On Plant Inelligence and/or Consciousness

C'mon: ya gotta admit it's weird AF

First off, you’re right: we can’t even agree on what human consciousness is. A guy in a vegetative state for 19 years suddenly wakes up and asks for a Pepsi¹; brain tissue grown from stem cells in a culture - brain “organoids” - might attain consciousness, some think; others demure. I’ll believe it when it can tell me what time the Giants game starts. (An organoid is an “it”, right? I don’t know how I’ll feel when it tells me to call it “Dave.” Or worse: “Mister Noid.”) But you know what will be interesting? Finding out the answer to this question: Which will happen first: Will a brain organoid convince an AI to kill itself, or will an AI go at some advanced organoid hammer and tongs? Or will both events happen roughly concurrently, like on a Wednesday night during Sweeps Week? Is Vegas taking bets yet?²

I’m not even sure where I “was” when I found myself downstairs in front of the fridge, eating a bowl of Fun Flaky Bliss Bombs, with milk. To be sure, I wasn’t “all there” - but was I conscious? Not in choosing to eat that crap. My gawd, I suspect a consortium of dentists got together - conspiracy! - and came up with those sugar bombs in order to juice their root canal rackets. And I know, this sounds like the typical Ambien joke. And yet I was not on Ambien. Why? Ya got any? Just one? Do me a solid…³ Then there were all those times you drove home from work and when you got home, you didn’t remember a thing about the commute. Consciousness? There must be a million flavors of it, many so subtle you don’t even notice ‘em.

There was a time when I was deep in the weeds in the various arguments about human consciousness. For me, when I took a step back and realized Philosophers, Anesthesiologists, Neuroscientists, Biologists, and yes, Physicists were all weighing in on what David Chalmers calls “The Hard Problem” and that no one was winning this game, no one seemed to be able to score, I realized this might be yet another “problem” we homo saps invent that is impossible for creatures embodied like us, in a gravity well on a planet in the Goldilocks Zone orbiting a Type G main-sequence star, to solve.

Some scientists and philosophers call this “Mysterianism”: maybe we can use the equations of quantum mechanics in all our hi-tech industry, but we can’t understand what the equations mean about how nature “really” works.⁴ And to combine the quantum world with Relativity? We’ve had 100 years of trying to solve this as of this year (2025)⁵ and everything has only gotten weirder and more inscrutable. So who’s going to pontificate about what is conscious and what isn’t? Lots of folks, turns out. Real smart ones, too.

I suspect we use our intuition and pick those series of stories that seem most plausible to us, and dig deep there. Until we hit a gas line or bedrock, whatever. Then veer off with a few other stories. I’m borderline Mysterian⁶ when it comes to the idea of consciousness, but I do favor certain lines of thought over others, and I can only cite something like “tentative intuitive plausibility.” I know it sounds rickety and stopped-up with debris, but it’s all I have.

All this goes for the origin of life (really cool set of stories there, ongoing, lots of smart folk working on it, rivalries and mudslinging, everything you can ask for as an Overweening Generalist); what happened before the Big Bang (same); what happens after death? (here I find the answers mostly hilarious); and why is there always room for Jell-O?

Finally! I get to:

Plants

A very basic, workable idea of “intelligence” (and maybe consciousness?) is the ability to decode and process energy and information from the environment and respond in ways that look adaptive and intentional. In this plants are looking like they’ve been overlooked by reductive science since the 1700s. If it turns out to be slam-dunk correct that trees, plants, bushes and all their cousins, were intelligent all along? Why it’s just damned embarrassing at the very least. On the other hand, with the way we’re heating up the planet, the plants may all just be muttering to each other that it’s only a matter of time before the Golden Age of Cretacious II and the mammal parasites are mulch.

