5 ms·

Do Plants Think?

68 points by rosser 14y ago

greenyoda 14y ago
It's an interesting article, but the title is a bit misleading. The article is mostly about how plants react to various sensory stimuli.
- olalonde 14y ago
  "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
  - jlarocco 14y ago
    Don't take this personally, but can people please stop mentioning "Betteridge's Law"? Somebody mentions it every single time a headline ends in a question mark, and it's not witty, clever, or funny any more. It's just annoying at this point. That style of headline isn't going away, and at this point everybody knows about "Betteridge's Law".
    - gpvos 14y ago
      Actually, I didn't, and I found the comment entertaining. But I can see how it gets annoying after a few times.
    - jarek 14y ago
      For those of us without flag powers, mentioning the adage is the most we can do about titles like these on HN. Of course I could just stop reading the HN front page, but that seems a rather null solution.
      - anigbrowl 14y ago
        Leave better comments, then flag with abandon.
        jarek 14y ago
        I did both of these. This resulted in the "flag" links disappearing.
        anigbrowl 14y ago
        Well, you've got me there. I flag frequently, like maybe 5-10 a day on average but sometimes 20+. Maybe there's another karma threshold or something I don't know about.
      - wccrawford 14y ago
        I've got flag powers, but I've basically given up. People have decided to upvote things that aren't relevant to this site, and by the time I see them, it's too late. And reading the 'new' feed is even more discouraging. I can't deal with the constant flood of garbage that obviously wasn't interesting or relevant, just to find a few tiny morsels.
        tptacek 14y ago
        Don't give up! Flag, and comment (briefly) about why. It's been my experience that lots of storied that I believed were long past flaggable (80-90 upvotes) have been killed sometime after I flagged them. Even if your flag doesn't kill the story, the conversation about why you flagged it will be valuable --- at the very least, more valuable than the off-topic story.
- rosser 14y ago
  Admittedly, "think" is perhaps an inapt word choice, but how is response to stimuli not, in some fashion, awareness?
  - derleth 14y ago
    > Admittedly, "think" is perhaps an inapt word choice, but how is response to stimuli not, in some fashion, awareness? Sure, it can be, if you're willing to admit that computers respond to stimuli.
  - greenyoda 14y ago
    Think of the "knee-jerk" reflex you get when the doctor hits you on the knee. It's a response to a stimulus, but it happens without even any involvement from your brain: it's just a round trip to the spinal cord.[1] I don't think that's what we usually think of as "awareness", which happens at the cognitive level. Reflexes like eye-blinking are even operational when you're unconscious. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_reflex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_reflex
  - saraid216 14y ago
    Right. Questions like this are stupid because they're not asking a usable question. The best response to the headline is really, "Define a thought." This is difficult in humans, never mind anything else. If you choose to define thoughts as stimuli-response, then you're classifying our entire system of instinctive responses as thoughts, which is practically a brain bypass. (The literal knee-jerk reaction.)
Falling3 14y ago
As a vegetarian, I constantly have to suffer through idiotic arguments based on headlines like this. I know this happens in all areas of life, but this is definitely the one to which I am exposed most often and it drives me absolutely nuts. Journalists, please stop giving people ammo for their stupid guns.
- whichdan 14y ago
  Strangely, I've never had anyone argue this to me, but I do get asked, several times per year, if I eat seafood.
  - aristus 14y ago
    In many languages, "meat" roughly equates to "red meat". Fish and fowl are considered different categories. I believe this came about because of a Catholic church ruling that fish did not count against the promise to give up meat during Lent. It also lead to silliness like classing the chigüire / capybara, basically a large swamp-dwelling gerbil, as a fish.
    - joeyo 14y ago
      Not just the capybara, but beavers and muskrats too! It actually makes some sense when you consider that Thomas Aquinas' Aristotelianist classification of animals more to do with habitat as anatomy.
  - jaylevitt 14y ago
    My usual answer: "Only Broccoli Fish." When they ask what a Broccoli Fish is, I explain patiently that there's no such thing.
  - derleth 14y ago
    > if I eat seafood Do you kill invasive insects? Frankly, a shrimp or a lobster is pretty much on a level with a cockroach, when you get down to neural complexity and everything relevant to moral vegetarianism, as opposed to vegetarianism for health reasons. Bony fish are not much more complex. Things like sea cucumber don't even have brains: They have nerves, but they lack any centralized structure for them to converge on. Same with jellyfish. So I suppose my point is that it isn't a dumb question, at least if you're a vegetarian for moral reasons related to killing a living being with emotions.
tathagatadg 14y ago
I particularly enjoyed the memory part - where they mention a venus fly trap remembers the contact with one leg of the insect then confirms that another leg has touched, and then the trap closes. Then 15-20 mins later it'd open again. This eliminates false positives, conserves energy! while(1): if (get_count_contact()!=2) continue; else close_trap(); sleep(15); set_count_contact(0); If nature wrote this kinda code, Evolution is like debugging! But this is really really oversimplified ...
pygy_ 14y ago
One of the most amazing feat of plants regarding information processing is the way the leaves optimize the gas exchange process. They do this by opening and closing small gates known as stomata [0]. Each stoma integrate their local state with the current atmospheric conditions and the state of their neighbors, behaving as the cells of a cellular automaton [1]. Plant leaves literally compute. -- [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/101/4/918.full http://www.pnas.org/content/101/4/918.full
maeon3 14y ago
If Aliens visit us, they will likely classify us as "Non thinking creatures", just as we classify plants as non thinking. Everything rests on a spectrum and trying to classify everything into bins as "thinking" or "non thinking" is a childish way to go about explaining how the world works. If you generate a 200 hz signal around the root systems of cabbage, the roots will grow toward the source. The plants can generate that signal as well, so yes, certain plants communicate with a very rudimentary audio communication system. Do plants think? It depends on your definition, but yes, Plants think, computers think, humans think. A better word might be "plants calculate the best course of action to achieve a goal just like humans do.".
- derleth 14y ago
  > If Aliens visit us, they will likely classify us as "Non thinking creatures" No. Obviously not. We obviously manipulate our environment in complex ways. > "plants calculate the best course of action to achieve a goal just like humans do.". If you truly believed this you could never justify eating them.
fallous 14y ago
I think (no pun intended) that plants and some other species that lack central brains operate more like BEAM robots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics in that the behaviors they exhibit can be remarkably similar to intentional behavior. If you believe that a Turing test is sufficient to judge an AI as "intelligent" then in the same way you'd have to conclude that the behavior is the measure, which seems to disallow certain assumptions regarding intent. Then again, given the recent research into how the gut flora can affect all manner of processes in humans, it certainly looks like Me(tm) is a product of a whole host of complex systems whose interactions display an emergent "intentional" system.

