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Consciousness may not require a brain

Are plants conscious?

8th December 2022
| New York Times bestselling author of CONSCIOUS: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. She is an editor and consultant for science writers, specializing in neuroscience and physics, and her work has appeared in the New York Times.
2,656 words
Read time: approx. 13 mins

Our default intuition when it comes to consciousness is that humans and some other animals have it, whereas plants and trees don’t. But how sure can we be that plants aren’t conscious? And what if what we take to be behavior indicating consciousness can be replicated with no conscious agent involved? Annaka Harris invites us to consider the real possibility that our intuitions about consciousness might be mere illusions.

 

Our intuitions have been shaped by natural selection to quickly provide life-saving information, and these evolved intuitions can still serve us in modern life. For example, we have the ability to unconsciously perceive elements in our environment in threatening situations that in turn deliver an almost instantaneous assessment of danger — such as the intuition that we shouldn’t get into an elevator with someone, even though we can’t put our finger on why.

Annaka Harris
8th December 2022

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Alar Miler 29 June 2023

This information is very helpful for my work from my location, and I look forward to hearing more from you.

Chandala B'abalanga 16 December 2022

amazing article

Mike W 10 December 2022

Recent research from ElectroMagnetic (EM) Field Theory of Consciousness (FTOC) indicates that sensory experiences of consciousness (qualia) are generated when an advanced brain’s neurons interact with an omnipresent EM zero point field (ZPF). Synchronized electrical oscillations from the neurons resonate with attractor states in the ZPF. These resonances produce the qualia that we experience, including colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and even our conscious sense of self. According to this theory, the conscious qualia and feelings that we experience are not actually created by our brains. Rather, they are accessed by our brains from a pre-existing “library” of qualia and feelings that exist within the ZPF, and that are actualized as specific experiences in our minds, based on the orientations and frequencies of the neurons’ oscillations. So, for example, when we look at a blue sky, the blueness that we experience in our mind’s eye is one of the inherent properties of the ZPF, which is actualized in our mind as an experience of blueness, based on a specific orientation and frequency of the synchronized oscillations that correspond to ZPF “blue”.

Since plants don’t possess advanced brains that exhibit synchronized neuronal EM oscillations, then according to EM FTOC, the plants are not conscious, at least not in the way that consciousness is commonly defined.

(See Keppler (2021) - Building Blocks for the Development of a Self-Consistent Field Theory of Consciousness - NIH National Center for Biotechnical Information - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience)

Glenn Richmond 10 December 2022

Is consciousness categorical, you have it or you don’t, or is it a continuum? Some organism’s behavior is reflexive and some is operant. Does plant behavior have a similar differential?