Plants are totally awesome ( part 2 ) Are you smarter than your Venus Flytrap?

[jadamz]

Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

Now, a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of anesthetics, including the types that are used when you undergo surgery.

Insights gleaned from the study may help doctors better understand the variety of anesthetics used in surgeries. But the research also highlights that plants are complex organisms, perhaps less different from animals than is often assumed.

 

[NobleHouse]

This goes along nicely with the Thread: Is Everything Alive that Debi started on January 31, 2018.

And it also coincides with MY belief stated in that post that I believe plants do have a living conscious !!

The idea that everything from spoons to stones are conscious is gaining academic credibility

The idea that everything from spoons to stones are conscious is gaining academic credibility

Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.

This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the “panpsychist” view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.

“Why should we think common sense is a good guide to what the universe is like?” says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. “Einstein tells us weird things about the nature of time that counters common sense; quantum mechanics runs counter to common sense. Our intuitive reaction isn’t necessarily a good guide to the nature of reality.”

David Chalmers, a philosophy of mind professor at New York University, laid out the “hard problem of consciousness” in 1995, demonstrating that there was still no answer to the question of what causes consciousness. Traditionally, two dominant perspectives, materialism and dualism, have provided a framework for solving this problem. Both lead to seemingly intractable complications.

Full story at site

 

[InkYourBus]

Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

Now, a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of anesthetics, including the types that are used when you undergo surgery.

Insights gleaned from the study may help doctors better understand the variety of anesthetics used in surgeries. But the research also highlights that plants are complex organisms, perhaps less different from animals than is often assumed.

Given the fact that a living organism requires an evolved brain in order to be imbued with consciousness, and flora clearly lacks this organ, I think its safe to state unequivocally that your Venus flytrap is not a sentient being. Its eating actions are simply the result of tissue stimulation and physical response. Just like those dead frog legs we made twitch in biology class. LOL

 

[Charleh]

Given the fact that a living organism requires an evolved brain in order to be imbued with consciousness, and flora clearly lacks this organ, I think its safe to state unequivocally that your Venus flytrap is not a sentient being. Its eating actions are simply the result of tissue stimulation and physical response. Just like those dead frog legs we made twitch in biology class. LOL

Medical evidence is starting to show that our hearts and even our stomachs are part of our consciousness too. Obviously not in terms of thinking capacity. The same can be said with bone marrow as it changes ones DNA and other aspects of their physiology.

They found that heart transplant recipients start taking on personality traits of the person that gave their heart, for example enjoying different activities, liking different foods all of a sudden, or in the case of suicides, sometimes when a heart recipient takes their own life, it’s often on the same day or in the same method that the donor took their own life.

I know plants don’t have hearts and stomachs, but perhaps they have another organs that can facilitate consciousness.

Thinking capacity doesn’t equate to consciousness. That’s why supercomputers are not yet conscious despite thinking capacity.

 

[Lynne]

I think the question here is what is consciousness? So we need a brain to have it? If we believe in life after death and out of body expierences it would have to be non local. There are a few really good near death expierence accounts where the brain was flat lined. The expierencier continued to make memories that were later recounted. Consciousness continued without the brain. Perhaps plants have an over soul that is a consciousness of sorts, less individual but as a species. Just food for thought.