Plants and sentience/pain
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They may have instinctive reactions to certain stimuli, but I don't believe plants are sentient.
I say no - to be sentient, IMO, one would not to at least have some sort of rudimentary brain.
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No. According to the research that I have read, and it is considerable, plants do react to stimuli, and exhibit similarities to more advanced neural systems, but that's about as far as the metaphor goes.
Even Jelly Fish, which are acknowledged as actually being animals, do not have the neural power to feel if they've been touched, or to make a concious decision. Plants are the same way. Despite the primativeness of plants and trees, they are of supreme importance, nevertheless. I would not dismiss them, simply because they are not Ents. They are basically the lungs of our planet, after all ...
Exactly. Some plants have very complex mechanisms and stimulus responses but there are no indications whatsoever that they possess any intellectual capacity in the sense we know of it. They lack anything resembling neural tissue and have nothing akin to a central nervous system.
Some plants have distinct reactions to injury but those are automatic, not conscious efforts to fight/escape pain.
I just realised how badly I worded my sentence but at least people seem to have realised I meant to say "have to have" instead of the silly "not to at".
Why give precedence to information processed by neurons like animals over hormones which is how plants transfer information? It's a valid distinction, but why is sentience, neural transmission, viewed as more informed? That neural transmission is just another biochemical reaction, after all.
Because that's where our level of medical and biological understanding is at. Also, we'll pretend for a minute, now, that it were proven that all life is on a more-or-less similar plane of self-awareness as Mankind. The meat and lumber industry are worth untold billions! The economic chaos alone would be an almost valid reason for supressing such information, if it ever came to light. But Common Sense is enough to tell you that these creatures that can't escape instinct to exercise their own Free Will, and these plants that simply react to stimulii are not at that level, at all.
When a Beaver decides it's not going to live in the muck and mire and is, instead, from now on, going to be an Advertising Executive ... maybe that will be a reliable test of Free Will in the Animal Kingdom?
Actually, there have been experiments that seem to suggest that even Crabs and Lobsters and all that respond to what we might refer to as "pain." For example, having something acidic rubbed on their attenae and they've been consistantly shown trying to remove it. Is that pain, which they aught to feel, or is that just an automatic grooming response based on instinct? See, even on a mobile animal it's hard to be certain, how could a reliable test ever be invented to see if plants are capable of it? But scientists have been insisting for years, "No Brain. No Pain." And to my knowledge this continues to be the working theory ...
Actually, there have been experiments that seem to suggest that even Crabs and Lobsters and all that respond to what we might refer to as "pain." For example, having something acidic rubbed on their attenae and they've been consistantly shown trying to remove it. Is that pain, which they aught to feel, or is that just an automatic grooming response based on instinct? See, even on a mobile animal it's hard to be certain, how could a reliable test ever be invented to see if plants are capable of it? But scientists have been insisting for years, "No Brain. No Pain." And to my knowledge this continues to be the working theory ...
Sentience arises because there is need such as hunting, finding resources and solve problems. Plants hasn't done that because they have another adaptions that kept them successful in nature.
But that is simply saying one form of information processing is superior to the other, neurons are better than hormones. Why? Pain is a reaction to stimuli, no?
But what is sentience, other than an appeal to a soul? That is to say, humans are intrinsic unique for that quality, yet under investigation falls apart. Humans are much more sophisticated in their ways of reacting to the environment, but not unique in any of those ways from other life on the planet.
What if oil was sentient? Would we stop burning it?
You aren't getting it. Self-awareness is very rare in nature, even among mammals and primates. Without self-awareness, there wouldn't be any consciousness.
You seem to be treading pseudoscience by playing with "what ifs" or "Different forms of stimuli".
No, I find self-awareness just another way of positing a soul without saying so or demonstrating it. Humans are more sophisticated than other animals and plants in reacting to their environment. How humans differ from other life on the planet is more a matter of scale rather than kind as I see it. In other words, the differences that create the choice in the OPs opening post is one of philosophy rather than science. My understanding of the difference between plants and animals as a matter of science is trivial. Where the term sentience comes in I see sentience as a philosophical term. Something that one can posit in the abstract but is nigh on impossible to support as a thing of empirical fact.
Defining sentience is done much like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of Pornography, folks know it when they see it even though they can't define it. Perhaps sentience is better described as an ability to delude oneself to the reality of the cosmos as uncaring and unthinking, and that wishful thinking is a suitable alternative to anything else.
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It has nothing to do with souls, it has to do with, essentially, how much like us other species are. The more a species is like us, the more we find it worthy of respect and protection. That's obviously very anthropocentric of us--even speciesist--but it's what we've got.
We can't deny nature. We have to eat. If we resolved to designate plants as thinking, feeling creatures that it's cruel of us to consume, what then? We all have to become breatharians?
I agree that our definition of sentience leaves a lot to be desired. We tend to think of it as an either/or, not something that exists on a continuum. This leads to people referencing techniques like the mirror test as a filter for sentient/non-sentient, which is laughably reductionist.
We can't deny nature. We have to eat. If we resolved to designate plants as thinking, feeling creatures that it's cruel of us to consume, what then? We all have to become breatharians?
I agree that our definition of sentience leaves a lot to be desired. We tend to think of it as an either/or, not something that exists on a continuum. This leads to people referencing techniques like the mirror test as a filter for sentient/non-sentient, which is laughably reductionist.
Yes, I agree, it comes down to being like us. It being, plants versus animals, and is a matter of feeling and emotion, The Bambi Effect for want of a term. The pain distinction for plants and animals just amounts to judging does the life form move slow enough or react slowly enough to not feel like one just killed Bambi's mom. It's something that doesn't hold up empirically as an absolute either/or but is a matter of scale and will always be a biased choice, as I see it. But then, I see life more from the perspective of the Shadows than the Vorlons so there's that.
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