• ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    They have the knowledge and are doing something about it. If other plants can send out this chemical by observing it themselves, that sounds like a reaction from a communication. It may not be cognition like we expect but it is behaving like cognition would. Hard to argue that plants don’t know or care of their friends start dying.

      • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I don’t care what a plant thinks of me; it won’t change the dynamic that I’m motivated and it’s prey.

        My point is that plants “think” but do so differently than meat bags. Plant cognition is more like a series of low level chemical reactions that look like thinking, but so does brain chemical squirts if we look close enough. So plants may actually be thinking using mechanisms which don’t rely on complex brain architecture because it has another method of processing that thought. Probably across the whole structure but the process is really inefficient so it takes a long time to finish compute.

        Like if a super computer made the judgement of a calculator - they are both crunching numbers but there is an order of magnitude difference in how fast the answer is found. Maybe a plant has low bus speeds and crappy compute limited to simple threaded operations.

    • kshade@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I’d argue that knowledge is more than that, otherwise books or state machines could also be said to know things.

      • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        The plants are acquiring information and making an independent change to their status with this information. Books do nothing with knowledge other than communicate it to others. Machines are unable to make independent changes to itself unless programmed to do so.