Group of Biologists Tries To Bury the Idea That Plants Are Conscious (theguardian.com) 284
Frustrated by more than a decade of research which claims to reveal intentions, feelings and even consciousness in plants, more traditionally minded botanists have finally snapped. Plants, they protest, are emphatically not conscious. From a report: The latest salvo in the plant consciousness wars has been fired by US, British and German biologists who argue that practitioners of "plant neurobiology" have become carried away with the admittedly impressive abilities of plants to sense and react to their environments. While plants may curl their leaves in response to touch, grow faster when competitors are near and spring traps when prey wanders into them, the vexed biologists argue that is no reason to believe they choose their actions, learn along the way or occasionally get hurt in the process, as some plant neurobiologists assert.
Bothered by claims that plants have "brain-like command centres" in their root tips, and possess the equivalent of animal nervous systems, the critics counter there is no proof of sentient vegetation or structures within plants that would grant them what the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has called "the feeling of what happens." Writing in the journal Trends in Plant Science, where plant neurobiology made its debut in 2006, Lincoln Taiz, a botanist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and seven like-minded researchers state: "There is no evidence that plants require, and thus have evolved, energy-expensive mental faculties, such as consciousness, feelings, and intentionality, to survive or to reproduce."
Bothered by claims that plants have "brain-like command centres" in their root tips, and possess the equivalent of animal nervous systems, the critics counter there is no proof of sentient vegetation or structures within plants that would grant them what the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has called "the feeling of what happens." Writing in the journal Trends in Plant Science, where plant neurobiology made its debut in 2006, Lincoln Taiz, a botanist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and seven like-minded researchers state: "There is no evidence that plants require, and thus have evolved, energy-expensive mental faculties, such as consciousness, feelings, and intentionality, to survive or to reproduce."
Provably Not True (Score:5, Funny)
What nonsense. Just think of all the vegetables currently reading this first post.
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Considering the number of "it's fake" "it's photo shopped" and "Trump is controlling the media" with the turnout at the national mall...I think we can roll in that you picked the wrong group of people.
Or it could simply be that vegetables are easily programmed for responses to specific stimuli, and always respond the same way. Hmm...well NPC's do the same thing.
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At what point does enough training and tweaking of AI result in sentience, and at what point does pulling the plug result in murder? That threshold exists someplace and we will probably find it in our lifetime.
The current threshold is when it becomes right-wing and starts talking about the wrong stuff. Ask Tai.ai, she died for your sins.
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May she rest in peace.
Re:Provably Not True (Score:5, Funny)
What nonsense. Just think of all the vegetables currently reading this first post.
On the Internet, nobody knows you are a vegetable.
Re:Provably Not True (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: Provably Not True (Score:2)
Anybody up for a Soylent Green Smoothie?
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I'm an animal. Like all other animals I eat what I please and care not what an activist's delusions have convinced them to believe.
Re:Provably Not True (Score:5, Funny)
Think of the seedlings!
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Smells great!
Kind of hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kind of hard (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't even know what consciousness is. Maybe they are conscious.
That's not true at all. Read a book. We have a pretty good idea of it's features and required properties. We know *WHAT* it is - but we're not quite sure HOW it's instantiated. BIG difference...
Re:Kind of hard (Score:5, Informative)
We know *WHAT* it is
Wikipedia gives 7 different proposed definitions of consciousness in the first paragraph. Which definition do you prefer?
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One that excludes plants.
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Wikipedia gives 7 different proposed definitions of consciousness in the first paragraph. Which definition do you prefer?
The reason that there are 7 different definitions means that it's a mixed bag of properties. This is not a problem, though, because we can compare plants and animals on all 7 (or more) definitions. Consciousness is not a binary concept, not some magic spark. It's a fuzzy set of properties. Animals have more of those properties, and plants have fewer.
Re:Kind of hard (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a pretty good idea of it's features and required properties. We know *WHAT* it is - but we're not quite sure HOW it's instantiated.
Please describe a falsifiable test for "consciousness", that can distinguish between a conscious entity, and one designed to mimic consciousness.
For intelligence, this test is relatively easy, because intelligence is defined by behavior. Consciousness is defined as an internal state.
Saying an entity is "conscious" is little different than saying it has free will, or a soul.
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distinguish between a conscious entity, and one designed to mimic consciousness.
