> “Plants grow and live; Animals grow, live and feel.”
Even this gets complicated as we learn more. Some plants like Venus fly traps obviously feel. The fresh-cut grass smell is a signal to other plants that the grass is in distress, and people are theorizing trees communicate through roots.
Meanwhile, oysters don't have a central nervous system.
Pointing out that plants react to external stimuli is interesting. But using "feel" is an emotionally-loaded word.
Additionally, although oysters (and at least dozens of other species of animals) lack a CNS, they also react to external stimuli. In fact, oysters are used in some water systems as sophisticated water quality detectors, e.g. in San Diego https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJJz15N1KEY .
As the sibling commented, there's really no proof to feeling. You can remark that something reacts to the environment. And we can use sophisticated tools to approximate things (e.g. brain MRI can see which parts of the brain "light up" in response to certain things).
I don't know of any way to prove feeling. It seems like a solipsistic trap. I _believe_ that most animals "feel", and _believe_ that no plants/fungus do...but it is merely belief that I don't think to be testable.
I do get the argument, but I do believe it's a pedantic point that's being taken a bit too far. The topic is still worth discussing, without giving up because there's a theoretical point that we cannot prove the causality.
We can start out with the assumption that humans can feel, since ourselves experience it, and can relatively safely transfer this to other humans (who exhibit all the subjective external signs of feeling, which seem similar to our own external signs when we are feeling things). We can also isolate the physiological properties which seem to play a role in this; say, a nervous system, or particular brain characteristics or region activations. This can be further evidenced by cases where individuals lack these, and lack the external signs of the feeling.
So if you then take a physiologically highly related and similar animal to a human, which also shows the external signs of feeling, I believe the argument that it is NOT feeling would be the option that is more absurd, and requires more proof than the argument that says it is feeling.
Of course, this rapidly falls away when we argue about very different types of creatures (say, fungi), or when theorising about types of feeling that might be possible, but we do not have, but nevertheless the entire topic is not worthless, IMHO.
We don't really have a means of measuring whether something 'feels' in any meaningful sense of the word other than by judging from its reactions to stimuli.
Hell, I can't even tell that you 'feel' anything. I only know that I 'feel' because I am able to subjectively experience it. I make the assumption that you feel because you appear to be very much like me in all other respects, however there is no objective measurement that can prove or disprove that assumption. Historically, not every culture even gave all human beings the benefit of the doubt on that, let alone animals (which contemporary western cultures at least often agree do 'feel').
Where you draw the line is seemingly arbitrary. Some might say that means there isn't one, that either we're all P-zombies (or at least everyone who isn't me is), or we live in a panpsychic universe. Of course, the universe has often resisted such black and white categorizations.
Consider this then: why do we care? I submit that the only reason we care whether or not something 'feels' is so we can exploit it without guilt, so we can shield our empathy from the consequences of our actions. I feel it is important to keep this in mind when making decisions which hinge on questions like whether or not something can truly 'feel'.
> Hell, I can't even tell that you 'feel' anything.
Philosophically, yeah. But if you can't prove or disprove anything, then "proving" isn't a useful metric. Being the same species should give you confidence that the grandparent is capable of feeling. (I'm assuming in best faith the commenter isn't a bot)
It seems to me that once you're in the terrain of "feeling" requiring a (suitable) nervous system, you've already crossed the borders of "p-zombie" experience, having already recognized analogous behavioural and physiological reactions as evidence of "feeling" (whatever that might imply).
I get that your point is much broader; the meaning of "feeling" is going to keep staring you in the face when thinking about a question like this, but it's a sophomoric question to anyone who accepts the possibility of it's discovery without a metaphysical understanding of a sunflower's conscious experience.
If oysters - lacking a CNS - react to external stimuli and quite probably "feel" something, even something as basic as lack of food, shouldn't we abandon the idea to live without hurting some other living being?
Even in the most ideal circumstances we kill other beings simply due to resource consumption. Maybe not now, but in the future - what we consume isn't available to them. Even if you claim the resources we consume aren't food to the food species of your choice, due to the law of increasing entropy we definitely shorten the lifetime of whatever comes after us just by existing.
