The Thinking Plant's Man (2025)

https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-thinking-plants-man/

by benbreen • 3 months ago

59 19 3 months ago

“Bose’s experiments impressed luminaries including Albert Einstein and Lord Kelvin, but the conclusions he drew put him at odds with many leading botanists, who saw a dangerous blending of science with spirituality—and insufficient evidence to support his claims that plants were capable of intelligent behavior, learning, and memory.”

Kind of incredible how nothing has really changed since then. Discussions of plant consciousness are nearly always dominated by very loud self-proclaimed skeptics - more of a social identity than an intellectual one at this point. They are strict materialists to a fault - any theory that appears to threaten materialism is dismissed. Even if it doesn’t actually threaten “materialism” but rather expands the set of objects considered “material” or in this case “thinking” (which is too dangerous for them to consider because “thinking” quickly bleeds into “conscious”). It’s telling that Einstein and Kelvin were impressed by his work, but these days any self proclaimed skeptic can just dismiss these ideas out of hand.

This is demonstrated clearly later on:

“Among these contemporaries, there was little room for what Bose himself described as “the inherent bent of the Indian mind towards mysticism and unchecked imagination.””

This is not only racist but also demonstrates the exact skeptic bent I just described. By lumping in a new science grounded in physiology with “mysticism” they are poisoning the well very insidiously.

I guess science has probably always been like this. Peoples entire careers become dependent on the flimsy theories of today so anything unorthodox is automatically threatening to them. For what it’s worth I’m not saying skepticism isn’t warranted especially for new claims but it seems to me that Bose was treated very unfairly, and I suspect that his theories would’ve held up well if his field had expanded over the last hundred years. I also think we’ll see some studies soon that absolutely blow the lid off this stuff and Bose will be remembered as a Galileo type figure of his field.

vixen99• 3 months ago

Racist? No! Perhaps other definitions will differ but here are two at random: 'A person who believes a particular race is superior to others OR a person with A prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others'. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=racist+definition&atb=v475-1&ia=we... (Wiktionary) and 'Having, reflecting, or fostering the belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race' (Merriam Webster) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racist. I read nothing of that in the statement by the Indian, Bose, to suggest that. It just a different mindset. I do agree with you regarding the hold that orthodoxy has on a number of areas of research. We should periodically check that it doesn’t neglect significant evidence pointing in another direction.

In a ResearchGate pdf, we read 'In India, where spirituality and mysticism are deeply ingrained in cultural practices, investigating parapsychological phenomena can provide significant insights into human consciousness.' Nothing racist, just one of the fascinating welcome differences of focus on the part of who happen to live in a different general cultural milieu from the West. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399124147_Mysticism...

therobots9272• 3 months ago

Ok fine call it western chauvinism. Same thing.

audreyfei• 3 months ago

thanks for posting this- really interesting to read! also I agree with the your point on racism. Anything termed "unchecked" tends to stem from stereotypes- either about age, race, or socioeconomic status etc. Allegedly, America is a meritocracy but funnily enough some ideas are labeled as just coming from an "Indian" as you noted. In regards to your last paragraph, Nietzsche's Daybreak featured "The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly."

sweetheart• 3 months ago

So, so much of human history is just us trying and failing to find reasons we're unique, as if uniqueness is somehow the source of value, meaning, or joy in life. We really seem to react strongly against the widening of our consideration for the experience of non-human life (or human life, if it looks just a little different).

croes• 3 months ago

Isn’t racism similar? The attempt to prove that people of a certain skin color have unique capabilities? The fear of extinction of a skin color.

Redheads are in much greater danger by that logic.

why_at• 3 months ago

Discussions of plant consciousness are nearly always dominated by very loud self-proclaimed skeptics

I have to say I have had the opposite experience. Ever since "The Secret Life of Plants" the average person is much more open to the idea that plants have some kind of conscious experience than is warranted by our current understanding of them. Myths about plants growing better when exposed to classical music etc. are still around thanks to this book and will seemingly never die.

