# Do plants have souls? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 20, 2003, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114 "2003-12-20T03:47:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![pothead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@pothead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pothead)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2003, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114/21 "2003-12-21T01:12:51Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by elucidator \* > \*\*How could I have lived so long and never had occassion to use the word “plasmodesmata”? I hope it involves “osmosis” 'cause thats the other one I know. \*\* Technically osmosis is the diffusion of water across a (semi-permeable) membrane. I guess this would just be plain old diffusion? On another note, how have I lived my life without this smiley ;j ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2003, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114/22 "2003-12-21T01:18:04Z")
Is not! It’s the diffusion of _gases_ across a semi-permeable membrane! I know that one! Water is just the, uh, dissolved-into stuff. ---
**Author:** ![pothead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@pothead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pothead)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2003, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114/23 "2003-12-21T01:32:05Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by elucidator \* > \*\*Is not! It’s the diffusion of _gases_ across a semi-permeable membrane! I know that one! Water is just the, uh, dissolved-into stuff. \*\* No, really. [Osmosis](http://www.google.com/search?q=define:osmosis) is the diffusion of a solvent across a semi-permeable membrane. In all the definitions I’ve seen, the solvent has been a liquid. The method I know of for the separation of gases, the gas is passed through a liquid or solid absorbent. The component gases are absorbed at different rates. ---
**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2003, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114/24 "2003-12-21T01:37:24Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by pothead \* > **Whats your definition of a soul? A consciousness? Some sort of overall definition or which the plant as an organism fulfills?** That’s what _I’d_ define a soul as, personally. However, for this debate, I’m thinking of a “soul” as what we would call a “spirit,” an inner “ghost.” For a plant, which never had a brain or a nervous system, one might even imagine a “soul” that doesn’t actually have a consciousness or a “mind” behind it. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2003, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114/25 "2003-12-21T01:54:02Z")
Oh, sure, thats true about :o mosis, yeah. But not _osmosis_! ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2003, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114/26 "2003-12-21T01:59:57Z")
So the pit fields are haunted with ectoplasmodesmata? ---
**Author:** ![pothead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@pothead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pothead)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2003, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114/27 "2003-12-21T02:21:52Z")
Personally, I consider metaphysical consciousness, or the will to be the soul/spirit. Its the embodiment of what you are; the driving force of life, normally constrained by the limits of the physical body but unaffected in so far as being able to exist in some form without the body. As such, I have never experienced soul-soul communication and think a thorough connection such as this can exist only under rare conditions. In order for us to know if a living organism has a soul we would have to communicate with it and to do so we would need to realize our own beings as the fundamental level (ie. become hyperconscious and transcend the limits of our physical bodies) either through a lot of meditation or not a lot of drugs. Whichever way we choose, it would seem that whatever we experience in terms of communicating with plants or whatnot would be seriously doubted even by ourselves when we are at baseline. Likewise, we wouldn’t have anyway to verify such states to be ‘real’ when we weren’t hyperconscious. This whole concept of whether plants (or anything really) has a soul borders on many philosophies. Sartre philosophized about being-in-itself and being-for-itself, essence preceding existence and existence preceding essence. The former are things that have their purposes defined before creation (ie. a scissor) while the latter doesn’t know its purpose and makes its own purpose (ie. humans? plants?). However, his whole theory begs the question as it assumes the lack of a God (which I’m sure makes a lot of people happy). On a similar note, I really like the model of the universe Orson Scott Card presents in Children of the Mind, with the whole Outside/Inside and aiuas. Its similar to the Sartrean model but IMO clarifies a lot of inconsistencies. Basically Inside is the universe as we know it. Outside is an infinite non-space with infinite aiuas (Greek for life). Patterns are called for Inside, and aiuas appear from Outside to fill those patterns. Fundamentally each quark, photon, electron, etc. is an aiua and sucessively larger entities (ie. atoms, molecules, planets, the universe, consciousnesses) are one aiua governing over the rest. In order to govern more complex patterns of particles, the aiua has to be relatively willful and able to comprehend such patterns. The whole thing actually makes a lot of sense, and I’m surprised no major philosophy has picked it up and developed it seriously. You can read about it in more depth in OSC’s book. ---
**Author:** ![pothead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecb155/32.png) [@pothead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pothead)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2003, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114/28 "2003-12-21T02:27:50Z")
> [@](#): > > [Osmosis](http://www.google.com/search?q=define:osmosis) What an unfortunate combination of letters. 😛 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-plants-have-souls/220114.md?page=1)