You may have seen, or even read, a number of articles on the possibility of plant intelligence over the last 12 years or so. But this idea is an old one. There are the mystics and pantheists and animists, of course, but then the German physicist and early experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner (b.1801) thought plants were not only smart, but had inner lives as well. Admittedly, this was after he had a breakdown when, at a career point desperate for a gig, he took on the job of assembling and translating many thousands of pages of the 8-volume Hauslexikon, which was a sort of 19th century Ladies Home Journal. The tedium broke him. Then he stared at the sun, as an experiment and wrecked his eyes, then stayed inside in a dark room for four years, when he finally emerged and looked at his garden and it sounds a lot like Aldous Huxley on psychedelics in 1953, but it was 1843:

A beautiful glimpse beyond the boundary of human experience. Every flower shone towards me with a peculiar clarity, as if it were throwing its inner light outwards […] One must only open one’s eyes afresh to see nature, once stale, alive again.

Fechner answered naysayers. Aristotle thought plants were living things, but stupid, failed living things, dumber than animals because they can’t even walk around⁷ and get their own food. Fechner said plants simply move really slowly (a historical figure named - ahem! - Chuck Darwin thought similarly of plant locomotion), and that plants delight in the sun as we would during a gourmet meal. Because we can’t know the inner lives of each other, we must assume that when we gaze into each others’ eyes and see something like ourselves, that the other must indeed be like us, and this includes our experiences interacting with plants. People like Sam Altman apparently extend this mode of phenomenological existentialism to artificial “intelligence.” I know this sounds nutty, but hey, William James liked Fechner, too. As an undergrad taking a bunch of Psychology classes I put the finger on Fechner as one of the earliest lab psychologists, with Wundt and Helmholtz, and they were all wiggy German weirdos I would have loved to hang out with. The physics of the mind, was what they thought they were doing.

Later I read The Secret Life of Plants, by Tomkins and Bird (1973), which Michael Pollan called “a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream.”⁸ There’s a brief discussion about The Secret Life of Plants in The Madman’s Library: how a documentary was made about the book with Stevie Wonder writing the music, how one of the stars of the book, Cleve Backster, was invited on Johnny Carson and David Frost, and “All this, despite the fact that Backster’s research, and the book as a whole, were derided as pseudoscientific nonsense by the scientific community.”⁹

At the same time, in 2025, studies in Plant Behavior are advancing at a torrid pace.

Brief Disclaimer, in Brackets

[Despite my tone here, I have come around to plant intelligence, if not plant consciousness. The unevenness of this tone - flighty, devil-may-care, smart-assed cannabis-infused wiseacre combined with an attempt at High Seriousness about plant intel - only serves to highlight the pixillated quality of my current stance of Yep: Plants Are Intelligent and Possibly Communists To Boot assertions here. I spent most of my life with an ontology of Plants Are Dumb, and now every day I’m reconfiguring old brain circuits, deleting here, editing there, writing new code in my subcortices: plants communicate to each other, allocate resources to those in need, use strategies to combat predators, discern, are mostly ecumenical in plant terms, etc. It’s a bit overwhelming, frankly. Plants seem - and I can’t believe I’m typing this - wise. What do they do if they’re attacked?, you ask. Well, they release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) because they have stress-response genes: kinda like using pepper spray on an unwanted sexual advancer. But their plant neighbors are listening in on the commotion and preparing for a similar attack on themselves. Smart move, guys.

Possibly my biggest ethical quandary that has arose from my Shift: I still eat some of these intelligent beings, and so far I rationalize it as, somehow, That’s What They Want, which will never feel satisfactory, and, indeed, it’s a lot like “Look at what she was wearing. She was askin’ for it!” I realize I’ve skipped over the eating of animals, which I would rather not write about right now, ‘cuz of…cultural baggage. Any and all advice here about eating plants would be greatly appreciated.- OG]

Hyphae

In fungi and some bacteria, hyphae are long tendrils of filament. They are a collection of cells surrounded by a “septum”-like tube wall that is just porous enough to exchange mitochondria, ribosomes and nuclei. This, I found, mindblowing. Because I have studied - strictly as an OG, remember - tens of books on neural transmission in human brains. A collection of hyphae is called a mycelium, a word I find mellifluously pleasant. Mycelia use spores to reproduce. Spores give rise to fruiting bodies and eject themselves from these fruiting bodies (like a mushroom) and travel for many miles on air currents before landing and taking up residence elsewhere. They are “ramblin’” agents like it’s nobody’s business. ‘Tis a hot topic among paleontologists and plant geneticists whether they preceded land plants on this planet (Earth; Gaia) or not, but microscopic fossilized spores from embryophytes called cryptospores have been dated to the mid-Cambrian epoch, which was some time after the Big Bang and much before the Moslems were beaten back by Charles “The Hammer” Martel in current-day France, Battle of Tours, 732 CE.