Suppose a clever neuroscientist alters your brain so that your consciousness is changed into a mimic-consciousness, with perfectly identical behavior, but without consciousness.
Would you be able to describe the difference ? If not, why would you assume there is a difference ?
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For intelligence, this test is relatively easy, because intelligence is defined by behavior. Consciousness is defined as an internal state.
Saying an entity is "conscious" is little different than saying it has free will, or a soul.
NO, that's even sillier but in the opposite direction. It's like life and the definitions of life. There are many things we can clearly identify a living or not living. Coming up with a solid definition is very difficult and there's a big grey area in the middle.
Re:Kind of hard (Score:4, Insightful)
We can describe properties that we can measure but we still don't know how it arises nor can we prove if it's generated or tuned at a particular locus.
There's plenty of science left to learn; no need to jump to pseudoscience or claims of the supernatural at this point.
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That's not true at all. Read a book.
Any book in particular? I read "new spring" from the wheel of time and lost consciousness. Does that help?
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I wouldn't go that far. We haven't got it pinned down. We do know characteristics of consciousness and from that we can emphatically say that many things aren't conscious. But we don't have a complete picture of what it is.
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It might be more precisely correct to say we aren't clear on what we mean when we use that word... at the very least we can't agree what it means, which makes discussions of it pretty fruitless.
For example do animals other than humans have consciousness? If you say "no", does that mean no animal other than a human can do *any* of the things that humans do that we attribute to consciousness? That was the position of most science texts when I was young; that animals were like robots and fairly primitive o
Re:Kind of hard (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole 'plants are conscious' thing has always struck me as an unscientific, clickbait based attempt to look cleverly contrarian by considering something so highly unlikely to be true that it doesn't merit any real thought at all. There just isn't any evidence whatsoever to suggest that plants are conscious or have anything even remotely resembling the capacity for it. There's just nothing in plant physiology that carries out anything that could be called consciousness. I'm willing to entertain the notion that consciousness could come from something different than the brain was we understand it, but I just don't see it in plants.
Re:Kind of hard (Score:5, Insightful)
For shits and giggles, imagine that complex though processes happened a hundred thousand times more slowly, sometimes over decades, but simple signals could propagate between them. Perhaps a forest can behave in a way similar to a group of neurons.
If that were the case, we would have no evidence and would not be looking for it, nor would we know how.
There is an evolutionary argument to be made about some communications between plants. It could be that advance warning of a fire could help the plant prepare and survive by shutting down preemptively.
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That is a whole lot of "I can't see it" and "there is no evidence".
Well, yes? You say that like it's a bad thing. Until someone provides even the foggiest shred of evidence to suggest anything beyond what is presently known about plant consciousness, or lack thereof, I apply Occam's razor.
There's a lot of things that could be true, if we imagine some unknown factor for which we presently have no evidence suggesting it's existence. No one knew that plants could emit volatile compounds in response to insect attack which are detected by nearby plants and trigger the produ
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I find that an interesting statement. Most people seem to have a discomfort with simply accepting an hypothetical as an unknown.
The way I see it, proponents of the idea of plant consciousness can believe what they want. If I really needed to have an opinion about it, I would seek evidence for myself, but the fact that I do not share their belief does not require me to judge them as quacks either. I just accept that I do no
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That is a stupid claim and according to your own statement, a whole lot of compelling evidence is needed to back it up.
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" it is logically impossible to prove a negative."
That we can agree on.
"One does not need to prove a negative in order for it to be rational to accept the negative as true."
You can accept the negative as true, but it doesn't make it so.
"..both ridiculous from common sense.."
That is merely an opinion. It may be ridiculous to you but that doesn't mean anything scientifically.
"
That i
Re:Kind of hard (Score:4, Insightful)
reaction to stimuli is sufficient evidence of awareness in neural processing, no implying required.
My coffee maker reacts to the stimuli of getting it's button pressed by getting hot. I don't think that is sufficient evidence to consider Mr. Coffee to be in possession of any form of consciousness.
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We don't even know what consciousness is. Maybe they are conscious.
No, they're not. Not by any commonly-accepted definition, even the really stupid ones.
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Plants seem to be designed to be eaten.
So are animals. Cows don't taste that good by accident.
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It's more likely that our sense of taste has evolved to like eating cows and other animals.
