Conversations on Plant Sensing: Notes from the field

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2022

Scientists are oft trained to think that "feeling" is not simply irrelevant but antithetical to their methodologies. That scientists are not simply objectively trained minds but also bodies that feel has been an important feminist contribution towards reimagining scientific knowledge-not as the product of self-directed teleological discovery, but as situated in time, place, and transformed through relations that oft exceed the binary logics of scientific representation; those founded upon rationalist distinctions between feeling/knowing, body/mind, object/subject. Through a collaborative methodological lens we (ethnographer + scientist) are calling radicle empiricism, we ask how a scientist comes to make sense of feeling and knowing-and the relations "between"-throughout shifting configurations of a pea plant decisionmaking apparatus. By focusing this study at the level of the apparatus (Barad, 2007), we provide an empirically based description-not a proposed model or theory-of some of the material-discursive relations through which the concepts of "feeling" and "knowing" are (re)configured through a scientist's unexpected encounters with pea plant root tips or radicles. As such, we offer a perspective that does not assume "feeling" or "knowing" as distinct categories of a scientist's knowledge making endeavors, nor as categories of experience that function

Protoplasma

Claims that plants have conscious experiences have increased in recent years and have received wide coverage, from the popular media to scientific journals. Such claims are misleading and have the potential to misdirect funding and governmental policy decisions. After defining basic, primary consciousness, we provide new arguments against 12 core claims made by the proponents of plant consciousness. Three important new conclusions of our study are (1) plants have not been shown to perform the proactive, anticipatory behaviors associated with consciousness, but only to sense and follow stimulus trails reactively; (2) electrophysiological signaling in plants serves immediate physiological functions rather than integrative-information processing as in nervous systems of animals, giving no indication of plant consciousness; (3) the controversial claim of classical Pavlovian learning in plants, even if correct, is irrelevant because this type of learning does not require consciousness. F...

Animal Sentience: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling, 2022

In our target article (Segundo-Ortin & Calvo 2023), we proposed the intriguing possibility of plant sentience, drawing parallels with non-human animal studies. This response aims to sift through the rich thicket of perspectives offered by our commentators. To do so, we assess the risks of employing double standards, as well as the tendencies of anthropomorphizing and zoomorphizing in plant studies. We also emphasize the need for clarity in linguistic and conceptual terms, examine the neurophysiological evidence for plant sentience, and discuss the ethical implications of such recognition.

Plants are often seen as passive beings, devoid of consciousness and agency. However, recent scientific and philosophical studies have shown that plants have complex networks of interactions and can react actively to their environment. In this context, plant philosophy asks questions that radically change our view of nature: Are plants really unconscious, or is our definition of consciousness limited? Or do plants represent a way of being that our human and animal-centered world has forgotten? With Prof. Stella Sandford, we explore the ontology of plants, consciousness and the possibilities of a deeper connection with nature.

E-flux journal , 2019

Choice Reviews Online, 2001

"The awareness and responsiveness of plants lives in these pages and is highlighted in our chosen excerpts. The book teaches us more, that animals also have many of our senses, or much better, and we recommend it to you in full. Here is a taste of excerpts from Chapter 5, Plants Have Sense, pages 185-241. Plants are bursting with movement. They are rich in sensation, and respond to the stimulation of the Surrounding world every moment of their active lives. They can send messages to one another about overcrowding or a threatened attack by a new pest. Within each plant there is ceaseless activity as purposive as that in an animal. Many of them share hormones that are remarkably similar to our own. Their senses are sophisticated: some can detect the lightest touch (better than the sensitivity of the human fingertips), and they all have a sense of vision.

ATLAS Publishing, USA, 2021

CHAPTER 14 (DEBONO M.W.) Recent studies on plant-environment and plant-human relationships reveal the need to reassess the scales of perception, sensitiveness and cognition of living systems. The complexity of plant’s emerging behaviors in interaction with the environment is supported by the signature of the electrome and the plant sensorium, a strong argument to establish the singularity of the living and weights its consequences in evolutionary, ecological or socioeconomic terms. This paper highlights the cognitive value of access to the experience of plants and its fundamentally mesological or ecoplastic nature, that is to say in direct connection with a singular milieu. This dynamic coupling makes it possible to explain the co-construction of an intelligible and sensible world without the use of a brain, principle that reframes the concept of intelligent behavior while revealing both the frontiers in cognition and the strong transdisciplinary challenges of an acute awareness of the man’s fragility as of the planetary ecosystem at the era of the Antropocene. Keywords: Plant behavior, environment, electrome signature, sensitiveness, mesological plasticity

2012

Current knowledge suggests that the mechanisms by which plants communicate information take numerous forms. Previous studies have focussed their attention on communication via chemicals, contact and light; other methods of interaction between plants have remained speculative. In this study we tested the ability of young chilli plants to sense their neighbours and identify their relatives using alternative mechanism (s) to recognised plant communication pathways.

Animal Sentience, 2023

The term sentience tends to be associated with affective valence along with affectively neutral sensory states. In the absence of evidence for affectively laden states in plants, the use of the term sentience in the exploration of plant sensory and behavioral complexity is misleading and ethically problematic for its potential to trivialize animal sentience.

Why Look at Plants? , 2019

"Plant fixity, perceived passivity, and resilient silence have relegated the vegetal world to the cultural background of human civilization. This book argues that the recent emergence of plants in the gallery space constitutes a wake-up-call to reappraise our relationship with plants at a time of deep ecological crisis. 'Why Look at Plants?' challenges readers’ pre-established notions through a diverse gathering of insights, stories, experiences, perspectives, and arguments encompassing multiple disciplines, media, and methodologies". https://brill.com/view/title/33086