Are spores really that badass, you ask? Well, radiotrophic fungal spores have grown inside the abandoned nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and use melanin to convert gamma radiation into chemical energy; other extremophiles can withstand pressures six times that experienced at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, some are totally fine living in temperatures near Absolute Zero (sans parka), and other extremophiles survive the vacuum of space, which has led to the theory of Panspermia: that life on Earth started elsewhere, which may be the ultimate cliff-hanger: okay…so where did that life start? Etc…So yes, Virginia, spores are badass. All the extremophiles must be given mad props by us homo saps, or I’ll just speak for myself: I complain it’s too cold when it gets below 55 degrees F; whine like a wuss when it tops 90F outside. Hat’s off to extremophiles everywhere! (And make no mistake: they are everywhere.)

Mycelia save our lives every moment of every day by decomposing plant material. So relax about raking the leaves: among us the fungus would break down, transform and re-purpose the leaves, though I can’t promise that busybody Mrs. Schwartz won’t complain to the Homeowner’s Association first. Life is complicated like that.

Oh yea, mycelia also make the soil more organic and release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere as part of the carbon cycle. They carry water, don’t chop wood as that would be a betrayal. They seem the nexus of electrical-chemical transactions of information, kinda like your how your nervous system is working right now as you read this puffball piece.

Hat’s off to hyphae, dendrites of the vegetable world.

Plant Philosophy

Sounds kinda absurd, but it’s burgeoning currently. Philosopher Stella Sandford of Kingston U. in London, who’s written a couple of books on plants and philosophy, writes:

The new plant philosophy has emerged partly in response to this work in the plant sciences, and especially to the new paradigm, because the series of concepts that mark out the new paradigm as new – agency, intention, consciousness, and so on – are already the topic of considerable and long-standing philosophical debate. As soon as attention is focused on plants, broader issues emerge. For it is not just that philosophy is interested in plants; we discover that plant life, or the specificity of plant being, challenges some of the cherished assumptions that have dominated the Western tradition for centuries, if not millennia. Plant philosophy is about more than plants. It is also about how the peculiarities of plant life challenge us to think about our own being in new ways.¹⁰

And boy is it a challenge for me. I mean, I’m easily in or approaching my dotage: am I ready to keep reconfiguring my thinking to deal with plants as intelligent? I’ve already gone over right wing attacks on this: it’s a conspiracy by radical environmentalists to try to keep us from the despoilment of the planet. I’ve looked at enough of the studies and evidence by now to see the (ironically) “conservative” attacks as childish. Big surprise!

It appears abundantly obvious that learning and responding to the environment doesn’t require neurons; neurons are how mammals like us do it; nature seems to have developed an array of ways to extract information from the environment and convert it into Intelligence.

How are you dealing with this rapid influx of data on how smart plants were and how for most of our lives we’ve treated them like, I dunno…Stephen King’s “Carrie”? If you’ve begun therapy, I understand.

Psychonauts Were of Course Avant Garde Here

Dennis McKenna, on what psychedelic plants can teach humans:

"They also teach us biophilia. Basically on a fundamental level you come out of a psychedelic experience with a feeling for the sacredness of all life and a love of life, and that's an important thing to integrate. They teach us animism: the perception that everything is alive and intelligent. And on the global level they teach us pantheism -- the notion that the universe itself, the world itself, is alive and intelligent. This is the worldview of most indigenous cultures that use psychedelics, and it becomes the worldview of individuals in our culture that use psychedelics."¹¹

In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning (2022), philosopher Justin Smith-Ruiu (formerly Justin EH Smith), who recently came out as a psychedelic user, and it turned him into a Catholic (!), argues for Internet within the context of Gaia, with many learned examples and it’s most definitely trippy.¹²

