Last
year Michael Pollan created something of a sensation with his New
Yorker article entitled “The Intelligent Plant.” Pollan discussed
a variety of findings and experiments which suggest that plants may
have capabilities that somewhat resemble or mimic aspects of the
human mind.
Pollan stated: “Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant’s behavioral response.” He pointed out that in 2006 six scientists had called for a new field of study to be called “plant neurobiology.”
I
may note that intelligence is not necessarily the same as
consciousness, so the idea that plants may have some degree of
intelligence does not necessarily imply that plants have
consciousness. Computer programs, for example, are not
self-conscious, but do show some degree of intelligence.
Is there a bit of Mind in our meadows?
Scientist Monica Gagliana has written a paper entitled “Animal-like Learning in Mimosa Pudica.” She claims to have detected that this plant species can “learn” to ignore a stimulus that it originally responded to.
Recently a scientific journal published a paper “Adaptive and selective seed abortion reveals complex conditional decision making in plants." The paper stated: “Ecological evidence for complex decision making in plants thus includes a structural memory (the second seed), simple reasoning (integration of inner and outer conditions), conditional behavior (abortion), and anticipation of future risks (seed predation)." The paper is summarized here, in an article entitled "Are Plants More Intelligent Than We Assume?"
Some materialists have dismissed and belittled such findings, claiming that they are all nonsense. Their reasoning goes like this:
- Neurons are the sole
source of intelligence.
- Plants do not have
neurons.
- Therefore plants cannot
have anything like intelligence.
This
reasoning is similar to the reasoning used to reject evidence for a
wide variety of paranormal phenomena suggesting human consciousness
can exist outside of the brain (phenomena such as near-death
experiences, medium phenomena, and apparition sightings). The
strategy is all too familiar: when someone accumulates or produces
evidence that contradicts your assumption, portray that person as a
fraud, a fool, or a fanatic. One may ask why materialists cling so
stubbornly to the premise that neurons are the sole source of
intelligence, given that no one has any real understanding of how
neurons actually produce thoughts.
But
what if there is something more than just trickery,
misinterpretations or errors behind the numerous indications that
neurons may not be the sole source of intelligence? One can imagine
an alternate theory of intelligence that may be consistent with these
findings about plant intelligence and indications of paranormal
phenomena.
The
theory might be something along these lines. It could be that there
is some unknown external source of what we might call Mind Stuff. A
sufficient amount of this Mind Stuff might result in self-conscious
beings like us. A much smaller amount of this Mind Stuff might result
in some limited degree of information processing capability such as
may exist in plants. It could be that our brains are just receptacles
for this Mind Stuff, or some kind of receivers that tune in to this
Mind Stuff (or organs that attract this Mind Stuff, like a magnet
attracts metal, or like a capacitor attracts electric charge). It
could be that plants are able to somehow attract or store a small
amount of this Mind Stuff. Through such a theory we might be able to
get around the difficulty that plants seem to have a limited degree
of something like intelligence, even though they have no neurons. We might also be able to explain the anomalous observations discussed here and here (such as the fact that some human minds perform well even with only half as many neurons).
Although
it fits all observations (including reports of paranormal phenomena),
such a theory will no doubt be spurned by conventional theorists, who
will continue to cling to the dogma that thought can only be produced
by neurons, clinging to it like a young child clinging to his favorite stuffed animal.
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