"Can We Speak of 'Plant Intelligence'?Greta wrote: ↑May 6th, 2018, 5:12 pmI'm inclined to side with Tamminem regarding plant intelligence - especially after watching much high speed footage. Conscious processing operates at different tempos, and when an organism's tempo of thought is slow enough, it will appear to be mentally inert to any organism with much faster operations. By the same token, small enough organisms appear to be invisible to the naked eye.
Some of the more complex motile microbes display at least as sophisticated behaviour as some simple brained organisms, so it appears that organisms can have structures that are analogous to nervous systems.
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[W]hat is intelligence? Because this concept is so broad and difficult to circumscribe, naturally there are many different definitions (the drollest being that 'There seem to be almost as many definitions of 'intelligence' as there [are] experts asked to define it', from psychologist Robert Sternberg). So our first task is to choose the definition that fits our situation. For plants we could use a rather broad definition: 'Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.' There certainly are others that might work perfectly well, but let's stick with this one."
(Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Translated by Joan Benham. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015. p. 126)
Plants are intelligent in the sense of being able to solve biological problems (of survival, nutrition, reproduction), but my point is that plant intelligence ≠ plant consciousness/experience, because there can be intelligent behaviour without consciousness/experience.
The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology defines "intelligence" as "cognitive ability", "cognitive" as "of, relating to, or involving cognition", and "cognition" as "the mental activities involved in acquiring and processing information". What exactly makes an activity or ability a mental one is a contentious issue; but even if "mental" or "cognitive" abilities and activities (defined in purely functional-informational terms) can meaningfully and truly be ascribed to plants too, this in no way means that they are subjects of consciousness/experience—that there is something it is like to be a plant from a subjective point of view. "Plant cognition" or "plant intelligence" is different from plant consciousness, which doesn't exist. The two former terms refer to nothing but purely physiological (chemical, electrical) information processes in plants. However sophisticated these may be, plants are nonconscious biomachines or biorobots.