68 points by rosser 14y ago

It's an interesting article, but the title is a bit misleading. The article is mostly about how plants react to various sensory stimuli.

olalonde 14y ago
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
- jlarocco 14y ago
  Don't take this personally, but can people please stop mentioning "Betteridge's Law"? Somebody mentions it every single time a headline ends in a question mark, and it's not witty, clever, or funny any more. It's just annoying at this point. That style of headline isn't going away, and at this point everybody knows about "Betteridge's Law".
  - gpvos 14y ago
    Actually, I didn't, and I found the comment entertaining. But I can see how it gets annoying after a few times.
  - jarek 14y ago
    For those of us without flag powers, mentioning the adage is the most we can do about titles like these on HN. Of course I could just stop reading the HN front page, but that seems a rather null solution.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      Leave better comments, then flag with abandon.
      - jarek 14y ago
        I did both of these. This resulted in the "flag" links disappearing.
        anigbrowl 14y ago
        Well, you've got me there. I flag frequently, like maybe 5-10 a day on average but sometimes 20+. Maybe there's another karma threshold or something I don't know about.
    - wccrawford 14y ago
      I've got flag powers, but I've basically given up. People have decided to upvote things that aren't relevant to this site, and by the time I see them, it's too late. And reading the 'new' feed is even more discouraging. I can't deal with the constant flood of garbage that obviously wasn't interesting or relevant, just to find a few tiny morsels.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        Don't give up! Flag, and comment (briefly) about why. It's been my experience that lots of storied that I believed were long past flaggable (80-90 upvotes) have been killed sometime after I flagged them. Even if your flag doesn't kill the story, the conversation about why you flagged it will be valuable --- at the very least, more valuable than the off-topic story.
rosser 14y ago
Admittedly, "think" is perhaps an inapt word choice, but how is response to stimuli not, in some fashion, awareness?
- derleth 14y ago
  > Admittedly, "think" is perhaps an inapt word choice, but how is response to stimuli not, in some fashion, awareness? Sure, it can be, if you're willing to admit that computers respond to stimuli.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  Think of the "knee-jerk" reflex you get when the doctor hits you on the knee. It's a response to a stimulus, but it happens without even any involvement from your brain: it's just a round trip to the spinal cord.[1] I don't think that's what we usually think of as "awareness", which happens at the cognitive level. Reflexes like eye-blinking are even operational when you're unconscious. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_reflex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_reflex
- saraid216 14y ago
  Right. Questions like this are stupid because they're not asking a usable question. The best response to the headline is really, "Define a thought." This is difficult in humans, never mind anything else. If you choose to define thoughts as stimuli-response, then you're classifying our entire system of instinctive responses as thoughts, which is practically a brain bypass. (The literal knee-jerk reaction.)