Hardcore buddhists for example consider all life equally worthy. No karma bonus for vegans, maybe less than for non-vegetarians who buy only from farms which provide a healthy, livable life to the livestock (or, obviously, for the plants)
Amusingly enough, saprotrophic fungi come the closest to putting this idea into practice. Their enzymes externally digest decaying matter, I.e. the disorganized jumble of proteins and nutrients “left over” from dead organisms.
"If oysters - lacking a CNS - react to external stimuli and quite probably "feel" something, even something as basic as lack of food, shouldn't we abandon the idea to live without hurting some other living being?"
Some have already abandoned that idea. I quote Joseph Campbell[1]:
"Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else."
I've always felt that sustaining oneself with the life another animal or plant or whatever is the ultimate sign of respect and should be considered an almost sacred act.
It suggests that trees may have some kind of hive intelligence in their roots and through the fungal networks they can communicate and share resources. It isn't something that I've investigated in a ton of detail but the ideas seem scientifically informed.
I haven’t read the book either; it’s on my list. I do hope it gives fungal networks their due—other research points to the fungi being the ones who decide how to share the resources, in essence farming the trees. It’s a mutualistic relationship that upwards of 90% of plant species participate in. The book Entangled Life, which I haven’t read yet either, looks at things more from this perspective.
The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. Rather than viewing trees as a hive intelligence, I think it’s plausible that we’ve been missing the forest as a whole organism. Perhaps “ecosystem” just means “an organism that is bigger than any one of us.”
It definitely has a sensor-like mechanism, but is it qualitatively different to some plants growing to face the sun, or a climbing plant climbing up a wall?
I've had flytraps and they are fascinating, though I've found them to be very fragile, at least in the conditions I can provide in my balcony. Their traps often turn black and rot after trying to digest a single fly, and I had one Venus flytrap die after flowering (the advice I found online was: don't let it flower, under most less than ideal conditions, the effort of producing the flower will spend the plant's energy reserves and kill it, and the single flower it can produce is not pretty anyway. I should have followed this advice, but curiosity got the better of me).
Yes, the counting part is mentioned in the brief summary at Wikipedia, and I find it fascinating. I wonder if it's some kind of cummulative chemical effect that wears off in a short time, but if it passes a threshold it triggers something.
> It definitely has a sensor-like mechanism, but is it qualitatively different to some plants growing to face the sun, or a climbing plant climbing up a wall?
Are you able to prove that your behavior is qualitatively different? That you are not merely a sufficiently complex chain of reactions to stimuli?
I'm of course unable to prove anything about my behavior.
That, however, is besides the point in my opinion. All taxonomy is arbitrary; there aren't "races" or "species" or even distinctions between "mineral" and "organic". All that matters is that those artificial distinctions are meaningful to us, humans.
In that sense, we consider we humans are qualitatively different than plants, and a Venus flytrap is closer to a plant than to an animal.
Do my thoughts have feelings? If I imagine someone being torture to death, has someone actually just been tortured to death, all the while feeling excruciating pain? Crazy implications if true!
If you see someone tortured to death, your mirror neuron might experience torture, so does it mean it that a neuron has feelings? Off course not, you're more than the parts of yourself.
> has someone actually just been tortured to death
I can't rule out the possibility that there are some qualia associated specifically with the neuronal activity corresponding to your mental simulation, but I can say that the leap to the "someone actually being tortured" interpretation isn't warranted. It's clearly not a "someone" in the sense of a human person, and so all bets are off when it comes to interpreting what it's like to be that thing.
> Crazy implications if true!
Well, the implications are most likely delayed until someone invents a qualia detector.
I see, but if the condition is true, won't crazyImplications() run regardless of whether we know the truth value of the condition? I am assuming the conditional logic is running in reality instead of in my head.
If it said yes, how would you prove it wrong? How convincing must the on-screen suffering become for us to start wondering whether there is something there that actually feels pain?
Incidentally the people theorizing about trees communicating through roots are actually saying trees are communicating via webs of root-connected fungi which act as the connections in between the trees. It's literally underground tunnels of fungi (mycelia) within which the chemical signals are transferred. Colloquially referred to as the Wood Wide Web; technically it's networks of mycorrhizal fungi.
I highly recommend The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Trees signal their neighbours of incoming dangers so they have to time to e.g. pump tannins into their leaves to deter animals that would munch on them.
