Plants, Cognition, Time (& Philosophy)

Abstract

When plants are viewed under various time and spatial scales, their behaviour can appear quite intelligent. This presentation simply aims at questioning some of the basic terminology used by Philosophers of Mind, and Cognitive Scientists. The goal of the presentation is not to answer the following questions, but to stimulate discussion and reflection. Can plants process information? Do they compute/calculate? Make decisions? Can plants think? Do they have goals, plans, intentions, memories? Can they know? Do they represent information? How? Do they attend, sense, perceive, feel? Can they be conscious? Can they learn? Anticipate? Can they communicate? Do they have free will? What do we mean by all the aforementioned terms, and how do we clarify them so that plants are once again relegated to simple stimulus-response systems? The parting thought is in showing that a trivial stimulus-response system is Turing Complete, so perhaps pointing to individual plant processes and showing that each one alone is a stimulus-response portion might miss the overall system-wide intelligence…