Is a Plant Conscious?

Mystic Garden

Art and Story By Michael Hooper

Michael Pollan, author of "A World Appears," provides some background in the history on science and its observations about the existence of matter and the existence of the mind.

Descartes rightly observed that there is nothing of which we can be more certain than the reality of our first person experience. There are two different types of things, stuff going on in the mental world and the physical world.

Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive and experience subjectivities, according to AI. It’s the ability to sense fear, pleasure and pain.

The author is asking us to use our own conscious to imagine what it is like for a plant, to have a conscious, to sense threats and opportunities for survival. He cites scientific articles in which authors wrote what it's like to be a bat and what it's like to be a plant. Imagine flying at night as a bat -- it seems terrifying -- but somehow the bat uses sonar to sense walls and danger. What it's like to be a plant deciding to extend its roots and its reach after a rain.

The author is looking for a way to connect with plants at a deeper level, he turns to psychedelic mushrooms.

On page 7, the author says a consistent and curious aspect of psychedelics is their ability to reanimate a world gone quiet and still.

In a study, before taking mushrooms, 26% of participants believe plants to be conscious but afterwards the figure climbed to 61% of participants who believed plants to be conscious.

Pollan says that in the afternoon after ingesting magic mushrooms, he said he felt that the plants "returned my gaze and gave me the distinct impression that they wished me well." He felt sure that these plants exhibited an elemental sense of being alive and aware.

I took psychedelic mushrooms one time. I was about 21 years old and working in Yellowstone Park. My friend Mike Sessa had a half ounce of mushrooms in a bag and we ate most of them in the lobby of our dorm rooms at Yellowstone Park. There was a level of animation going on in the sense that my awareness became keener, the feeling of camaraderie and brotherhood with Mike became higher, more elevated. We were laughing at each other‘s jokes, we carried on like this until a friend of mine came to me and said she wanted to be alone with me.

We went to my room and she took her top off and I started laughing for some reason and she put her clothes back on and said you’re weird and left, I don’t know what was wrong with me? I should’ve been more accommodating.

Later I found my friend, Mike Sessa. We went outside, still high on these mushrooms, and laid down on the pavement and looked up at the night sky and the stars were glowing and pulsating light. He said something we started laughing at each other, laughing at the universe.

My experience taking psychedelic mushrooms was great, but I never felt the need to do it again. Once was enough.

The author says that after he came down from his high on mushrooms, he began to doubt whether plants had any conscious at all. We are more willing to ascribe conscious to animals because they have a nervous systems like we do, he says. Plants lack anything that we would recognize as eyes yet they do exhibit behaviors of seeing light and shadow. They communicate using their own electrical and chemical signaling methods that operate at a dramatically slower pace of time than animals. These plants have thousands of these command centers, the modules that integrate incoming information, then decide what to do in response. 

I planted three plants in Puerto Rico. Shortly after we planted the pomegranate tree, one of its branches wrapped itself around the stake next to it so that it could hold itself up when the northeast winds blew. It must’ve sensed that there was a wooden stake nearby and was able to caress its arm around it. Another flowering plant that I had planted I accidentally hit it with the weed-eater and cut off its top and tore its bark. I kept watering it and somehow it repaired the bark with new bark and grew new leaves somehow it healed itself. Intelligence is described as the ability to solve a problem. Well, I saw a plant solve its problem, it used intelligence to repair itself and continue growing.

If two unrelated plants are grown in the same pot, they will compete for this nutrients by attempting to colonize as much as the soil as possible whereas related plants will cooperate and share the pot together, suggesting that plants can recognize their own kin according to the author page 23.

Charles Darwin believed that the “brain" of a plant is actually in its root. Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it, they will seek out a buried pipe through which water is flowing. I know this because the roots found my sewer line and destroyed the clay pipe over the years, forcing me to spend $4000 to put in a new sewer line.

The author suggests that intelligent behavior emerges from a distributed network of cells exchanging signals. This is not so far different from most animals. There is no command post rather one finds a leaderless network, the singular self that we experience as real or imagine to be located somewhere behind our eyes deep inside our brain actually has no physical address in our gray matter, page 31.

A bean plant will find a pole to attach itself to and wind itself around to go up. Somehow it senses the pipe, seeks it out and curls around it, perhaps using echo location to pinpoint the pole, the author suggests.

The author quotes another scientist who says plants can be rendered unconscious by using the same anesthetics that put animals out; these drugs induce a state of unresponsiveness. A Venus fly trap won’t snap shut when an insect crosses its threshold under the influence of this drug, this suggests that consciousness has something to do not with chemistry, but with physics and appear to shut down the action potentials.

Whether or not plants sleep is a very difficult question?

The ability to imagine the impossible is the great gift of conscious, but also leads to all this puzzlement and existential angst, page 72.

In Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1836 essay, Nature, he wrote:

"The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them." 

Pollan says, What we do have in common with plants is the need to reduce uncertainty to head off surprise by inferring the state of the world through our senses and then acting as best we can to avoid becoming hungry, cold or dead, page 75.

The author says that consciousness will likely be a hybrid enterprise informed by the values of Empiricism, experiment, philosophy, imagination, and the arts, the indigenous, Buddhism and other spiritual traditions, personal experience, and yes, altered states of consciousness too. In the end, he said plants are sentient beings.

 

With a projection of the human mind onto a pretty woodland scene, Pollan wrote, "now I felt sure I was sharing this reality with countless other minds. None of them human."