Matthew Hutson took LSD, then asked scientists about altered states and their power, then began to see trees as smart. He talked to naturalist Sy Montgomery, author of Soul of an Octopus, who had compared her scuba diving and octopus-research to LSD: “I find myself in an altered state of consciousness, where the focus, range, and clarity of perception are dramatically changed.” In an email Montgomery told Hutson that “the mental experience of one species is no more real or valuable than any other.” Hutson, an atheist since age 10, was backpacking in the Sierras when a tree seemed to want to commune with him. ¹³

Am I making this next one up as a psychonaut - am I pulling your leg? - or could it be real?: MIT scientists transformed the leaves of spinach into a bomb-detection device that can sense not only explosives but dangerous chemicals in the air, and thereby transmit the info to our digital phone? Sounds psychedelic! But it’s actually a thing. Prof Michael Strano, MIT chemical engineer: “We’re showing how we can get information from a plant’s root system into your cellphone.” The field is called Nanobionics. “The vision is to try to replace the electronic devices we mass produce with comparably functioning plants,” says Strano. The very idea makes me feel high.

Tom Robbins, in 1984:

Flowers do not see, hear, taste, or touch, but they react to light in a crucial manner, and they direct their lives and their environment through an orchestration of aroma. With an increased floral consciousness, humans will begin to make full use of their “light brain” and to make more refined and sophisticated use of their “smell brain.” […] We live now in an information technology. Flowers have always lived in an information technology. Flowers gather information all day. At night, they process it. This is called photosynthesis. As our neocortex comes into full use, we, too, will practice a kind of photosynthesis. As a matter of fact, we already do, but compared to the flowers our kind is primitive and limited. [..] Some people believe that we process information during dreams. Quite the contrary. A dream is the mind having fun when there is no processing to keep it busy. In the future, when we become more efficient at gathering quality information and when floral consciousness becomes dominant, we will probably sleep longer hours and dream hardly at all.¹⁴

Thomas Pynchon, in 1973:

Trees, now — Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. “That’s really insane.” He shakes his head. “There’s insanity in my family.” He looks up. The trees are still. They know he’s there.¹⁵

“Hemp Cannabinoids May Have Evolved to Deter Insect Pests,” says a 2023 study. I was aware of this idea in the 1970s, but now we have more data that cannabis plants may have developed THC and other similar molecules in order to protect themselves. Philosopher Dr. Sebastian Marincolo discusses human use of cannabis within the context of animal and plant intelligence and how Western thinkers have use the ontological categorization of intelligence to argue that the fundamental deadness of “reality” is “advanced” while those who had ascribed intelligence to plants and animals were just nutsy-cuckoo and “primitive.”¹⁶

Alan Watts, in 1972:

It escapes the notice of many well-educated people that the scientific establishment always runs the danger of becoming a rigidly authoritarian religion, a church excommunicating heretics such as Wilhelm Reich, Velikovsky, and Timothy Leary. In this church it is high dogma that anything outside the human skull is relatively stupid and unfeeling, and that animistic religions, such as Shinto, which attribute life and spirit to rocks and rivers, represent the lowest form of intellectual development. Meanwhile, such an imaginative enthusiast for science as Arthur Clarke speculates about vast electronic intelligences located in the galactic center. But the angels may be growing in your window boxes.¹⁷

Terence McKenna, in 1989:

The closer a human group is to the gnosis of the vegetable mind — the Gaian collectivity of human life — the closer their connection to the archetype of the Goddess and hence to the partnership style of social organization. The last time that the mainstream of Western thought was refreshed by the gnosis of the vegetable mind was at the close of the Hellenistic Era, before the Mystery religions were finally suppressed by enthusiastic Christian barbarians.¹⁸

Well..damn: Substack just alerted me that I have over 4000 words here, so I apologize for taking so much of your time. I will get to Robert Anton Wilson’s experiences with plant mysticism in a future article.