Falling3 14y ago

As a vegetarian, I constantly have to suffer through idiotic arguments based on headlines like this. I know this happens in all areas of life, but this is definitely the one to which I am exposed most often and it drives me absolutely nuts. Journalists, please stop giving people ammo for their stupid guns.

whichdan 14y ago
Strangely, I've never had anyone argue this to me, but I do get asked, several times per year, if I eat seafood.
- aristus 14y ago
  In many languages, "meat" roughly equates to "red meat". Fish and fowl are considered different categories. I believe this came about because of a Catholic church ruling that fish did not count against the promise to give up meat during Lent. It also lead to silliness like classing the chigüire / capybara, basically a large swamp-dwelling gerbil, as a fish.
  - joeyo 14y ago
    Not just the capybara, but beavers and muskrats too! It actually makes some sense when you consider that Thomas Aquinas' Aristotelianist classification of animals more to do with habitat as anatomy.
- jaylevitt 14y ago
  My usual answer: "Only Broccoli Fish." When they ask what a Broccoli Fish is, I explain patiently that there's no such thing.
- derleth 14y ago
  > if I eat seafood Do you kill invasive insects? Frankly, a shrimp or a lobster is pretty much on a level with a cockroach, when you get down to neural complexity and everything relevant to moral vegetarianism, as opposed to vegetarianism for health reasons. Bony fish are not much more complex. Things like sea cucumber don't even have brains: They have nerves, but they lack any centralized structure for them to converge on. Same with jellyfish. So I suppose my point is that it isn't a dumb question, at least if you're a vegetarian for moral reasons related to killing a living being with emotions.

tathagatadg 14y ago

I particularly enjoyed the memory part - where they mention a venus fly trap remembers the contact with one leg of the insect then confirms that another leg has touched, and then the trap closes. Then 15-20 mins later it'd open again. This eliminates false positives, conserves energy! while(1): if (get_count_contact()!=2) continue; else close_trap(); sleep(15); set_count_contact(0); If nature wrote this kinda code, Evolution is like debugging! But this is really really oversimplified ...

pygy_ 14y ago

One of the most amazing feat of plants regarding information processing is the way the leaves optimize the gas exchange process. They do this by opening and closing small gates known as stomata [0]. Each stoma integrate their local state with the current atmospheric conditions and the state of their neighbors, behaving as the cells of a cellular automaton [1]. Plant leaves literally compute. -- [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/101/4/918.full http://www.pnas.org/content/101/4/918.full

maeon3 14y ago

If Aliens visit us, they will likely classify us as "Non thinking creatures", just as we classify plants as non thinking. Everything rests on a spectrum and trying to classify everything into bins as "thinking" or "non thinking" is a childish way to go about explaining how the world works. If you generate a 200 hz signal around the root systems of cabbage, the roots will grow toward the source. The plants can generate that signal as well, so yes, certain plants communicate with a very rudimentary audio communication system. Do plants think? It depends on your definition, but yes, Plants think, computers think, humans think. A better word might be "plants calculate the best course of action to achieve a goal just like humans do.".

derleth 14y ago
> If Aliens visit us, they will likely classify us as "Non thinking creatures" No. Obviously not. We obviously manipulate our environment in complex ways. > "plants calculate the best course of action to achieve a goal just like humans do.". If you truly believed this you could never justify eating them.

fallous 14y ago

I think (no pun intended) that plants and some other species that lack central brains operate more like BEAM robots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics in that the behaviors they exhibit can be remarkably similar to intentional behavior. If you believe that a Turing test is sufficient to judge an AI as "intelligent" then in the same way you'd have to conclude that the behavior is the measure, which seems to disallow certain assumptions regarding intent. Then again, given the recent research into how the gut flora can affect all manner of processes in humans, it certainly looks like Me(tm) is a product of a whole host of complex systems whose interactions display an emergent "intentional" system.