what it is yet.
Are you an actual pan psychic in the wild? I’ve always wanted to talk to someone who holds that view.
What? No. Plants show problem solving ability and awareness of their surroundings in ways that go far beyond their traditional conception of being inert and and unaware of their environment. Panpsychism is woo woo nonsense. I’m talking about observable light, water, and nutrient seeking behaviors, apparently altruistic chemical signalling of danger, protection of offspring, some kind of communication with neighbors to mediate conflict over resources. You have to zoom way, way out to make it look anything like animal communication but these creatures are aware of their environment and interacting with organisms around them.
Sure those behaviours are observed. But what specifically makes you think consciousness is likely? Obviously we can’t measure consciousness at this point, (or perhaps ever it’s quite unclear) but most people fall somewhere between “brains do it” and the more chauvinistic “human brains do it”.
This isn’t really something you can talk about particularly scientifically, the closest to that is basically that we observe that in humans people report modifications to consciousness if you dick with their brains and we tend to avoid wanting to overcomplicate hypotheses with second order things until necessary. We can then try making comparisons between human brains and non human brains but it’s all very speculative.
You can assume behavioural complexity requires consciousness but it’s pretty vibes based and drawing lines is hard. Most people also seem to not ascribe say complex algorithms, bacterial colonies, or water cycles or whatever consciousness though.
So I’m curious where you fall. Personally I don’t think pan psychism is woo but I don’t subscribe. Stuff just is conscious doesn’t seem any more or less reasonable to me than a lot of other “stuff in this particular arrangement just is conscious” type hypotheses, especially when humans can have all sorts of modifications to their brains and continue to describe being conscious (p zombies???).
I don’t want to bait, I’m genuinely interested although personally consider myself more of a fence sitter on non animal sentience. Suspecting it’s less likely but of course unprovable one way or the other atm.
I didn’t say consciousness, I said sentient. They’re distinct concepts. I don’t find consciousness to be an interesting or useful concept.
You don’t need pan-psychism to recognize plants are living organisms. Like, you can anesthetize a tree. In fact, anesthetics work on… pretty much every living organism? I’m not aware of any exceptions.
Plants are living yes, and hormone signals etc happen in them sure. It’s not known what causes consciousness though, hell we don’t even know why general anesthetics work in humans and we generally only believe them to disrupt consciousness because you ask people about it later and they say they have no recollection, except sometimes when they do so amnesics are often administered as a failsafe.
What do you mean when you say anesthetise a tree? And why is that evidence of sentience? Like lignocaine will work on the nerves in my arm. You could keep my arm alive after removing it from me (at least for a while) and inject lignocaine and observe interrupted nerve signals. Most people don’t believe amputated arms to be sentient though.
Oh, they found out what anesthetics does. It stops the formation of microtubuals within cells. So, pretty much anything can be anesthetized. And it suggest microtubuals might play a role in cognition.
I don’t really see why plants wouldn’t have some rudimentary sense of themselves? I mean, it wouldn’t be as detailed as what animals experience, but they’re alive, so why not? Maybe that’s a leap. But, so is assuming the inverse. Arguably, that’s a bigger assumption; why one kingdom of life and not the other?
