Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked

[cwmoore]

It seems to me that AI is more plant than animal, and the specific biological response mechanisms that plants use have explanatory power toward understanding and communicating about AI in a more productive way than the popular conception of GAI as sentient.

[groestl]

As our testing procedures improve, we find out more and more about the cognitive abilities of animals, and have since found self-awareness in chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, magpies, and recently, through sniff tests, dogs. I find it not far fetched that at some point, we start to recognize (some) plants as sentinent beings, maybe on a different timescale than us. Would be interesting to know why you think they are so different from animals that they are better models for AI?

[WaltPurvis]

Interesting... Care to elaborate?

[trendoid]

Really? Considering AI has (or will soon have) the best "brain" when it comes to adapting its default heuristics based on new information, plants don't seem to fit the right explanatory model.

I would like to know in what way you think they are a better model than animals.

[Aardwolf]

So the signal passes from the attacked leave to other leaves, what do the other leaves do with this information though? What can they defend against?

[cwmoore]

They can produce noxious chemicals or retrieve resources from threatened parts among other responses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_defense_against_herbivor...

[yosito]

I highly recommend that anyone concerned about causing suffering to plants by eating them read about Kirtimukha. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtimukha

[techbio]

I was unfamiliar with this. Great story. I appreciated the inclusion in the article of the related myth of Ouruboros.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

[aldoushuxley001]

I read about Kirtimukha, but what does that have to do with concern over causing plants suffering by eating them?

[kregasaurusrex]

I never realized that the chemical signals could travel so quickly through a plant, and previously thought this process took hours instead of a few minutes. While we as humans feel almost instantaneous pain, there's a short delay before the spike in calcium ions are then propagated to the rest of the plant's structure. Will be interesting to see how the related knowledge we can learn from simpler eukaryotes could eventually be expanded to include all sorts of more complex ones.

[spraak]

Some people love to use this information as a fallacious argument of futility against veganism, i.e. that suffering cannot be avoided because "plants suffer too!". But this misses the point. Plants can respond to stimuli, but it doesn't mean that they feel pain, suffer and have a consciousness and emotions like animals do.

> Plants have no eyes, no ears, no mouth and no hands. They do not have a brain or a nervous system.

That again, they respond to stimuli but don't feel pain like an animal.

[marcv81]

"That again, they respond to stimuli but don't feel pain like an animal."

I don't feel this is a valid argument. We only really know how pain feels to us, but we can guess it also applies to other humans, animals, etc. That we cannot imagine how it feels to respond to negative stimuli as a plant should not invalidate the possibility that it is unpleasant.

[lizknope]

In Jainism some of the more strict followers do not eat root vegetables (like potatoes) because it is considered violence against plants. If you eat an apple you are not killing the plant and actually helping it to spread its seeds. If you dig up root vegetables you most likely end up killing the plant.

Mushrooms and other fungi are considered violence against plants as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

[AndrewKemendo]

You're shifting the burden of culpability to a specific and more concrete definition of "pain" and "suffering" than our current science recognizes.

The neuroscience of pain and suffering isn't binary and is extremely complicated and multi-variate [1].

For example in humans, nociceptors [2] – tissue sensing nerve cells – respond to damaging or potentially damaging stimuli by sending “possible threat” signals to the spinal cord and the brain. This is interpreted on a spectrum of what we interpret semantically as "pain." What is shown in the videos of the plants, is effectively no different than the nociception process in humans, which could safely be classified as "pain."

If you want to define a distinguishing point for pain/suffering differently, that's fine, but it wouldn't have much basis scientifically.

[1] http://clbb.mgh.harvard.edu/pain/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociceptor

[thraxil]

It's also a moot argument because animals that are raised for meat... eat plants. Lots of plants. Meat is incredibly inefficient in that sense. Most farmland in the US is for animal feed.

So if someone really is worried that plants feel pain and wants to reduce the amount of plants being killed, the most effective thing they could do would be to stop eating meat.

[cko]

Ok. What about: sea sponges, starfish, jellyfish, and octopi? (If you’re drawing a seemingly arbitrary line at “has brain / nervous system => able to feel suffering”)

Which signalling molecules would qualify?

[hw]

There are some people who don't feel pain (congenital insensitivity to pain). If there was a way to raise animals such that they lack the ability to feel pain and emotions, would it be acceptable to vegans to then consume animals?

[hirundo]

Plants struggle to survive and reproduce as animals do, with different strategies adapted to their circumstances. Pain is just a specific mechanism toward that end, as is sentience. Why should we privilege those mechanisms when deciding which organisms are worthy of our concern? It's as if birds decided that flight is the key feature important to determining interspecies concern. Chauvinism based on anthropoid characteristics is still chauvinism.

[cwmoore]

What does veganism have to do with HN or the article? This seems like basically a political discussion hijacking a science post.

[mirko22]

In my view, what’s futile about it is the fact that for many veganism has to do with moral choice against animal suffering but gets conflated with “living healthy”.

Skin of an apple that you buy in standard shop is anything but healthy due to the amount of chemicals applied to it. Even the home grown plants can be treated in a way that is unhealthy.

And thirdly, things like avocado plantations are anything but environment friendly.

[bromuro]

I’ve grow plants the whole life and I’m pretty sure they feel pain. I know that, you start observing them and you understand with time their emotions. Pain is the easiest to spot. We don’t need to wait the scientists answer about that.

[13415]

If vegans were serious about stopping suffering, they'd create a machine that instantly destroys earth.

Edit: While I'm perfectly fine with being downvoted for this and understand why - this was meant as a joke, and you shouldn't joke on HN - I need to point out that this Doomsday Machine Argument is a standard argument against Negative Utilitarianism, which was first published by R.N. Smart, and anyone with a negative utilitarian doctrine (incl. many vegans) needs to address this argument.