I am in great need of assitance from you gracious Dopers!
I am unfortunately losing a battle of wills and ideas with my girlfriend concerning plants and consciousness following the discovery that plants emit methane, this started the argument that only conscious entitie can fart!
I’m calling on you all to point me in the direction of proof or (my side) dis-proof of my slender marrow’s ideas!
I have searched on plants/conciousness/emotions etc all to no avail.
My great lady proposes that:
Trees are aware of their surroundings on a conscious level, hence they are able to change colours with seasons to attract the necessary animals for food/reporduction. They also “compete” with each other to be the tallest tree in the forest to be closest to the sun. I argue that these are all reactions to chemical or atmospheric changes.
Plants feel pain and scream when cut. I have nothing to say on this point except that I said plants have no neural network to form a consiousness.
Carniverous plants eat = aware of “prey” therefore concious beings. See point 1 for my comments.
Talking/playing music to plants helps them grow. I’m willing to give this one some form of credit but would appreciate any cites to assist my synicism.
This will do for starters. If you can disprove all of the above then I’m sure my slender marrow will revert with more points on her theory.
I don’t think you’re going to be able to rationally argue her out of any of these beliefs. Better to just play along.
Do trees actually produce methane while alive? I thought it was a byproduct of organic decomposition after death (organic decomposition being essentially the source of farts as food is broken down in the digestive system of animals).
I guess that goes for mowing the lawn too, grass is a plant!
You have also given me the best excuse for never buying another bunch of flowers, poor things! Cheers David
I guess it depends how loose your definitions are. When injured some plants, notably the acacia tree, release chemical signals which nearby plants can receive and respond to in various ways. In the case of the acacia, it releases chemicals in response to being eaten which cause nearby acacia plants to secrete a substance which makes their leaves taste bad. However, it probably can’t be said that the plants experience pain; it’s simply responding to injury automatically and without consciousness.
Ask her to define “consciousness”. Certainly, trees can and do react to stimuli, and I suppose that “capable of reacting to stimuli” isn’t a completely hopeless definition of “conscious”. If that’s all she’s implying, then her argument is both true and exceedingly weak.
If, on the other hand, her definition of “conscious” is a bit stronger than that, then I suspect that she’ll have a very hard time defining it non-circularly. If she tries to just define “conscious” as being synonymous with “self-aware”, for instance, then of course you ask her what “self-aware” means, and so on.
Well, that could be said of a lot of clearly human activiites, too.
You need a more precise definition of sentient beings for this argument.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient) sentient is the ability to feel or perceive, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness. So you lose this argument; trees are obviously sentient.
What you probably meant was sapient, which does involve knowledge and self-awareness. Trees are not sapient.
But I would agree with others about the uselessness of trying to convince her of this. Rational arguments have no effect on someone who does not think in a rational manner. You just have to decide that this non-rational thinking of hers is a ‘cute quirk’ that you enjoy, or trade her in on a more logical girlfriend. Your choice there.
Your girlfriend suffers from an epistemological dysfunction, i.e. the inability to accept or reject a new idea by solely rational criteria. You’ll find that she has all sorts of irrational beliefs that no rational arguments will pry her away from.
Which means that all attempts to “correct” her thinking (or lack thereof) will fall on deaf ears. That is, it’s not her problem, but yours. You, being the more or less rational one, have to reevaluate your choice of girlfriend.
This is not obvious at all. Define “feel” and “perceive”. Sure, they can react to stimuli, but that does not mean they feel or perceive the stimulus. Does a moustrap feel or perceive the mouse it traps? No; to say so would be silly. Feeling and perception require a nervous system of some sort, as far as I’m concerned.
Consciousness is a very ambiguous term, but I think any rational person would agree that without a sophisticated and adaptive neurological system one can’t hope to display anything like consciousness (or self-awareness in a cognitive sense). Any form of life is, by definition going, to display responsiveness to environmental stimuli, but this is hardly indicative of consciousness or even exclusive to life; the alarm system that’s going off right now down the hall from me is (overly) responsive to environmental stimuli, but it’s clearly dumber than Curly Joe.
As for plants “screaming” or responding to musical stimuli, this is pseudoscientific nonsense propogated by people who have no conception of the biology of plant life. Plants may respond to a trauma by emiting an enzyme, but this is an localized, autonomic response, not the reaction of a centralized or even distributed nervous system.
But methinks that you’re not going to win this argument with logic and facts, or indeed, at all. Recall Heinlein’s astute observation regarding familial arguments: “In a family argument, if it turns out you are right–apologize at once!”
You are completely correct. Plants do react to their environment, but that is mediated by the physical and chemical factors present. Plants have no nervous system, and thus cannot have conciousness.
Plants cannot feel pain, since they have no pain receptors and no nervous system.
Some carnivorous plants react to the presence of prey, but that is due to physiological changes in the plant tissue prompted by the prey coming in contact with it. They are certainly not “aware” of the presence of prey in any meaningful sense.
This one is also nonsense. See here for a discussion of the evidence, or rather lack of it.
Many of these ridiculous claims were popularized in The Secret Life of Plants
by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, published in 1973. They are nothing but pseudoscience.
Even by Wikipedia’s definition, trees are very obviously not sentient. They have no ability to feel or perceive, since they lack a nervous system. The mere ability to respond to environmental factors does not constitute sentience.
Is your girlfriend, by any chance, a Pythagorean? This is an idea that had some traction in antiquity. Breath “Spiritus” is closely associated with consciousness or ensoulment.
Much has been made of the Pythagorean proscription against eating beans. The Pythagoreans were strict vegetarians, and their vegetarianism extended to beans, with the reasoning that, since beans make you fart, the gas must be their spiritus escaping from your body. Therefore, beans have souls, and it’s unethical to eat them.
I won’t dispute that. However, we have here a specimen of humanity who does not agree that a thing lacking in a neurological system must necessarily lack consciousness. Axioms are of no use if they’re not agreed on. If we are to attempt to make any logical headway, here (yeah, I know, but I’m an optimist), we need to first establish what axioms we’re starting with. Hence my suggestion that Mr. Marrow ask for definitions.