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Intelligence without neurons: a Turing Test for plants?

P. Nick

Published 2021 in Protoplasma

ABSTRACT

“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms ‘machine’ and ‘think’. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous”. With this proposal, Alan Turing (1950) moves into the question, whether intelligence is bound to neurons. It is remarkable that he begins his seminal work on that, what today is so readily (and inappropriately) called artificial intelligence, with a fundamental definition of terminology. He makes a very important point: the attitude to frame definitions on the “normal use of words”, i.e., to give a new and different meaning to terms that are in everyday use already, is “dangerous”. Indeed. A debate, where terms are ambiguous, will turn ambiguous. This primordial fallacy might contribute a big deal to the controversy about so-called plant consciousness. This debate is overlapping, but not identical to the controversy, whether plants can feel pain, which was thematised in the editorial to the preceding issue (Nick 2021) reflecting on the contributions by Robinson et al. (2021) and Baluška and Yokawa (2021). The question, whether plants can feel pain, and the question, whether plants are endowed with consciousness, seem to be of a similar logical structure. Plants are obviously quite different from us. Can we assume that consciousness, a phenomenon, which is even hard to interpret in ourselves, exists in plants, but in a form that is so different that we cannot easily recognise it as similar? Or does the fact that we cannot recognise this phenomenon in plants without inferring numerous auxiliary assumptions, not simply mean that this phenomenon does not have a counterpart in plants? Again, the old debate about homology versus convergence. To dissect this may be rewarding, irrespective of the outcome, because it brings clarity and advances our understanding of the world and of ourselves. However, the debate has suffered from terminological ambiguity from the very beginning—giving a good example for Turing’s dictum. Keeping this principal problem in mind, it is worth reading two contributions to the current issue addressing the topic of plant consciousness from two opposed viewpoints—Mallatt et al. (2021) take a clear stand against, while Trewavas (2021) is a proponent in favour of plant consciousness. In their contribution, Mallatt et al. (2021) work systematically through a list of twelve claims. Before doing so, they first try to define their object by drawing a line between something they call “higher consciousness” and “phenomenal” or “primary” consciousness. “Higher consciousness” describes a phenomenon characterised by traits linked with personality, such as the ability to reflect on experiences, recognise the own self in a mirror, or ponder a thought. They concede that also their opponents do not claim that plants are endowed with higher consciousness (which seems to be linked with language). This is not the debate—the debate is about presence of “primary consciousness”, which describes that a living being has “a first-person point of view”. The authors break this relatively vague definition down into two operational criteria. There is a mental representation of the sensed world, and there is affective judgement of situations as “good” or “bad”. They quote then, interestingly, a definition from their opponent, defining primary consciousness “as the capacities to be aware of the environment and to integrate sensory information for purposeful organismal behavior” (Trewavas et al. 2020), and they agree with this definition, specifying that aware is transcending the realm of mere mechanistic responses to a stimulus and that purpose is transcending evolutionary adaptation in the sense that it is a kind of individual volition. Having defined what they mean by consciousness, they are setting forth to “debunk” that primary consciousness exists in plants. Rather than listing these twelve arguments individually, I will try to group them into logical units:

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