[t-writescode]

I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.

It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).

  All humans are human.
  Babies can feel pain.
  Plants feel.
  Animals think.

Just … So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.

I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.

[chickensong]

> It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.

It's pretty easy to see that most things above plankton aren't rote automatons. Anyone claiming otherwise just has an agenda to sell.

[adjejmxbdjdn]

I don’t believe there’s any evidence behind plant’s feeling or thinking.

Other than that you’re right.

[why_at]

Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.

[SapporoChris]

What the average person thinks is a very low barrier but I do not think plants have crossed that yet.

[t-writescode]

Some variety of learnings over the last several years. Many of them are sensationalized; but my simple statement was "plants feel"; and many of these values imply some level of "feeling":

Plants scream when harmed:

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-lou...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stressed-plants-c...

Plants release VOCs when harmed:

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lzg4x9/...

(OP's main comment has several sources)

Plants respond to audio stimuli (hearing, sorta):

[3] https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=24-P13-00035&s...

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4102826/

A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"

[glenstein]

I think this is a huge error which collapses the most urgently important distinction at the heart of the entire issue. Plants do complex, interesting things, and we borrow from an already existing vocabulary to make analogies. So people will say plants "feel" or "communicate" or "see".

But those are automatic biological reflexes, and using words with connotations to conscious awareness to describe them makes people think they're the same thing. But a plant "feeling pain" is repurposing words about consciousness to mean new and different things. And I think people are seduced by it because it feels like being open-minded to new possibilities.

[t-writescode]

I think that there was a relatively recent panic to stop anthropomorphizing the rest of creation and that that rebellion against anthropomorphism clings so hard to "that's not how humans do it and stop thinking it is" that we commit the sin in the opposite direction - and declare everything as "definitely not a lived experience of another being" and "just rote programming" too early.

[Modified3019]

Science if finally catching up to Werner Herzog

>Of course there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.

But seriously, the articles you posted are inappropriately repurposing words normally associated with conscious experience, in order to get attention.

There is lots of evidence plants react to stimuli. There is no evidence they feel.

[Exoristos]

There's no reason to think that birds and trees don't routinely exuberate with joy, since cooperating with our needs in needful proportion brings us humans exuberance.

[forlorn_mammoth]

fortunately, there is a lot of evidence behind plant's feeling and thinking; enough so that if you were to expose yourself to it, and if you were willing to update your beliefs based on strong scientific evidence, I believe you'd change your view.

[glenstein]

There's evidence for stunningly intricate, marvelously impressive biological function, but there's no evidence whatsoever for internal mental states.

What's happening is we borrow from a pre-existing vocabulary with connotations to conscious activity and we use it to describe automatic biological reflexes, and then some people lose track of whether it was an analogy or whether it was literal and start claiming plants can "feel."

[t-writescode]

It's funny you bring up "have no mental state", because there is a plant that scientists find seems to have some sort of memory:

https://www.sci.news/biology/science-mimosa-plants-memory-01...

> The scientists show how Mimosa plants stopped closing their leaves when they learnt that the repeated disturbance had no real damaging consequence.

...

> Astonishingly, Mimosa can display the learned response even when left undisturbed in a more favorable environment for a month.

[mcswell]

11 distinct calls is something a rote automaton could easily cope with. So I don't think this study proves much of anything about birds' cognitive abilities.