s a minimal 'cognitive' perception of the world by lower organisms possible? The aim of this paper is to evaluate the ability of plant kingdom to treat information without nervous system. On the basis of experimental results on plant bioelectrical potentials and on the analysis of extended cognitive levels defined in the emergent plant neurobiology paradigm, these organisms are considered: (1) as possessing dynamic integrated perceptive systems close to those of animals, (2) as self-organized entities with protoneural abilities and (3) as expressing primitive generic processes which have nonlinearly conducted to complex brain networks. This approach permits a new bottom-up investigation of plastic interfaces, particularly at the level of perceptive and knowledge accumulating systems. Providing the great value of early sensory processing in plants is accepted, the only way to progress would be to read the emergent behaviors of complex informational systems co-creating the world through a transdisciplinary framework.
Taking as a basis of discussion Kalanchoe's spontaneous and evoked extracellular activities recorded at the whole plant level, we put the challenging questions: do these low-voltage variations, together with endocellular events, reflect integrative properties and complex behavior in plants? Does it reflect common perceptive systems in animal and plant species? Is the ability of plants to treat short-term variations and information transfer without nervous system relevant? Is a protoneural construction of the world by lower organisms possible? More generally, the aim of this paper is to reevaluate the probably underestimated role of plant surface potentials in the plant relation life, carefully comparing the biogenesis of both animal and plant organisms in the era of plant neurobiology. Knowing that surface potentials participate at least to morphogenesis, cell to cell coupling, long distance transmission and transduction of stimuli, some hypothesis are given indicating that plants have to be studied as environmental biosensors and non linear dynamic systems able to detect transitional states between perception and response to stimuli. This study is conducted in the frame of the "plasticity paradigm," which gives a theoretical model of evolutionary processes and suggests some hypothesis about the nature of complexity, information and behavior.
The concept of plasticity provides a unifying hypothesis to account for the natural properties of living systems as well as the different levels of perception and information associated with these systems. Are the metadynamics of evolutionary processes able to describe the nature of consciousness as a whole? The close study of the link between the coherence of emerging objects and the way we think they appear allows us to use the metaphor of a discontinuous bridge linking primitive perceptions to consciousness just as brain plasticity is linked to art.
The plasticity of living systems acts at several levels of evolutionary biology including self-organization, phenotypic, phylo-, onto-and epigenetic processes, while mesology is an approach situated in between ecology and phenomenology. After a description of the specific objects of plasticity and mesology as non-dualist studies of the dynamical coupling between beings and their singular milieu, we will develop some arguments regarding the perception-action loop and the sensory flux of informations crossing the evolution of the living, before focusing on recent discoveries about plant electrome. Using for the first time mesological plasticity as a frame to reanalyze the Uexcküll's assertions about Umwelt and meaning-making theories of plants, this chapter shows the leading rule of electromic interfaces in the generation of spontaneous low-voltage variations continuously emitted by plants via electrophytographic or EPG recordings. Used as early markers, EPGs are considered in this framework as natural systems of monitoring and discrimination of environmental stimuli that allow the identification of the electromic signature of a plant-stimulus pair in a given milieu.More generally, we will develop the trajections associated with complex behaviours of plants: a bottom-up transdisciplinary view of co-evolutionary or ecosemiotic processes highlighting their specific sensitive fields and cognitive accesses to experience (their otherness) as well as new phenomenologies about interactive ecosystems and phytosemiotics.
Recent studies on plant-environment and plant-human relationships reveal the need to reassess thescales of perception, sensitiveness and cognition of living systems. The complexity of plant's emergingbehaviors in interaction with the environment is supported by the signature of the electrome and theplant sensorium, a strong argument to establish the singularity of the living and weights its consequencesin evolutionary, ecological or socioeconomic terms. This paper highlights the cognitive value of access tothe experience of plants and its fundamentally mesological or ecoplastic nature, that is to say in directconnection with a singular milieu. This dynamic coupling makes it possible to explain the co-construction ofan intelligible and sensible world without the use of a brain, principle that reframes the concept of intelligentbehavior while revealing both the frontiers in cognition and the strong transdisciplinary challenges of anacute awareness of the man's fragility as of the planetary ecosystem at the era of the Antropocene.
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