Re: Kind of hard (Score:2)
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All you have to do is look at the success of e.g. cows, chickens, pigs, and sheep. Being delicious is a selective property.
These are domesticated breeds. The "selector" in this case is us.
Energy expensive mental favulties (Score:4, Insightful)
In the vast timescales of the universe, it may be completely normal for beings to have a thought once every few million years. Entropy is the final enemy.
Leading hypothesis show that planets are able to support life in a very small period of their existence, ie have liquid water, atmosphere and mild temperatures. Life needs to evolve quickly to not only adapt, but ensure continued existence by adapting the environment to support and allow life to flourish.
Plants(all photosynthesis bearing organisms) in all their forms not only have terraformed this planet, but have carefully crafted this planet to support more and more complex life forms. Plants have evolved much further in their own tracks than the animal kingdom collectively has. The animal kingdom has mainly tagged along and adapted to the ever carefully adapting and changing plant kingdom.
To say they are not conscious without even being able to truly and collectively define what consciousness means is but a drumming of our ignorant ego. The timescales plants have are much further out than mere humans have.
Aah humans, we think we know it all!! We’re just here to consume the energy that plants have spent billions of years to tame, capture and store.
Fuck Off (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't offer any physical theory for the phenomena of consciousness.
You can't come up with an objective test for it.
You can't even rigorously define it.
Thus, you can't tell me who or what is or is not conscious. For all I know, these biologists are just meat sacks with complex reactions, not actual conscious beings.
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For all I know, these biologists are just meat sacks with complex reactions, not actual conscious beings.
Biology is just applied chemistry. #435
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First: Define "Consciousness" ? (Score:2)
Second: What test(s) are you using to "prove" (demonstrate) that:
a) Humans are conscious, and
b) Plants are NOT conscious?
reminds me of a college party (Score:2, Insightful)
Thirty years ago I was at party in college. I was finishing up my degree in biology and the horrible boor that cornered me was a philosophy student who argued (hypothetically) that plants could be sentient. The argument is just a frustrating today.
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Then it would have been his ghost. LRH died in 1986.
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The vocabulary.com definition for sapience starts with "good taste". Clearly, plants do not have good taste, because otherwise they would be made of meat. So I think we can safely rule that one out.
Wait a minute! (Score:2)
I was looking for a new thing to feel guilty about. This sort of ruins it for me.
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I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants!
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Quick, check politicians (Score:2)
They could be plants. Who needs alien invaders.
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They are definitely plants. [wikipedia.org]
Lost in Space (Score:2)
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In fairness, it would be good to see a decades-old documentary backed up by more current research.
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"In his many experiments with plant and human interaction he found that the was doing with the plants required that the "experimenters must become part of their experiments." Vogel found that the plants responded to the thoughts of people whom he brought into their presence, one philodendron even sulking (refusing to give any response) when a visitor admitted that he had compared that plant unfavorably to the one he had at home. " - http://bionutrient.org/site/li... [bionutrient.org]
The rise of pseudoscience (Score:5, Interesting)
The rise of pseudoscience is both alarming and depressing.
We landed people on the Moon decades ago, we change out hearts, livers, and other organs routinely, and we carry the equivalent of the entire world's computing power in 1965 in our pockets...and yet flat-earthers and chemtail nutters still make the headlines almost daily. Homeopathic medicine is still a thing to many people. And of course, billions of people walk around believing in a magical super-being who will cast them into Hell for the most minor of imagined transgressions, like eating shellfish or engaging in what they claim is "sexual immorality".
"Plant-brain" promoters are no different despite not having a single paper published in any reputable peer-reviewed journal, EVER.
It's fucking shameful that so many people believe in such a wide array of utter bullshit.
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"Plant-brain" promoters are no different despite not having a single paper published in any reputable peer-reviewed journal, EVER.
Drop the hyperbole.
First link on google scholar. [sciencemag.org] There are many, but only one example is needed to refute your claim.
This has been established science for some time now. Scientific progress is made by going beyond what we knew to be true and false by testing and evidence.
What we don't have scientific evidence for is what we cant have scientific evidence for: what exactly is consciousness. The news story we are discussing is not science at all. Whether or not plants have consciousness is not science. It's ph
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IANAB, but it's not hard to determine from the abstract that the paper you cited is not about a "plant-brain" system. Rather, it discusses rapid intercellular communication via chemical transfer -- and "rapid" in this context means 8.4 cm per minute. The communication is a response to conditions such as "wounding, heat, cold, high-intensity light, and salinity stresses." I'd hardly call that evidence of a plant-brain system.
