• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Plant Sentience

Brian2

Veteran Member
A friend of mine told me once that he saw his sister reach out her hand to a branch on a tree and that the branch bent down to meet it.
Interesting phenomenon if it happened, and we all would understand my friend's observation in different ways.
 

Windwalker

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Are they? I thought being sentient meant having a form of consciousness.
How are you defining consciousness? Cognitive thought with symbolic representations? I would say rather that consciousness is simply awareness and response to the environment. I see cognitive thought as just a more advanced and more sophisticated expression of consciousness. A flatworm doesn't have a brain, yet it can figure things out just fine.
 

JustGeorge

Not As Much Fun As I Look
Staff member
Premium Member
Animals, of course.

I know you jest, but one can eat the fruits of a plant without harming the plant.
Astrologer Linda Goodman was very adamant of the benefits(for all) of a 'fruits only' diet. Not culinary fruit, but eating only parts of the plant that wouldn't require the death of it. I thought it was an interesting idea.
 

Father Heathen

Veteran Member
How are you defining consciousness? Cognitive thought with symbolic representations? I would say rather that consciousness is simply awareness and response to the environment. I see cognitive thought as just a more advanced and more sophisticated expression of consciousness. A flatworm doesn't have a brain, yet it can figure things out just fine.
Then is AI sentient?
 

Brickjectivity

wind and rain touch not this brain
Staff member
Premium Member
The Inner Lives of Plants: Cognition, Sentience, and Ethics

It would appear that we need to do more studies into the inner lives of the Plant Kingdom. It's apparent to most of us that are Animist, that plants have sentience, but is not a widely accepted position for sure.

"Plants are susceptible to anesthesia; lidocaine applied to roots works well to knock out plants."

""Plants display cognition—flexible and goal-directed behavior. When climbing a pole, a clever bean makes "broad, circular sweeps of their surroundings, growing as they go. As they home in on a pole, some beans will suddenly lunge towards it like a drunken pub-goer taking a swing at someone. It is a rapid, directed change in behaviour. This suggests the plant isn’t simply running a pre-programmed pole-seeking sequence." ""

IMO if a Jellyfish without a brain is considered living and sentient. Then why not plants?
I think that in future if plants develop (through death, mutation and evolution) animal-level intelligence it will be in groups of plants (not individual plants). They will be groups of plants, perhaps of multiple kinds, each spread out over much land. There are already plants connected by fungi which exchange nutrients and which might also pass messages about threats such as fire and parasites; but I don't know of any survival pressures which would push plants beyond this into mammal levels of thought. Plants seem to have adapted to fungi, and it is all they can do to keep from being eaten by the fungi. They do use fungi sometimes for getting and sharing nutrients. Plants and fungi are becoming symbiotic, but its mostly because otherwise the fungi would eat them. It could signal a future in which plants and fungi become much more flexible like humans are. Perhaps there will be colonies of plants which can grow in any weather and survive in darkness and extremes of hot and cold or which can fight off any insect or animal which attacks them. They might grow tentacles and stingers and shoot barbs at wandering animals or eat houses. But not this year.
 

Windwalker

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Then is AI sentient?
It depends on how you are defining sentience. See the details in this Wiki article: Sentience - Wikipedia. Personally, I'd say no at this point at least, for one reason it is not an organic, biological creature. It's not part of the natural system that evolution created. At best it robotically mimics nature, from what I can tell so far. It's something humans programmed. It didn't organically evolve.

But my question wasn't about sentience per se, but about consciousness itself, not types of consciousness. Is a tapeworm conscious? I'd answer yes. How would you answer that same question?
 
Last edited:

Nimos

Well-Known Member
The Inner Lives of Plants: Cognition, Sentience, and Ethics

It would appear that we need to do more studies into the inner lives of the Plant Kingdom. It's apparent to most of us that are Animist, that plants have sentience, but is not a widely accepted position for sure.

"Plants are susceptible to anesthesia; lidocaine applied to roots works well to knock out plants."

""Plants display cognition—flexible and goal-directed behavior. When climbing a pole, a clever bean makes "broad, circular sweeps of their surroundings, growing as they go. As they home in on a pole, some beans will suddenly lunge towards it like a drunken pub-goer taking a swing at someone. It is a rapid, directed change in behaviour. This suggests the plant isn’t simply running a pre-programmed pole-seeking sequence." ""

IMO if a Jellyfish without a brain is considered living and sentient. Then why not plants?
The only thing I'm wondering about is what on Earth are the vegans going to do, they are going to have some rough time if plants are considered sentient :p
 

Windwalker

Veteran Member
Premium Member
The only thing I'm wondering about is what on Earth are the vegans going to do, they are going to have some rough time if plants are considered sentient :p
The deeper question is, if one realizes that they are one with everything, does that mean that when they eat a carrot, they are eating themselves?
 
Top