“acacias nibbled by antelope produce leaf tannin in quantities lethal to the browsers, and emit ethylene into the air which can travel up to 50 yards. The ethylene warns other trees of the impending danger, which then step up their own production of leaf tannin within just five to ten minutes”
There's a lot of anthropomorphism in that. Intention to warn, feeling danger, making decisions... They're indicative of an intricate system, but let's not jump the conclusion of inferring it's a sentient system in the lens of our own experience.
You're right about the language, but the mechanism is real The evolution of gaseous defense hormones in plants is thought to actually benefit the same plant, but has a side effect of 'warning' the plant's neighbours. Because plants don't have a bloodstream, chemical diffusion of messenger molecules throughout a plant is pretty slow. So some plants just use the air around them as a signalling medium, and when they are damaged, release gases into the air which their other leaves can detect. Of course, the gases also affect their neighbours.
As others in this thread have said (in other ways) other organisms are black boxes to each of us. We cannot know whether they intent to do things, feel, have emotions, etc. We can only try and guess on basis of analogies (some philosophers will argue we cannot even know other organisms exist outside our own mind)
If it walks and quacks like a sentient being, why not call it a sentient being? One argument is the lack of complexity in reactions. That may be valid, but if so, where do you put the border between simple mechanical response and pain/warns others/…?
If that’s a gradual border, you can’t say the least complex of them aren’t feeling/having emotions/….
I think the distinction is gradual, with no clear border. That’s why I’m fine with calling this kind of responses ‘feeling’. On the other hand, I also don’t think cutting of a branch of an acacia is torture, but maybe I should call it torture on the extreme end of the scale of torture.
I think this is a quote from Linneaus and not the thrust of the article. In fact, it’s one of the original arguments for classifying fungi as plants and not closer to animals.
"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.” - Daniel Dennett
What's fascinating here is that tunicates (like sea squirts) are thought to be the closest relatives to vertebrates, closer even than amphioxus. They just went down a radically different path, perhaps because their chemical defenses against predation are so effective, so they could brutally optimize away things like brains.
I think that that dichotomy is obviously wrong. More useful dichotomy between animals and "not-animals" involves capability of locomotion, which is something that althought not strictly correct can at least be observed from outside of the system in question.
They grow bulbs where other onions have flowers: these fall over and root, and send up stalks, and it does it all over again.
That's locomotion, just, not on the time scale we're accustomed to considering. We also have a whole category for animals which don't practice locomotion, sessile.
I would say the most central distinction between animals and (plants|fungi) is that animals have a definite body shape, while the other two have indefinite body shapes.
That isn't a perfect distinction (the occasional gecko will regenerate two tails where it had one before), but it's very good, in addition to being striking / obvious.
>> “Plants grow and live; Animals grow, live and feel.”
>
> Even this gets complicated as we learn more. Some plants like Venus fly traps obviously feel. The fresh-cut grass smell is a signal to other plants that the grass is in distress, and people are theorizing trees communicate through roots.
This quote, as noted in the beginning of the article, is attributed to Carl Linnaeus, and subsequently invalidated. As far as I can tell, the author was not attempting to defend this point-of-view, as it's been superseded by modern taxonomic classifications.
When I consider the problem of the Chinese room, I often feel it's a stronger argument that human perception of its own understanding is just illusory, predictable mappings of inputs to outputs. To say we understand things intrinsically and not through a mechanical, artificial process sounds wrong. The ideal AI would be equal to us, and equally flawed from any sort of objective existence.
Discussion of plant feelings strikes me as a dumbed down Chinese room. I'd say plants are just stimulus response machines with no option for debate of sentience or awareness. That's not to say they're not intricate, amazing, or beautiful. But "feelings" imply processing of the feelings at some sort of subjective level, and I don't see any reason to believe plants have this.
All this stuff gets much simpler and much more objective when you look at genomes and build phylogenetic trees. There fungi look like a branch on their own. That's also how archaea were discovered as a separate domain, not just a kingdom.
Not that much simpler; we end up abandoning a simple tree structure and end up building a web when we have to start including horizontal gene transfer.
Quite. — a similar problem is also one of historical linguistics where a simple tree structure of “descendants” is often inadequate.
I find all of this classification for it's own sake to be a wanting approach that bares little fruit in terms of inference, and mostly seems to exist simply because it comforts the minds of men to classify, even when it can obviously not be done.
