[HN Gopher] Plants monitor the integrity of their barrier by sen...
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       Plants monitor the integrity of their barrier by sensing gas
       diffusion
        
       Author : Bluestein
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2025-07-05 13:18 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | spacephysics wrote:
       | At what point will we see that plants are conscious, just in a
       | different manner than animals colloquially?
        
         | bullfightonmars wrote:
         | Stimulus-response is not consciousness. There is nothing
         | subjective about this mechanical and chemical response to
         | injury.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | Science hasn't really understood consciousness.
           | 
           | If you don't understand consciousness, how to make it from
           | first principles and how it works, then I don't think you can
           | confidently say "this isn't conscious" about much.
        
             | hombre_fatal wrote:
             | We can explain plant behavior through known physical
             | processes though.
             | 
             | We don't need to lean on consciousness nor other mysteries
             | at all. Nor we do have to when a rock changes color as it
             | gets wet.
             | 
             | And without this parsimony, then we could claim that any
             | unexplained mystery underlies any well-understood
             | phenomenon which doesn't sound like much of an epistemic
             | standard.
        
               | Etheryte wrote:
               | You could just as well make the same argument about human
               | behavior in a broad perspective. Not understanding every
               | minute interaction in our brain is a fairly secondary
               | point when the overarching themes are all the same.
        
               | treve wrote:
               | Even if there's no hard measurable rule on the limits of
               | what we consider consciousness, that doesn't mean that
               | definition includes anything that exhibits chemical
               | reactions.
               | 
               | Ultimately it's a bit of an inprecise human concept. The
               | boundaries of what fits in there might be somewhat
               | unclear, but we definitely things that intuitively are
               | (humans) and aren't (plants, rocks) in this set. Plants
               | don't think.
        
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