Pop science journalists are eager to report any new finding on some physiological capability of a plant as the plant "thinking", "feeling", or they invoke the classic Betteridge's law of headlines: "Are plants conscious?" In almost every case the original author of the scientific piece never described it as such.

culi2• 3 months ago

Late succession trees that lives hundreds of year have shown a lot of complex and interesting behaviors. They are able to identify offspring and send specific nutrients through the mycorrhizal network, coordinate with other trees to fight off pests, and potentially even coordinate evapotranspiration to modify weather.

One of the most interesting adaptations I've been learning about is the various adaptations that these trees and their lianas have to lightning strikes. For us they seem like rare one-off events but if you are a stationary being that lives hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, lightning strikes might be the primary driver of disturbance.

Some organisms think on really long time scales and it's hard for us to appreciate their "intelligence". If AGI does ever come around, I wonder if hyper-intelligent fast-thinking robots will one day look at humans and go "wait, there's actually a lot of intelligent behavior in these creatures that we didn't notice because they think on much different timescales"

leodavi• 3 months ago

I want more of this. Trees using coordinated cell transpiration to control the weather is so fictional but so possible. It's the kind of thing that makes Earth so cool. What do you read? Anything digestible to a curious layman with ~20 minute reading sessions on the train rides?

KingFelix• 3 months ago

I can't speak to this exact scenario, but also fascinated by time scale / thinking / I am reading Greg Bears Eon at the moment. Super interesting ideas on space/time travel, not exactly related but enjoying it so thought I would share!

culi2• 3 months ago

Oof that's hard to answer. I edit Wikipedia pages of botany-related topics so I'm usually reading stuff that's NOT 20-minute bites. I also have a particular interest in parts of nature that break the, imo, false dichotomy between "abiotic" and "biotic" (incl. aeroplankton, mycorrhizal fungal networks, aeonophiles, niche construction, soil ecological succession, etc)

Actually recently I've mostly been listening to lectures by some scientists I follow:

Evan Gora at the Cary Institute does research on big trees in tropical rainforests and recently published some fascinating work on tree adaptations to lightning strikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjGFWDSXtJk or https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KjGFWDSXtJk

I'm also a big fan of Suzanne Simard's research on "mother trees". She wrote a book I've yet to read called Finding the Mother Tree that also has an audiobook available. But she also regularly does talks

A book that kicked off the popular interest in mycorrhizae is The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben which is also quite digestible. RadioLab also had a great episode about it https://radiolab.org/podcast/from-tree-to-shining-tree

And here are some of my favorite publication that sometimes cover these topics:

Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org/forests-emerge-as-a-major-ove...

Noema https://www.noemamag.com/the-intelligent-forest/

Aeon https://aeon.co/essays/what-constitutes-an-individual-organi...

Emergence Magazine https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-o...

Nautilus https://nautil.us/this-cloud-forest-should-not-exist-1226267

euroderf• 2 months ago

"wait, there's actually a lot of intelligent behavior in these creatures that we didn't notice because they think on much different timescales"

I've read that rocks are alive and quite possibly sentient. Although their life spans are.. geological.

treis• 3 months ago

If this piques anyone's fancy the Overstory by Richard Powers won the Pullitzer and is about trees communicating (and a bunch of other stuff).

rf152• 3 months ago

While the observations are measurable correct, are we not antropomorphosising a bit too much here?

SamBam• 3 months ago

That debate is 90% of the article.

rf152• 3 months ago

I mean, even the debate still goes down that path on both sides. What even.

niam• 3 months ago

At some point the metaphor becomes an encumbrance, rather than something helpful

Well put.

Pop science is what it is, but I'm bewildered when the rhetoric around plants "screaming in pain" weasels its way into my conversations. Then it's a game of understanding whether my correspondent sees it as a funny way of straining language, or whether they think it's close to the truth.

The Thinking Plant's Man (2025)

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