Even ignoring horizontal gene transfer, the Neanderthal man is typically considered a separate species from the modern human, yet it seems almost inescapable at this point that at least significant populations of the latter have some horizontal ancestry of the former, but some populations also lack it.
The universe doesn't care what sections of it we consider to be organic or inorganic, one creature or multiple creatures, alive or dead, one species or another, sentient or not. In the end, they're all leaky abstractions.
I'd not be surprised if we learn in $time_unit that everything in the universe is life. The variable is - like in relativity - the experience of time, not if something is alive (as opposed to moving in relativity). It may be close to zero from our perspective, so quite hard to spot, but we get better measurements with more time.
Imperfect as they are, these abstractions impact the universe though, through our thoughts and actions, and getting them wrong can have dramatic consequences.
Thinking in terms of composable attributes maps the world a lot better than dichotomic, essential taxonomy (composition > inheritance in the CS world).
Taxonomy is a premature optimization that comes intuitively because it's been selected by evolution since it was good enough for most purposes.
I don't recall Spolsky's article (even though the term rings a bell), but as someone having worked in modelling and simulation the better part of my career, I tend to think of it more along the lines of Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong": every "thing" is a model, and no model is perfect, but some models are better than others. If you're waiting for the perfect model, you'll never do anything, which brings to mind another adage, adapted: strong models, weakly held. That is to say, do the best with what you've got and don't be afraid to change once you find a better model, but always remember that they are models with limits.
The fine article linked here about fungi I applaud as improving our models.
There is evidence of fungi appearing over 1 billion years ago [1].
Plants first appeared around 400 million years ago or later [2]. In fact, early plants required symbiosis with fungi to grow. Even now, plants grow better if they have symbiosis with fungi and most plants (such as tomatoes) can grow symbiotically with fungi. But it is cheaper to use fertilizers, and those are used instead.
Still, forest ecosystems still depend on fungi and require them as a way to recycle plant material (fallen leaves, dead plants and trees).
Evolutionary, fungi existed well before plants managed to evolve.
The common ancestor basically tells us who we are related to more, but does not tell you when they branched out. So we are more closely related to fungus than to almonds, and that is what we learn from the tree of life. But the common ancestor of plants was born after the common ancestor of fungus.
In Human analogy you could think of it like that cousin uncle (non native speaker, so don't know what if that is the right term) who was born after you, but in the family tree will be shown before you.
Edit: Googled a bit. I have a first cousin once removed, who was born after me (referred to as cousin uncle above)
I thought: "how bad can it be?" but that really is a rabbithole of almost limitless depth. It really drives home just how many species there are that we have no pictures of. And how far you have to zoom in to find anything you can recognize.
My guess is that simosx is using the term "plant" in the strict/colloquial sense, not the either Plantae kingdom (so not including things like cyanobacteria).
We probably lack a big chunk of the whole picture. Phylogeny is based in fossils, but as most fungi are typically soft, lack of characteristic fruits or wood only a few were fossilized. Even worse, most micelia are indistinguishable from other fungi unless you pick a microscope, thus much less fossil diversity and branching is expected.
Chemoautotrophs are understood to be the earliest form of life on Earth, but photosynthetic bacteria date back 3.4 billion years. Cyanobacteria show up in the fossil record some 700 million years later (oxygen producing photosynthetic bacteria) and 300 million years after that, oxygen existed in sufficient quantities in the atmosphere to appear in the geologic record.
There already are some product like this. At least for small scale gardening. Not sure about cost difference since I do not buy fertilisers.
I've already used it for about 40 tomato plants. But not sure if it really works (or at least that particular product). Will have to try with some control group next time.
Well they work on their own timeslines :) I had to cut down a tree about 6-7 years ago. The leftover stump at the base couldnt be removed without major excavation due to the elaborate root network. That stump has attracted all kinds, sizes, shapes and colors of fungi over the years and they are still busy working on it.
It already is a selling point used by many companies, primarily those targeting marijuana cultivators. "Photosynthesis Plus[1]" is a one such product. I have used it to grow both tomatoes and pot. It does not replace the need to use fertilizer (or compost, etc.) so at least for the home grower, there is no cost savings. At scale it could allow you to use less expensive types of fertilizer or something, I am not sure.
