Consider your sources. As an erstwhile professor I grew accustomed to repeating that, and this was before the internet started up, making claims of all kinds. Certain news sources—think New York Times, or the BBC—earn their reputations slowly, over many, many years. That doesn’t mean they don’t make mistakes, but it does mean they’re often on the mark. So an article on plant consciousness on the BBC is worth considering. Consciousness is still something we don’t understand. We have it, but we can’t always say what it is. Many, if not most, people tend to limit it to humans, but it’s become very clear than animals share in it too. Why not plants also? A few years back I read a book by philosopher Thomas Nagel. He made the argument that human consciousness must come from somewhere, and as we look down toward animals, and plants, what we see are smaller pieces of the same thing.
I’m not stating this as eloquently as Nagel did, but the idea has stayed with me. The BBC article notes how plants seem to react to human interaction. And they seem to communicate back. We lack the natural range to hear their responses, but some experiments indicate that plants at least communicate among themselves. Being the BBC, the story reports but doesn’t necessarily advocate this point of view. Still, it makes sense. For too long we’ve supposed human beings to be the only intelligent creatures on this planet, taking the arrogant view that animals are automatons with no thinking ability. To give them that would be to make them too human-like.
That particular viewpoint still exists, of course, but more and more scientists are starting to consider whether consciousness isn’t emergent from, as Nagel put it, smaller building blocks. I tend to be on the more imaginative end of the spectrum—consider your source here—but it seems to me that plants could well have a consciousness too. Trees move. They do it too slowly for our species to notice it, fixated as we are on our own brief time in the world and our human affairs, but that doesn’t mean they don’t move. It simply means that if we want to see it we need to shift our perspective. Communication, it would seem, pervades nature. If it does, isn’t consciousness somehow implicated? Plants may respond when we pay attention to them. To me that makes the world an even more wonderful place.
