When I say an entity is conscious, I mean to say it not only has the ability to react to stimuli, but it can also abstractly choose how to react. It can rewire its own reactions, not just in a Pavlovian sense, but it can also develop internal thought frameworks and route its reactions through the frameworks it prefers.
The only mechanism plants have for improving the way they react to their environment is biological evolution. You could call that mechanism a type of consciousness, but in doing so you would have to treat the species as the conscious entity, not the individual plant; individual plants are like passing thoughts.
Thus I don't think individual plants are conscious unless they have some way to improve their reaction to their environment outside of biological evolution.
Things that don't move very fast are at an advantage where energy efficiency is important. The general trend is that low-energy things modify their environment chemically and high-energy things modify their environment mechanically. Compare the diversity of human-discovered secondary metabolites from plants/fungi (low power), insects/reptiles/amphibians (medium power), mammals/birds (high power)
https://www.mpg.de/15791/Plants_and_environment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_communication
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6b23/df2807a0fb8e77c4922377...
I can imagine an experiment where some plants are placed in an environment where the communication chemical they secrete interacts with a gas in the air, slowly poisoning the plants. Would the plants adapt by changing their own behavior, or would some later generation survive due to a mutation? If they changed their own behavior, that might point toward a kind of individual consciousness.
From a philosophical standpoint, and considering the spirit rather than the details: Is this hypothetical experiment just giving plants a challenge at them which they're too dumb or helpless to solve?
It seems there are plenty of analogous challenges which humans alone or in groups are unequipped to deal with.
Is any "challenge" humans respond to not a homeostatic correction, like if everything were perfectly perfect for a person would they do anything different at all? Considering also the homeostases we're built to maintain "just because", like novelty vs boredom.
If a thing "decided" to change its reproductive rate, or selected different sexual partners based on environmental conditions, is this necessarily a phenomenon unconnected to individual agency? Humans do this too.
Developmental neuroscience strongly supports the claim that physical brain architecture requires environmental stimuli, and psychology strongly supports the importance of "nurture" contributing to a person's "self". Do these stimulus responses have no bearing on consciousness?
If your conscious experience suddenly became transferred to a tree, and a lumberjack came to cut you down, how could you convince them you're conscious using the behaviors available to you?
Consider a conscious alien unfamiliar with human society, or a Stone age tribesperson who somehow doesn't embody human cognitive biases like assuming consciousness of things that look like them. If they observe a financial services office for a few hours, do they think the workers are modifying the environment in an individually considered manner?
If plants and humans were both considered by definition to be conscious, would life change?
More importantly as we understand more about the brain we may eventually understand how everything works. Any definition that would then exclude humans as conscious becomes irrelevant.
Which has an interesting parallel with many plant's ability to rotate the face of their leaves towards the current position of the sun.
So the question shouldn't be whether we can adapt in ways that plants can't but rather what degree of adaptability feels sufficiently thoughtful to our meat computers.
If by "free will", you do mean what I think you mean, it would be very surprising we have it. It would basically imply dualism, which I have dismissed a long time ago.
Of course our thoughts are entirely automatic. They're physical processes like any other. It would still be nice to understand their structure. I for one would be thrilled to learn how choices actually happen.
Simple: it goes both ways. Then decoherence happens, the universe splits in half, and we experience being in either one of those halves. What we observe is but a glimpse of what actually happen. We don't have access to the other side (split universes don't communicate with each other, contrary to what much sci-fi material describes).
That may sound weird, but the alternative (that half the amplitude is "not real", or that it "collapses" (in a way that is non-local, that is, exceeds the speed of light), is even weirder.
Or you could just refuse to answer the question, and stick to "this equations mean I should observe this with those statistics".
These are just reactions with a memory component. This would include any computers, and so is too broad. I think consciousness will end up being a specific type of information process, with certain properties including those you describe, but it must have more properties and so be more specific than what you outline.
Saying this because the definition seems to beer toward “free will”.
This seems like a reductio ad absurdum definition of consciousness, to echo rotrux's "By this definition my air conditioning system is conscious" comment.
Consciousness may be hard to define, but it certainly is something that at least appears "special", and I think it's a big mistake to not include at least some level of self-awareness in the definition.
These are the most boring sorts of arguments. You want to talk about only systems that have self awareness? Fine, you go do that on this side of the room. You want to talk about systems that don't necessarily have self awareness? Okay, do that on the other side of the room.
If you can't decide on common definitions for words, you can't play together.
You seem to be saying that there's a "special" thing, and that thing must include self awareness by your reckoning, and you call that thing "consciousness". Instead of arguing about whose definition of the word "consciousness" is better, just define that thing rigorously, call it anything you want, and then we can talk about it.
For example, is nature (evolution) conscious?
I mean this in the most literal sense, the system which created your definition of "consciousness", is that system itself consciousness?
The material that makes up our neurons once came from a non self-aware system. (basic minerals, etc.)
