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  • Damaged plants can send out signals to other plants, and chemicals to repel what is damaging them (to the specific area where the damage is being done) and repair their damage.

    Could you please explain how this can be distinguished from wound healing in a human. Like what chemicals are sent out? what is the mechanism? are they transported anywhere in particular? are different signals collated in determining a response or does the same hormone guarantee the same response in a dose dependent manner?

    Some plants will avoid growing towards areas that they have been unable to thrive in before.

    This is surprising to me, is it distinct from following chemical gradients? I have never seen this, or heard about it. The closest I would say I have ever seen is not growing towards salt or dry soil. What is the evidence here please as I don't know what you're talking about. Is there a memory effect? if a grass doesn't grow south and you put it in a new area will it also not grow south?

    You still seem to be talking about things from a purely human perspective. Dogs will damage their feet and not even let you know sometimes.

    I'm really not, I had a whole thing about memory and will to live and avoiding areas where I specifically spoke about rats.

    Whether or not you notice it (and it's true that many animals will try to hide injuries, humans included) doesn't mean there is no modifications to behaviour. E.g. licking, protecting the area (less weight on paw, lifiting it up etc), reacting to the same stimulus more negatively such as not eating or growling etc when being touched.

    You literally said she stopped using it. Aka she felt pain. Ever eaten after a dentist when your mouth is still numb? you will straight up bite off chunks of your lips and keep eating. If there was no pain she would keep trying to use it and probably just be confused when it didn't work. Which btw is how she'll behave if you anaesthetise her!

    Also if you've ever noticed her behaviour after removing say a piece of gravel from between the pads in her feet you'll probably notice despite no damage the first step or two will be tentative. She's anticipating pain, again behaviour modification.

    Plants just don't do anything like this.

    • You are asking me to sum up the entire science of plant cognition in such a brief window that I might as well have Wikipedia do it for me.

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

      • No I'm not, I'm asking why you specifically believe those things to be comparable.

        What specific knowledge do you have which prompts these apparently very deeply held and unusual beliefs?

        • Specific knowledge? My whole point here is that there isn't enough knowledge. Why do I need specific knowledge to say "this field is changing by the day and we keep learning plants are able to do all sorts of things we thought you needed a nervous system for, so it is not inconceivable that plants feel pain?"

          You do know that I have never made the claim that plants definitely do feel pain, right? I never even claimed that they feel pain the same way an animal does. I even suggested that what they would feel could be described as pain even though it wasn't the sort of thing we would anthropogenically think of as pain because we do not have good definitions for the concept of pain or the concept of suffering.

          I'm not sure why I need to repeat myself like this when I made all of this clear in my initial post.

          • Ok, and I opened by acknowledging the hard problem of consciousness but you never actually said that you disagreed with my assertion that my amputated hand doesn't feel pain.

            Do you think my amputated hand feels pain? It would seem that you would have just as much (more maybe! given electric shocks or heat to the fingertips will make it recoil) evidence for it feeling pain as grass. And that all your arguments about grass signalling also apply to my amputated hand.

            If you don't think my amputated hand feels pain (or could be considered at least as likely as grass to) why don't you?

            • I wasn't suggesting a leaf feels pain or that it would be the leaf that would have some definition of pain and suffering if it were ripped from the stem. It would be the rest of the plant.

              So why are you bringing up a part that, when separated from the whole, no longer has that capacity in any living thing?

              • wait what? that's an extremely unusual stance!

                What do you mean separated from the whole? all the non hand parts of me are also no longer whole but I am willing to believe amputees, even multiple amputees, even people who have lost the majority of their body can feel pain if their brain is alive and mostly intact.

                This is consistent with my belief that pain experiencing happens in a centralised mass of nervous tissue we call a brain.

                If you don't think centralised masses of nervous tissue are needed to experience pain (required for plants to, given that no brain is something we can prove) what do you think is? Why would a patch of grass have that thing but not a blade of grass (grass lacks localised organs afterall) or my hand?

                • Until you stop insisting that an amputated hand is equivalent to an entire plant, this is a ridiculous discussion.

                  Plants are alive. Amputated hands are not. Those are facts you can't seem to accept.

                  • We appear to be imagining different scenarios. Imagine it is freshly amputated and is still alive, or that we amputate it and hook it up to an artificial circulatory system, or indeed my circulatory system but at a distance so nothing else is connected (curious if you think the pain chance changes in that situation).

                    I'm sorry, I could have been more explicit. It seemed obvious to me discussing a dead hand was silly but being the internet it's worth clarifying these things.

                    • Imagine it is freshly amputated and is still alive,

                      Why should I imagine it when that's not reality?

                      or that we amputate it and hook it up to an artificial circulatory system, or indeed my circulatory system but at a distance so nothing else is connected (curious if you think the pain chance changes in that situation).

                      Where it would be no more "alive" than Henrietta Lacks' eternal cell line. If you have to keep it from decomposing by artificial means, it's not alive like a plant is alive. This should be obvious to you.

                      Find a better analogy.

                      • it's not an analogy it's a thought experiment. I am trying to understand the shape of your ideas.

                        So the ability to feel pain is harmed by cybernetics? division from a whole (still no idea what you mean specifically there in the absence of localised organs)? and if you're going to die in about an hour?

      • Also we need to distinguish responding to the environment and even making decisions from experiencing pain.

        I can make a robot from Lego that follows a line pretty well but I think we're all pretty comfortable with the idea it is vanishingly unlikely to feel pain (although there are people who feel punishment machine learning schemes are unethical lol).

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