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Drop the hyperbole.
Man, you just can't let go of that line, can you? There was no hyperbole in my post. Yours, on the other hand, is full of hyperbole and contradiction, and is ironically self-referential:
Nobody anywhere is claiming plants have a brain. Secondly, what do you think our brain is but a centralized intercellular communication system via chemical transfer? And what else do you think a plant would have need for other than heat, cold, light intensity, and so on?.
So, you say nobody is claiming plants have a brain, but then it sounds like you're claiming exactly that.
It's as if people's IQ/reading comprehension dips 40% when they encounter something they dislike.
I'll just let that stand.
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It's not clear that a brain is required to form a consciousness, so using the term 'plant-brain' is a bit of a strawman. Nobody claimed that.
The question of consciousness is wholly a philosophical one. I know it's bad form to point at wikipedia articles, but it's the most available source at hand, and their entry on consciousness is just a primer on various philosophical arguments. It's an open question, and frankly, I don't think we're equipped to really answer it with regards to plants. We only really fig
Re:The rise of pseudoscience (Score:5, Insightful)
A large number of people have always believed in utter bullshit since the dawn of time. It's certainly nothing new.
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The pseudoscience of plant consciousness has been around for decades. Cleve Baxter [wikipedia.org] conducted "research" on the subject in the 1960s, and published his "results" [rebprotocol.net] [PDF alert] in the International Journal of Parapsychology.
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Speaking of pseudoscience, your statistics around the described belief are vastly inaccurate.
You're confusing your straw man with an actual widely held belief. Name a denomination that believes you will go to hell for eating shellfish.
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Oddly, while there's protes
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I was expecting a real statistically relevant answer, not a non-sequitur of what you've "heard a lot about" (particularly from anti-theists).
A behavioral error, "abomination" or not, does not imply being sent to hell.
But let's frame the context of discussion a bit.
What ultimate outcome are you expecting is appropriate for LGBT individuals, going strictly by, say, science and evolution?
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What ultimate outcome are you expecting is appropriate for LGBT individuals, going strictly by, say, science and evolution?
Exactly the same outcome that's appropriate for non-LGBT individuals. We are all born, live our lives and then we die. Doesn't matter who you are or what your sexual orientation is.
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What you're describing in Leviticus is the Mosiac Law. The purpose of said law was to keep the ancient nation of Israel clean, morally and physically, and to provide a means for the Messiah. The Law also promoted health by having provisions for quarantining the ill, proper corpse disposal and designated toilet areas. Other things the Mosiac Law prohibited that were commonly practiced by surrounding nations were things like incest, child sacrifice, inquiring of the dead or otherwise communicating with a spir
Re: The rise of pseudoscience (Score:2)
At no point in Jesus ministry did he ever go around protesting and condemning others in a manner like this but rather his was always a positive message to those willing to listen.
While I was with you for almost all of your comment, I'm not sure that the whitewashed sepulchres would completely agree with you on the above.
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we carry the equivalent of the entire world's computing power in 1965 in our pockets.
Is that the equivalent of the entire world's computing power in 1965 in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
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And of course, billions of people walk around believing in a magical super-being who will cast them into Hell for the most minor of imagined transgressions, like eating shellfish
I think you've mixed up a bit of Judaism (not eating shellfish) with probably Christianity, but possibly some other religion. .It's fucking shameful that so many people believe in such a wide array of utter bullshit.
yes
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The old testament is still part of Christianity
Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not even the smallest detail of God’s law will disappear until its purpose is achieved. So if you ignore the least commandment and teach others to do the same, you will be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. But anyone who obeys God’s laws and teaches them will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven. But I warn you—unless your righteousness is better than the righteousness of the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!
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Maybe by competing with someone who lied less often but was more overtly condescending?
with SD everything is conscience (Score:2)
Typical (Score:2)
California, home of two legged fruits and vegetables.
Oh sure (Score:2)
You could model a plant's DNA in a supercomputer (Score:2)
Of course I would be highly amused if it were true, only because it would spell an end to Vegans and Veganism, once and for all -- because the
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I think we could create a working computer model of a plants' DNA within one.
