this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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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?
This sounds like Penrose's stuff which is umm not widely accepted.
Being alive is not a clearly defined state, it's a classification we impose on the world. Assuming life is conscious is pretty close to panpsychism, especially when we get to organisms like fungi or plants without centralised structures. That's not saying it's wrong, as you say we can't exactly go and measure it. At this stage it is not an empirical question.
But uncertainty doesn't mean anything is equally likely. toy example: radioactive decay timing probabilities.
Most people tend to come down on assuming brains have something to do with consciousness because humans describe consciousness being modified by stuff happening to their brains and not the rest of them. If you come down on all life being conscious to some degree or another why? and where do you differ from the pan psychics who say all stuff is conscious to some degree or another?
Yeah, I pick up a lot of this reading and listening to Penrose.
I kinda think about it like the evolution of eyes. So, for a while creationists liked to point to eyes and say, "how could such a structure slowly evolve, what good is half an eye?" and of course the answer is, "far preferable to no eye whatsoever." And there's evidence of development from rudimentary sensitivity to electromagnetism, gradually improving with lenses and pin-hole apertures and colour specific structures.
So... I think about sentience in that same means of gradually increasing complexity. Cus like you can say a brain is integral, but how does it start? Where doe the phenomenon actually begin? I think it makes sense to suppose some equivalent to that patch of photo-sensitivity that eventually becomes an eye. Microtubuals pose the most likely candidate for that role, though yeah it's still tentative. And... if we're gonna assume some minimal level of awareness, I don't think it's that big of a stretch to suppose it exists in things that react to their environment.
And that's where the similarity to pan-psychism ends. Why should I make that assumption for a virus or a rock or a hydrogen atom? Those aren't cells. They don't react to their environment or reproduce on their own. A universe where those things are conscious would be functionally identical to one where they aren't.