Theoretically it helps to break down organic matter into forms more readily bio-avialible to plants. In my experience I'm not sure I've noticed much difference, although I did see some mushrooms popping out of the side of one of my fabric pots once.
Products like this should be looked at with the same skepticism as "Audiophile grade capacitors" and such. If you want to smell the absolute worst stench -- like a transcendentally rotten smell -- I'd definitely recommend paying $20 for a bottle of germs at your local hydroponics shop.
Marketing BS aside, myorrhizal associations[2] are pretty fascinating, and relatively understudied.I enjoy the analogy sometimes used of it being "the internet for plants[3]."
BTW this is sarcasm, but judging by the author's corpus of articles this is the kind of question he would love to see raised (Except about him of course)
I recently finished Merlin Sheldrake's "Entangled Life" which I highly recomend to anyone interested in finding out more about these fascinating organisms. Really changed the way I see the world. My family are getting pretty bored of the fungus facts that I trot out as we go on our daily socially distanced walks through our local woods.
I highly recommend the book: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. [1]
He goes in to all studies even down to the point that mushrooms, fungi have their own kind of "internet" that communicate to trees, plants and even to having their own commence.
> Have you ever picked up something and wondered, 'what is that?' Taxonomists help answer that question by dutifully documenting phenotypic (trait) and genotypic (genetic) differences among living things that allow them to be quickly distinguished and identified.
Let us be honest that very often it is simply a matter of arbitrary definitions.
A problem of the taxonomy of “reptiles” vs “birds” is that Crocodilians are genetically more related to any bird than they are to any other reptile, but they are still grouped with “reptiles” rather than “birds", for instance.
> Placing organisms into categories is useful so that instead of describing a slew of characteristics, we can simply use broad categories as reference points to inform us not only about the nature of an individual, but also about its relationship to other similar organisms.
The categories produced by taxonomy produce guidelines at best, not rules, traits that correlate and guidelines that apply when they do, and not when they not do so.
I do not believe there is all that much use to it, as nothing can really be concluded from the knowledge that species s belongs to group g.
> A new organism classified as a vertebrate, for example, will be commonly understood to have a spine composed of vertebrae.
The Hagfish is a famous example of a vertebrate that lost it's spine by evolution.
> We have arrived at our first reason fungi are not plants: fungi lack chloroplasts. This verdant, unifying feature of plants
Yet there are plants that lack chloroplasts, and animals that have them.
> Reason 3: Molecular Evidence Demonstrates Fungi Are More Closely Related to Animals Than to Plants
Yet, as said, crocodillians are more closely related to birds than to any other reptile, and are still called reptiles.
Biological taxonomy is not completely arbitrary and there is some rhyme to it, but much of that rhyme is gut feeling, and the arguments this article raises can easily be shown to not be so absolute as the article would suggest they are. If the article's tone would be to be believed, then the plants that lack chloroplasts, and the vertebrates that lack vertebræ, would no longer be classified as such, and that is clearly not the case.
I am not so impressed with mankind's seeming compulsion to classify what won't, and to invent classification schemes that seem rather wanting to classify for it's own sake.
This is hardly the biggest problem; the various attempts at classification in psychology have shown to be even more problematic than this.
> A problem of the taxonomy of “reptiles” vs “birds” is that Crocodilians are genetically more related to any bird than they are to any other reptile, but they are still grouped with “reptiles” rather than “birds", for instance.
All models are tentative. Note that modern paleontological papers now refer to dinosaurs as “non-avian dinosaurs”. Give it time and the commonly recognized groupings of today will change.
There is a difference between the model being tentative, and objects within that model being able to be moved from one classification to the other after mere debate and politics.
Such things do not happen in many models, as the classifications are based upon universal rules not open for interpretation or subjective assessment.
> Note that modern paleontological papers now refer to dinosaurs as “non-avian dinosaurs”. Give it time and the commonly recognized groupings of today will change.
Quite, but they are not really referring to reptiles as non-crocodillian reptiles very often.
Even this gets complicated as we learn more. Some plants like Venus fly traps obviously feel. The fresh-cut grass smell is a signal to other plants that the grass is in distress, and people are theorizing trees communicate through roots.
Meanwhile, oysters don't have a central nervous system.
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