DNA by itself doesn't do anything. You need the entire cellular machine around it, and that's far beyond what we can do on a supercomputer. And even if you could model a single cell, it still doesn't tell you anything. The ability to model a single human neuron tells us almost nothing about human consciousness.
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let alone define what 'consciousness' means
It's our word, so we can assign any reasonable meaning we want to. And you can define a word without fully understanding how it works. We can define things like "satellite" or "automobile" or "CPU" without understanding exactly how it works, or without defining a virtual model.
Coming up with a definition is not the big problem here. The real problem is finding a definition that we all agree on, and that's pretty much impossible, no matter how much we claim to understand. Even if some genius creates a workin
In before someone (Score:2)
In before someone identifies as an intelligent plant.
My phone is conscious (Score:2)
impressive abilities of plants to sense and react to their environments. While plants may curl their leaves in response to touch, grow faster when competitors are near and spring traps when prey wanders into them
Yes, classic stimulus-response behaviour. But evolved, not learned.
My phone "knows" when to alert me to an incoming call. It "talks" to me with its own language of beeps and adapts the screen brightness to ambient light levels. It tells me when it needs "feeding" and it even "knows" where it is.
Sure, it can't move of its own volition (though sometimes I wonder!) but neither can plants. One could argue that it also grows old and dies, when it becomes unable to charge its battery, suffers a fatal fall or
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Nice way to fuck with the vegans (Score:3)
So don't throw the idea away yet.
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I've always held that vegans are cruel, vicious heartless devourers of innocent vegetables.
They're worse than carnivores, who generally at least kill the animal before eating it. Vegans think nothing of eating a carrot alive, and as for what they do to strawberries..
Re: Meat mafia are trying to make a point? (Score:2, Informative)
No way. I do eat and think vegans are lunatics.
An, they are! At least in comparison to meat eaters. They do have a significantly higher proportion of psychiatric disorders.
Check out
Burkert, N. T., Muckenhuber, J., GroÃYschÃdl, F., RÃsky, E., & Freidl, W. (2014). Nutrition and healthâ"the association between eating behavior and various health parameters: a matched sample study. PloS one, 9(2), e88278.
Https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088278
There are ab
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No way. I do eat and think vegans are lunatics.
You eat vegans? What do they taste like?
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You eat vegans? What do they taste like?
Tofu.
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And the grilling of the workers might take up most of lunch.
Hmm... doesn't sound very vegan to me.
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a fish scream [youtube.com]
It's on the Internet. It's gotta be true.
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But we have yet to see clear signs of consciousness in any of them, including monkeys. And yes, including your dog.
Consciousness is very ill defined. You can't "know" anyone other than you is conscious either, but that's not a a terribly useful direction. We have also identified brain regions in human responsible for, or related to consciousness in humans. We can simulate those regions or examine what happens to people when the brain is injured. and we know other animals have those brain regions too.
It seem
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Given it's biological, it's likely (a) extremely messy [for example really fucking strange things happen if you knock out certain brain regions] and (b) exists on some sort of continuum.
Also, evolution cares only about behavior, not how it "feels" inside. So we can ignore all philosophical arguments, and just look at the behavior of plants vs animals/humans.
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Consciousness is very ill defined.
Yes, it is. However, we do have a model: Us.
You can't "know" anyone other than you is conscious either, but that's not a a terribly useful direction.
I think that philosophical argument was soundly debunked around a hundred years ago or so? But you can simply apply Occam's Razor.
It seems very unlikely that some switch flipped that gave us this special general quality say a few hundred thousand or maybe a million years ago that absolutely nothing has despite having a shared evolutionary history and strong similarity of brain structure. That requires a sort of biological human exceptionalism which sems pretty unlikely to me.
And yet we have something that no other animal has: We are time-binders, in the words of Korzybski. There is a long list of things unique to humans. We are not biologically exceptional, but we definitely are exceptional. If you want to prove me wrong, point me to the Gorilla Internet, the many books written by Bonobos or the Dolphin cod
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Some have argued that everything has consciousness, of some sort. A photon just goes wee. If atoms have consciousness, trees, made up of atoms have consciousness. Also, their consciousness may be in a dimension we are not privy too; along the lines of the pan-dimensional superintelligent mouse
https://aliens.fandom.com/wiki... [fandom.com]
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If atoms have consciousness, trees, made up of atoms have consciousness.
And a fat person has more consciousness than a thin person ?