On Fri, 1 May 2026 11:23:06 +0100, Ernest MajorThe second paragraph includes "Usually, when scientists measure characteristics of organisms-whether plants or animals-they look at the average of the tendencies of the entire group. For at least the last hundred years in plant biology, individual plants within a species have been seen as replicants. No individual trait matters to science, which only looks at the average of the traits of the entire population. If one individual falls too far outside the average, it tends to get discarded from the study as an outlier. "What individuals do is seen as just noise,"".
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 28/04/2026 15:21, Martin Harran wrote:Sorry, I can't grasp what you are saying there. What do you mean byOn Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:59:47 +0100, Ernest Major>
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>On 28/04/2026 10:01, Martin Harran wrote:>On Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:00:01 -0700, Mark Isaak>
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net> wrote:
>On 4/26/26 2:32 PM, Martin Harran wrote:>>>
A few weeks ago, I referred Mark to a Scientific American article
back in February that fairly well sums up the state of the game in
research into consciousness. Here is a non-paywalled link to the
article; well worth a read if you have an interest in this subject.
>
https://archive.is/1k2ej
I had lost that link and have not read the article until now. Thank you
for reposting it. Here are my thoughts on it:
>
Overall, it looks like a good summary. I didn't know all the different
models and approaches myself, so I can't comment on them, but it jibes
with what else I have read. The only hypothesis I see the article left
out is quantum theories, regarding which: good riddance. One quote in
the article is very much an overstatement: Demertzi is quoted saying,
"Everything comes down to it [consciousness], everything." Kidney
function does not come down to consciousness, nor does your fingertips
wrinkling after long immersion in water. But that's a quibble.
>
The article says that the researchers don't agree on a definition of
consciousness, but, frustratingly, it does not give any definitions nor
describe the differences. Since definition is fundamental to the
problem, especially as it might apply to AI (which the article considers
at some length), this is a major omission.
>
I've just finished reading 'The Light Eaters' by Zoë Schlanger. It is
a thoroughly fascinating book and I hope at some stage to get time to
write a detailed review of it but briefly, it identifies behaviours in
plants that if they were identified in any animal species would be
regarded as signs of consciousness and intelligence. They include
things like communication, memory, altruism, kin selection and
mimicry.
Perhaps specific instances of "communication, memory, altruism, kin
selection and mimicry" would be regarded as signs of consciousness and
intelligence, but these are not things that are in general so regarded.
>
Memory and communication occur in bacteria. Mimicry (molecular mimicry)
occurs in viruses. In general these all occur in organisms (in addition
to plants) without nervous systems. There also occur in animals in
circumstances that are not assumed to be signs of consciousness and
intelligence - for example Batesian and Mullerian mimicry in butterflies.
>>>
Basically, botanists talk about this openly among themselves but not
externally. The reluctance to discuss it externally is due to the
ridicule and opprobrium that they would likely get from the wider
scientific community especially those involved in neurology who
dominate the research into consciousness. The author puts some of that
down to the dreadful book 'The Secret Life Of Plants' published in
1973 which effectively poisoned the well for rational discussion of
plant intelligence by making stupid claims like plants preferring
Beethoven to rock 'n' roll and reacting to a polygraph when someone
imagined setting them on fire.
>
The main scientific issue, however, is that neurologists insist that
consciousness is driven entirely by the brain. Plants have neither a
brain nor a nervous system and botanists have come to the general
conclusion that consciousness may be a "whole-body" thing. That idea
is now getting some support in animal biology with increasing
understanding of how much of a role microbes play in determining
behaviour and personality, particularly with the discovery that
transplanting microbes can result in behavioural transfers.
>
e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7294648/
I think you have a fallacy in there. Consciousness as an epiphenomenon
of the brain is not equivalent to consciousness being unaffected by
factors external to the brain. Neurologists don't, for example, deny the
existence of psychoactive chemicals.>
Mind you, I don't think the idea that consciousness as a whole-body
thing will come as any great surprise to anyone who has felt their
heart broken by grief, their stomach fluttering with butterflies or
their bowels clenching with fear.
>
So what do you make of this?
>
<quote>
>
Karban [1] often talks to colleagues who study personality traits
among animals, and he's come to a simple yet groundbreaking conclusion
about how to approach his research: animals and plants are clearly
different, yet they share a common world. Their daily travails are
very similar. They need to find food, and they need to find mates. And
they need to do it all while other things are trying to eat them. "If
animals have solved a problem in a particular way, it's not
unreasonable I think to ask, huh, I wonder if plants have done
something analogous."