Imagine waking up from deep sleep. In the first few seconds, there is virtually no intelligence present other than basic autonomous body survival intelligence, which is also present during deep sleep. So what has changed? What is the difference between being in deep sleep and being in the state of unintelligent awareness a second after waking from deep sleep? There is not something that it is like to be in deep sleep. There is something that it is like to be just awakened from deep sleep.
There is a lot of confusion in most conversations between consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness. The three are different concepts and the relationships between them are poorly understod.
I can imagine a human-level intelligence that lacks consciousness (this is sort of what is meant by the term 'p-zombie'). I can imagine a being that almost or completely lacks intelligence (in the sense of problem-solving ability, pattern recognition, etc.), yet is conscious.
Humanity currently has a lot of knowledge about how various material phenomena (drugs, being hit in the head with a brick, etc.) affect consciousness, but as far as I know humanity currently has zero knowledge about the mechanisms by which material phenomena affect consciousness. Consciousness in its essence is not understood at all and may be fundamentally beyond the reach of science.
There is no reason to assume that it is in principle possible to objectively evaluate whether some entity is conscious.
Maybe, but probably not!
> I can imagine a human-level intelligence that lacks consciousness (this is sort of what is meant by the term 'p-zombie'). I can imagine a being that almost or completely lacks intelligence (in the sense of problem-solving ability, pattern recognition, etc.), yet is conscious.
I can imagine living forever, but it's actually impossible. The p-zombie argument depends upon a rhetorical trick that exposes our ignorance, much like Zeno's paradox.
> There is no reason to assume that it is in principle possible to objectively evaluate whether some entity is conscious.
Whatever argument you might use to to justify this, would also suggest that it is not possible in principle to objectively evaluate whether something is healthy, or alive or feels pain. And yet we seem quite adept at this.
Following that line of reasoning, you could say that even the smallest particle/bit of energy has some level of consciousness.
Then you could also say that Earth (and any planet or star), is also conscious, and at a way higher level than we (humans) are.
Do you know of this concept has been incorporated into physics somehow? Are there any models in physics that consider panpsychism as fundamental? (i.e. That consider consciousness as a basic property of matter/energy, just like the 3 special dimensions or time)
What's the point of the word "conscious" if it's just a synonym of the word "complex"? If it doesn't add anything, it's not worth having the word.
However, this happens very frequently in humans, we have multiple different languages and even multiple synonyms for a lot of (most?) words in every one of those languages.
At the same time, would correlation of two things make one of them worthless to have/know/understand?
If you're saying they're synonymous, then it doesn't make sense to ask whether you can have one without the other.
So ask yourself, could you imagine something being complex but not conscious, or conscious but not complex? If so, then they're not synonymous and you have something interesting to talk about.
We us as humans on the other hand, want to compare our consciousness to the one of animals/plants/etc.
Trying to bridge the two things, you could say that everything has consciousness, but that there's a "level" of it, which to make it simple, you could attribute to (or be roughly correlated to) complexity/size.
In a way, it's exactly how gravity is defined.
This is very similar to the definition I was given for "robot" in an embedded systems course.
A popular definition (in my experience) is the existence of a central nervous system, but we don’t really know whether or not that’s responsible for consciousness. I wonder if we’ll ever know for sure.
Ah, that's a biiig claim. Which may be true nonetheless. Can you be more precise in this context about 'intelligence' as distinct from action-reaction?
BTW there is a claim that plants can be conditioned a la pavlov. I'll try to dig out the ref (recently in new scientist). Amazing if verified.
> about how plants were more adaptive to radiation
Adapted in this context means adaptations so as to 'not die' I suspect. Please correct me if needed.
Life forms that don't move don't need brains. Sophisticated decision-making isn't a challenge that a plant has to meet. I think this is a strong point against the idea of plants being conscious.
https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for...
In that line, what do you define as a "closed system"? Technically, nothing exists that doesn't somehow interact with its surroundings. Including humans (we breath, eat, absorb/exchange heat from air/sun, etc). Also black holes (Hawking radiation).
For example, a car and a truck are both vehicles, but a vehicle is neither a car or a truck.
The truck or car are the subject/closed system.
Why closed? Who says it is closed? I claim it is open, and, spans the entirety of physical reality, fully entangled.
> ... that contain both input and output, in which information is gathered and alters some component of the system itself.
That sounds like a model for computation not consciousness. A JIT compiler would qualify.
We still do not properly understand it, thus we cannot define it. While I try to stray from vague or ambiguous interpretations, I do think it's significant to point that out.
Let's look at the generic definition: * consciousness - "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings." * awareness - "knowledge or perception of a situation or fact."
While a plants' consciousness may not be COMPLEX, it does not mean the absence of conscious. There are things such as cellular intelligence which we know is exhibited in even the smallest of prokaryotes and eukaryotes cells.
At the most abstract interpretation I think consciousness can be defined as a closed system that contain both input and output, in which information is gathered and alters some component of the system itself.
There was a really interesting article the other day on here about how plants were more adaptive to radiation (specifically in Chernobyl) compared to the regions animal counterparts.
To this definition, I think plants exercise consciousness. When we look at life we have to analyze on both the fundamental and complex aspects.
Just my 2 cents.