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Plants do communicate and experience sensations. I would not call that comparable to human intelligence or full on sentience, but dismissing a fact as a destruction because it might be inconvenient is a bit reductive. Scientific facts help us understand the world better and ideally, make our lives better off. Discarding inconvenient information is not going to help us.
It’s not like plants being able to feel things is going to stop us from eating or using them. We know for a fact that animals think and feel, even if not on our level, and we still have no qualms about eating them.
Some people do have qualms about eating them, though.
We know for a fact that animals think and feel, even if not on our level, and we still have no qualms about eating them.
Who’s ‘we’ here, because I have plenty of qualms with eating animals.
Plants probably do have their own version of feelings, like any living organism. Just not human ones.
Trees and Mushrooms are known to communicate. If you fell a tree, the whole forest will know within minutes. Whether they have feelings or not I can’t tell.
The smell of grass cutting is a warning to other grass.
A warning to do what? Run?
From what I understand it’s a pheromone(?) reaction that causes the grass to send water and nutrients lower down into the plant, so they can more easily survive being grazed on / lawnmowered.
There are evolutionary mechanisms that let many plants excrete foul tasting or smelling compounds when they’re alerted to nearly danger, from their other leaves being eaten, or those nearby that release warning compounds.
Plants also work in tandem with fungus and other microbial life to sort of message needs to get support for survival, possibly defense as well.
There are a bunch of people who’ve bought into the enchanting myth that plants feel things and “scream in pain”.
It’s not really surprising since most people don’t know botany or plant psychology, but love a nice TED talk.
Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness: Trends in Plant Science
I too love the smell of suffering.
Is it worth worrying about though? Is it bad to make a plant sad?
I mean, it’s not good right?
Sure. But I don’t think it’s relevant either. I’d consider it something like worrying about how a chair feels that I’m sitting on it.
We might not understand intelligence. Plants might be “intelligent”. At minimum we know that plants communicate within their cells and with each other and that they can learn.
I like to fantasize that a large oak is a huge mass of neural tissue and that alder stand that is the largest organism or something is a super brain.
Everything has feelings and intelligence. Even you, dumbass ;)
“how do you know YOU aren’t an LLM??? Hmmm???”
Because my water usage is very low.
If I am the dipshit running me should just pull the damn plug already and never put it back in.
Eh, consciousness is just an elaborate Markov Chain on life that didn’t go the botany route hundreds of millions years ago.
Intelligence is just a word we came up with very recently to try explain stuff.
LLMs are literally just us hearing ourselves for once.