>
Usually, when scientists measure characteristics of organisms-whether
plants or animals-they look at the average of the tendencies of the
entire group. For at least the last hundred years in plant biology,
individual plants within a species have been seen as replicants. No
individual trait matters to science, which only looks at the average
of the traits of the entire population. If one individual falls too
far outside the average, it tends to get discarded from the study as
an outlier. "What individuals do is seen as just noise," Karban
explains. But his work with sagebrush throws away the relevance of
averages. Personality research treats individual differences as
valuable data. Each one is a point on the spectrum of behavior. The
noise becomes the signal. "This is the opposite approach: It's paying
attention to the variation among individuals."
>
After a long career studying how sagebrush send signals to each other,
Karban is finely attuned to variation in this process. He sees that
the exchange doesn't turn out the same way every time. Sometimes a
plant will signal distress, and its neighbors won't produce defensive
compounds, or sometimes they just produce less. Karban believes this
may be because individual plants may have different tolerances for
risk-one metric of personality. Some, he says, might exhibit a
personality akin to, say, natural-born scaredy-cats; they will signal
wildly at the slightest disturbance. In that case, other plants in the
same family will treat their scared kin like the boy who cried wolf
and ignore them. They won't produce compounds of their own.
>
</quote>
>
Schlanger, Zoë. The Light Eaters: The Acclaimed International
Bestseller (p. 68). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. Pp66-68
>
>
[1] Richard Karban, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Entomology,
University of California-Davis,
>
I was puzzled as to why you raised this, but on reflection perhaps it's
the 3rd paragraph that you're interested in, and I shouldn't have been
distracted by the surprising claims that botanists are uninterested in
individual variation* in species. It also seems a bit of a tangent -
it's a specific example that on the face of it isn't a rejoinder to what
I had written previously.
"individual variation in species" and why do you think I am claiming
botanists are uninterested in it?
That looks to me very like a claim that botanists are uninterested in individual variation in species. You might like to note that my inference that it was the 3rd paragraph that you were interested is an implicit rejection of the position that you intended to claim that botanists are uninterested in it. (Or in blunt terms I didn't think you were making that claim.)
Individual variation is species is the easily observed fact that all plants of a species are not identical.
-->
For a nominal entomologist Karban has a lot of papers (50 odd) on
signalling in sagebrush. Sagebrush uses methyl jasmonate as a wounding
signal. This is a short range signal (around 2 feet), and seems to be
primarily used for intra-plant signalling - signalling between branches
through the medium of the air rather than through the plant tissues -
and inter-plant signalling comes along for free.
>
I wonder how much of the third paragraph represents Karban, and how much
is Schlanger's spin. My take is that there is individual variation in
methyl jasmonate production in response to herbivory (totally
unsurprising), and that there is individual variation in the production
of anti-herbivore compounds in response to exposure to methyl jasmonate
(also totally unsurprising). (Several of Karban's papers are about wild
tobacco "eavesdropping" on the sagebrush methyl jasmonate signal.
>
With the short range of the signalling mechanism, observation of the
behaviour implied in the last few sentences in the field doesn't seem
likely. Karban has done lab experiments, but these involved pot-grown
plants, so an additional signalling mechanism through the roots can be
discounted. It is conceivable that the implied observations could have
been made in the lab - experiments using pot grown plant raised from
cuttings allow experiments where an individual clone can interact with
more other clones that occurs in the wild - but I'd want to see a paper
rather than hearsay. To obtain the implied observations a large scale
experiment would need to be performed - e.g. 10 clones interacting with
10 other clones iterated chronologically 10 times requires 1000 tests.
>
The implied observations require that the plants can distinguish between
different methyl jasmonate sources. (One could speculate an ability to
distinguish based on the spectrum of volatile compounds.) It also
requires that the plants can tell whether the response was needed in
hindsight, and remember this. In principle epigenetics could offer the
latter.
>
Given the short range it is conceivable that this, if it exists, is not
a whole plant phenomenon, but a branch-scale phenomenon utilising local
epigenetic modifications.
>
* Contradicted, inter alia, by a paper that I was an author on last year.
alias Ernest Major
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