if you rank “care about plants” people way up there with AI worshippers, you’re lost to propaganda.
Do “people who care about plants” really think they have feelings and are intelligent? I consider myself a person who cares about plants and I think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
Just to play devil’s advocate… The more we understand about consciousness and the more we study animals like invertebrates, the more we keep finding out our previous assumptions keep getting proven wrong.
Terms like feelings, emotions, and intelligence are all open to interpretation and debate.
Fun fact there are theories that the Sun may have a sort of consciousness
There are also theories that corporations are sentient.
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There are theories that managers are sentient.
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.
Also the reason Giraffes eat from down-wind, so that nearby plants do not deploy (evolved over a long timescale) self-defense mechanisms
You can’t just be spouting off crazy shit like this online and not citing your sources!
C’mon, plants can’t be intelligent! Our top scientists and science fiction writers have proven it!
(Now will anyone actually get the reference)
The smell of grass cutting is a warning to other grass.
A warning to do what? Run?
A lot of plants put out those smells as a way of saying ‘something’s eating me!’ to the local predators.
Alternatively it can be to store more energy in the roots.
Spring forth, loyal protector, and save me!
To get their affairs in order
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 nearby 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 think people liken it to human consciousness because that’s what they know, but I think most people understand that’s an abstraction and the reality is much more sciencey and nuanced
Paywall so I can’t actually read the whole article but from the abstract:
Based on a survey of the brain anatomy, functional complexity, and behaviors of a broad spectrum of animals, criteria were established for the emergence of consciousness.
“We’ve drawn an arbitrary line around ‘consciousness’ and have decided what’s on either side” isn’t exactly the concrete dismissal they seem to think it is.
Not arbitrary: consciousness is a defined word with historical meaning. “Consciousness comes from the Latin word conscious, which means “knowing with” or “having joint knowledge.” The term evolved in English during the 17th century, with its modern meaning relating to awareness of one’s own mind first appearing in the late 1600s.”
You have arbitrarily redefined consciousness, implicitly by context to include any response to the environment. What good is epistemology if a plant’s hormonal action implies self awareness?
Edit: Imagine, if you will, that the stream of consciousness using language to tie a plant’s hormonal action to self awareness, e.g., words like “plants know when” is just as much of a cognitive and emotional hallucination as the most sublime sounding gibberish produced by an LLM.
consciousness is a defined word with historical meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Problem_of_definition
While you can just make shit up in definitions, you don’t get to claim that others use your definition. All you’re actually doing here is destroying words.
It might be (is!) a scam but at least we got some good music out of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_Wonder's_Journey_Through_"The_Secret_Life_of_Plants"
Plant psychology 🤣
The typical smell from cut grass is actually microbes. The soil is very much disturbed by the way we cut grass (not talking about reaping hay/wheat/etc here, just your typical suburbanite with a lawn mower). I can’t remember what they are now for the life of me, but the microbiology professor at my college loved explaining to the younguns that the reason the local water tasted/smelled bad (compared to most places) was that the same variety of microbe responsible for the cut grass smell was present in high concentrations in the source for the city water. Once he pointed it out, you could pick out the similarity.
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.
Does hydrogen care when it’s separated from its oxygen buddies?
Plants probably do have their own version of feelings,
Just like LLMs?
I think the word you are looking for is senses.I’d definitely put LLMs beneath plants.
Because plants actually serve a purpose
I mean, I think plants have more complex feelings and inner lives than LLMs.
No.
Edit: Still no.
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Death metal works better, but for an interesting reason: it makes the dust vibrate off of the leaves.
The only inconvenient part is that you get absolute morons that hear words like “communicate”, “warn”, “react”, etc, given to chemical reactions, and believe it’s sentience and shit.
Fr. Plants are as sentient as my phone. Right now it’s sending pain signals because it’s at 8% battery. Am I torturing it by not plugging it in?
Exactly this
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I mean there are arguments to make for sentience…
Not any sound ones
What?
There’s a difference between sentience and consciousness. There’s also the fact that there is no actual way to measure these concepts and say for a fact if something experienced one or not.
Plants have goal oriented behavior, plants have chemicals that respond to stimuli. Sentience is simply the basic ability to feel and experience. There are absolutely arguments to be made around that.
Most arguments against things being sentient or not is a lack of a neural structure. But that’s like saying things without mouths cannot eat. The limited human experience makes one both arrogant in assumptions and ignorant of other’s experiences because they can’t relate.
“Sentience” is just chemical reactions all the way down. There’s no reason to fully assert plants are not sentient. Especially when we can’t even define what makes something conscious or not.
Ok then. Tell me why you think a chatbot could be sentient then.
First, read and try to understand the definition of sentient:
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Capable of sensing or feeling, conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling
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Aware
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Finely sensitive in perception or feeling
(Clue: look up the definition for “inanimate”, and also for any words that you don’t understand from the previous definitions. Do this in the dictionary, not with an LLM)
I’m talking about plants.
Oh, well in that case I agree with you actually, my apologies.
I guess I’ve just gotten used to having to argue with people on here about whether or not their shitty software is sentient.
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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.
We know for a fact that humans think and feel, even if not on our level, and we still have no qualms about eating them.
That noise the human makes when you put them in boiling water is just air escaping.
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Some people do have qualms about eating them, though.
Tbf, it’s pretty hard to eat a gpu, and they’re really expensive to boot. I’d have qualms too in their position
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Right, I just brought it up because the people with moral objections to meat tend to ground them in the cruel treatment of animals. If you can be cruel to plants too then I don’t see a way out of making a moral compromise unless you just eat rocks (not the computer rocks though, too smart).
Yeah but you can’t be cruel to plants and even if you could, it takes way less plants eating them directly than filtering the nutrients through an actually sentient animal.
Yeah, what you just described is a moral compromise. “Eating the plants is cruel, but less cruel than letting more get eaten to feed animals to eat instead.”
I don’t think vegans argue that sentience is what makes it cruel, either. Otherwise they’d be fine with eating fish, bugs, and probably chickens. If plants are capable of suffering then that would probably be enough to at least make the argument about eating them being cruel. You’d basically have to follow the diet of the alien hive mind from Pluribus; foraging windfall, scavenging, and autocannibalism.
Are mixing up sentience and sapience? Fish and chickens are definitely sentient, e.g. they have a subjective experience of their existence. Bugs as well, I’d guess.
Maybe! I used sentience because you used it in your comment and can never keep the two straight. If sentience is a subjective experience then plants would have that by having feelings and intelligence, wouldn’t they?
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“how do you know YOU aren’t an LLM??? Hmmm???”
Sam Altman hasn’t tried to flip me over and steal ram from me.
Give him time.
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.
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.
In that case Pando might tickle your fancy.
-maxxing
Downvote for spelling.
it’s a meme suffix.
Spoken like someone who peaked in the 3rd grade spelling bee
Huh?
Everything has feelings and intelligence. Even you, dumbass ;)
is my table or phone capable of enjoying a movie and thinking about its themes
The way hollywood is going these days it just might be! :D
But why would a table think about those things? I sure don’t. It’d probably be more into like, bearing loads. I bet it likes when lots of people put full plates around its edge and doesn’t when you stand on the middle to change a light bulb
Me I’m more into alternative energy schemes
Panpychism in a nutshell
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.
Consciousness is just an elaborate markov chain… I cant even…
The earth is just a rock… there im smart
A living organism is a strange loop. Computer software isn’t. Just because you can describe both in probabilistic terms doesn’t mean they’re the same phenomenon.
