Daniel Chamovitz - Are Plants Sentient?
32,191
Published 2024-06-10
To inquire whether plants are “sentient” sounds like pseudoscience but has become real science. What does a plant know? Plants can react to their environments, but can plants sense or feel? Can they remember long-term? Can they adapt and learn? Are plants intelligent? And are they in any sense aware?
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Daniel Chamovitz is an American-born plant geneticist and the 7th President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel.
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All Comments (21)
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The plants in the background are like “crap…they’re onto us”
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As a kid in michigan, i was addicted to the woods. I had to be out in the pines every day. Id wake up early, get my shoes on and run out there, i just loved it. But one day while out in a nice spot i was just overcome with awe at how beautiful it was out there. I sat down and rested my back against a tall pine, and just looked around in amazement. In that silence i realized i was actually feeling an intense "hum." It literally felt like the trees were emitting a powerful low hum, and it felt so good. I sat there aware of it and said to myself, "This is what perfect feels like." 30 yrs ago and ive never forgotten it. Ive since concluded that the trees were speaking to me, embracing me, filling me with something that they were emitting. Sounds kooky, but im convinced there's something to it.
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I've spent many years in the garden and I earnestly believe that plants have personalities. They are more attuned and responsive to their environment than most people.
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I hope Chamovitz really meant that he didn't mind stepping on grass or plants when it was a matter of course or simply necessary. I would hope that most people would avoid crushing any life form if it is a simple thing to avoid it and definitely not find satisfaction in the destruction. One of the factors in childhood development that leads toward bullying and aggression in adulthood is a lack of wonder and empathy toward nature which really should be nurtured by parents and society.
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I have a bog garden of carnivorous plants. The Fly Traps not only sense for more than one hair touched, they will open the trap again if no movement is detected inside the trap. They also detect the sun location and orient the blooms is that direction. (Yes, the bloom just like other plants.) BTW: Excellent video!
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The invasive vines in my yard "know" how to piss me off.
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Life on Earth, Truely Amazing.
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The problem is projecting human concepts of sense (of taste, smell, sight) and the human concept of information processing (mental activity) onto other species rather than the other way around. As covered at around 2:15 there are other ways of biologically responding to environmental inputs without mental processing. Only a small part of human reactions or pro-actions involve any real mental processing. That may say something about our understanding of what mental processing even is —> it may just be evolutionary developed interacting-with-the-environment mechanisms
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All life has a mind, I simply cannot fathom how it could be any other way. If you 'know' something, your mind is telling you that you 'know' that particular thing. I think as a human species, we seriously need to disassociate the 'mind' with 'brain'.
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The entire world is memory itself. Only the gifted observe and develop.
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Anything that can feel is conscious and has a soul
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Fascinating, thanks guys!
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I'm skeptical...
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Plants have the ability to react to an outside stimulus, such as responding with a chemical defense when they are being eaten by insects. However, even a brain dead human will respond in the same way, in that the body will exhibit a chemical defense when doctors try to harvest the organs for donation. However, without a functioning brain, there is no pain or consciousness present. The same is most likely true in the case of plants.
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So that's why kids don't want to eat vegetables.
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Mowing the lawn just becomes a green-bath.
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A plant that “knows” but can’t run away is useless…! Also “Knowing” is different from “Reacting to a feed-back-mechanism”…..
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8:14 I love your channel and your audience, I'm gonna comment on ALL your videos for years until I reach your level of subscribers.
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The plants are more hearing than you understand. Look at the hairs all over, it’s not just like hairs on our arm, same as hairs in our ears. The signal is transferred once the vibration is felt. Hearing is just feeling, same with light, feeling the changes and measuring the distance and seeing the relative.
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Very good interview.. "Sentience" is not an overly vague word like the word "consciousness" certainly is, but AWARENESS is more precise.. Yes indeed, plants have an obvious awareness of their environment.. One opinion.
