Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates

Abstract

Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of ‘plant neurobiology’ describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocentric moral extensionist framework requiring plants to anthropomorphically meet animal standards to be deserving of moral respect. I argue this strategy is misguided because moral extensionism is an erroneous ontological foundation for ethics.

Understanding interdisciplinary perspectives of plant intelligence: Is it a matter of science, language, or subjectivity?

“…The scientific paradigm of plant intelligence can benefit from the integration of ethno- and other social sciences, because of their relationship with multiple worldviews. The concept of plant intelligence has been mentioned in various socially oriented disciplines, e.g., philosophy [ 7 , 91 , 92 ], ethnobotany [ 93 ], and anthropology [ 94 , 95 ]. Meanwhile, to our knowledge, only a few literature references in the biological sciences incorporate the ontological features of plant intelligence (e.g., [ 96 , 97 ]).…”

Plantness, Animalness, and Humanness: plant placement within animacy and adjacent scales

“…Biology should exist outside of the human understanding, organized by genetic relatedness, evolutionary processes, chemical composition, and functional or ecological roles, independent of human observation and naming (Contini et al., 2020; Marder, 2012; Wehrle, 2020). However, these biological concepts are named and framed by human understanding, and although biological categories appear as universal truths, these are dependent on the definition of the category or attribute, and organisms are too varied and complex for an easy definition (Arber, 1950; Hendlin, 2022; Sattler, 1986). Importantly, animate and inanimate categories are not generally used or useful in biological descriptions, so a reliance on biology to clearly describe this dichotomy is hopeful at best and misguided at worst (Sattler, 1986).…”

“…The question and argument of whether plants exhibit intelligence is based on the definitions and lines that separate these distinctions (Linson & Calvo, 2020), especially when anthropocentric and animal‐specific terms are employed such as neurobiology (Hendlin, 2022). In the definition wherein intentionality needs consciousness (Searle, 1979), and plants lack consciousness (Taiz et al., 2019), plants lack intentionality, but both plants and even many so‐called lower animals are complex autonomous creatures.…”

Sensitive Souls and Biosemiotic Agency as Emergence

“…Invertebrate swarms may have in aggregate more intelligence than some mammals (Mikhalevich & Powell, 2020). It is also likely that certain plants may have more semiotic agency and complexity than some animals -but that we are biased in our designation of the capacities of plants (Hendlin, 2021). But again, to make such zero-sum comparisons already accepts (incorrectly) that consciousness is a single metric -or set complex of metrics -which is invariant and exhaustively discovered.…”