Sham consciousness
As a young researcher I often got told off when saying that a plant ‘decided’ to take action as a reaction to something. The argument was: ‘A plant does not think, so it can not decide.’ Not something you can argue with. But still I keep coming back to words like ‘decide’ when describing the reactions of plants.
We are so used to describe things from a human point of view that we don’t even have good terminology to describe reactions when they are not the result of a thought. And that is a loss. Because of this we risk that we attribute consciousness to organisms that clearly don’t have it.
Take plants for example. That plants are conscious of their environment is clear, but if that is also consciousness is another thing. The precise reactions of plants to their environment are not the results of conscious decisions, but that of a fine-tuned network of proteins and genes that ‘behaves’ itself as logic gates: if this than that.
A good example of such a fine-tuned network is that of the circadian clock. Which has morning and evening genes. But the morning genes you can divide into early morning genes, mid-morning genes, midday genes, etc. Beside regulating process that need to be regulated at respectively early morning, mid-morning and midday, they also regulate each other. They turn on the next in line and turn off the one that was on before them. When you don’t know anything about this regulation, then it appears that plants know the time. But in reality it is nothing more than a chain of logic gates.
Now are plants not the only organisms that respond to their environment using fine-tuned gene networks. All organisms do, including we humans. And maybe here is where it gets unconvertable. The thought that if our reaction to our environment is nothing more nothing less than a result of genetic logic gates, that our consciousness is also nothing more or less than a result of genetic logic gates. Then it is only a small step to say that plants are also conscious.
Personally I think that that is a step to far. First we should try to find out what it is that makes is conscious. Only when we know that, then we can analyse if organisms like plants, but also bacteria and fungi are also conscious. Till then we need to rely on observations that aren’t explainable by logic gates.
Plant en Zo 