by ReasonablyDoubtful » Wed Feb 06, 2013 6:25 am
First: Five pages of arguing about plants, intelligence, and various other things. My OP is a success!
Second: I'm just going to make a couple points here. Not really going to bother with the rest of it because I just don't feel like it.
GUTCHUCKER wrote:I'd have to say that any meaningful intelligence (which anyone would give a fuck about) is something where the organism remembers, considers, uses it, makes mistakes, makes actions which do not benefit or detriment it, and profits from it in some form. Plants have not been observed doing any of that.
Actually, pea plants at the very least have been observed remembering and using information they remember to benefit them. "Dancing" plants also have the ability to dance
better as they get more practice.
GUTCHUCKER wrote:I know that many plants can survive after their 'brain' (let's call thousands of possible-root-processors a brain, which is also stupid enough to force me to commit suicide) is removed, and regrow it. That makes me not give a shit how much it has suffered, or what kind of thought process (for nonsapients, lit.: complex reactions to sensory input) it uses.
Except it all boils down to how you define death. If I was able to keep your body functional after chopping off your head, would you really still consider yourself to be alive? Of course not. Everything that you were, everything that you knew, would all be gone. The same holds true with plants. When they cut off the root cap, it causes serious changes to how the plant's roots grow. It's like cutting out the part of your body that deals with controlling your right hand.
Furthermore, we have to consider this from an evolutionary point of view. If there were women that were willing to have sex with headless men, wouldn't it be evolutionarily beneficial for a man without a head to still be able to function? Well, turn that up to 11 with plants. Even if their functions are all impaired, they don't really have any memory, they can't grow roots properly, communicate, anything like that, they can still potentially reproduce. In other words, the reproductive and energy-producing parts of a plant just... giving up after the "brain" dies? That's kind of stupid (from an evolutionary point of view).
First: Five pages of arguing about plants, intelligence, and various other things. My OP is a success!
Second: I'm just going to make a couple points here. Not really going to bother with the rest of it because I just don't feel like it.
[quote="GUTCHUCKER"]I'd have to say that any meaningful intelligence (which anyone would give a fuck about) is something where the organism remembers, considers, uses it, makes mistakes, makes actions which do not benefit or detriment it, and profits from it in some form. Plants have not been observed doing any of that.[/quote]
Actually, pea plants at the very least have been observed remembering and using information they remember to benefit them. "Dancing" plants also have the ability to dance [i]better[/i] as they get more practice.
[quote="GUTCHUCKER"]I know that many plants can survive after their 'brain' (let's call thousands of possible-root-processors a brain, which is also stupid enough to force me to commit suicide) is removed, and regrow it. That makes me not give a shit how much it has suffered, or what kind of thought process (for nonsapients, lit.: complex reactions to sensory input) it uses.[/quote]
Except it all boils down to how you define death. If I was able to keep your body functional after chopping off your head, would you really still consider yourself to be alive? Of course not. Everything that you were, everything that you knew, would all be gone. The same holds true with plants. When they cut off the root cap, it causes serious changes to how the plant's roots grow. It's like cutting out the part of your body that deals with controlling your right hand.
Furthermore, we have to consider this from an evolutionary point of view. If there were women that were willing to have sex with headless men, wouldn't it be evolutionarily beneficial for a man without a head to still be able to function? Well, turn that up to 11 with plants. Even if their functions are all impaired, they don't really have any memory, they can't grow roots properly, communicate, anything like that, they can still potentially reproduce. In other words, the reproductive and energy-producing parts of a plant just... giving up after the "brain" dies? That's kind of stupid (from an evolutionary point of view).