1. https://ground.news/article/arkansas-man-who-awoke-from-19-year-coma-in-2003-has-died-aged-57

2. My brain seems to be in a weird spot right now. Please stand by. I didn’t even address an advanced organoid having hallucinations like some AIs are already reported to have had. What if an organoid says it hallucinated but it turns out it - Dave - was lying all along? Can it still get a job on the writing staff for a situation comedy at Netflix? Science has so much to answer for! If this AI attacks a sufficiently sophisticated brain organoid at the same time an organoid successfully carries off a hit on an AI, I will give the Simulation Hypothesis a second thought. Hold me to it, folks!

3. It was probably a simple case of Somnambulistica Ceresiae, yet to become well-characterized in the literature. Or I was just smoking a ton of weed that night/early morning.

4. Just go ahead with all the Simulation Hypothesis stuff at this point. Have fun and see if I care. I don’t think we are in a Sim, but then of course I’d think that, given “all this.”

5. Wolfgang Pauli came up with the Exclusion Principle; Heisenberg got an epic amount of creative thinking done on Helgoland, trying to escape his hay fever; Heisenberg, Born and Jordan come up with Matrix Mechanics, another road to the summit that worked, where they found Schrödinger’s Wave Equation was already sitting, meditating. Schrödinger thought this up in 1925, didn’t publish until 1926. We still don’t really know what it all Means, but it works. Schrödinger wrote that the “sum total of all minds is one,” so let’s hold that thought for the discussion of plant intelligence? Imagine all these guys thought they’d figure all this GUT-stuff (Grand Unified Theory) out pretty quickly with one long neat equation that summed up all of physical reality, so I could carry it around on a piece of paper in my wallet. Did Not Happen. Looks like it won’t, either. The head of Physics at Caltech is a String Theory guy; Sean Carroll, who used to be at Caltech but is now at Johns Hopkins, is a Many-Worlds guy. I’m guessing it’s bad form to announce yourself as a Mysterian if you want to head up Physics at Caltech of Johns Hopkins. Not that I applied.

6. One of the coolest things about this highfalutin’ idea by eggheads is that it was taken from the 1960s rock band ? and the Mysterians, you know: they had a hit with “96 Tears”? Those of you under the age of 50 might not get this reference and I make no apologies. Suck it up and listen to Classic Oldies on Hot 97.7, your go-to oldies station for the entire Tri-State area.

7. Aye, plants are fixed in one place, or sessile, a perfectly cromulent word.

8. New Yorker, Dec 15, 2013: “The Intelligent Plant: Scientists Debate a New Way of Understanding Flora.” Link. Quotes from Fechner are from various English translations, and mostly from Nanna: On the Soul Life of Plants, for which his colleagues attacked Fechner mercilessly, but the German public kept it on the best-seller lists for decades. He opens his Foreword: “I confess that I have taken some hesitation in bringing up the very dreamy subject in the most peaceful natural area…” Dude had chutzpah! In The Secret Life of Plants, pp. 135-140 are devoted to Fechner, whose worldview anticipated Whitehead’s “process” reality, and Fechner should be considered a panpsychist.

9. The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities From History, by Edward Brooke-Hitching, p. 212 (2020)

10. Aeon, August 2nd, 2024, “Seeing Plants Anew.”

11. DMT Dialogues: Encounters With The Spirit Molecule (ed. Luke and Spowers), p.57

12. see esp. pp. 57-84; but also a must-read is pp.86-88, where Smith compares slime mold intelligence to two people sending emails. Also see Carl Zimmer, “Wired Bacteria Form Nature’s Power Grid: ‘We Have An Electric Planet,’”about how nature built an electrical grid for itself loooong before we humans even knew what bacteria or electricity was.

13. see Matthew Hutson, New Yorker, May 12th, 2022, “How I Started To See Trees As Smart.”

14. Jitterbug Perfume, pp. 323-324

15. Gravity’s Rainbow, pp.552-553 (It seems a fairly safe bet that the FBI questioned Pynchon when they were desperate to track down the Unabomber/Theodore Kaczynski. We know for a fact they questioned Tom Robbins, because he wrote about it: see Tibetan Peach Pie, pp. 291-294.) The FBI apparently questioned William T. Vollmann and considered him a suspect at one point.

16. The Art of the High, Marincolo, pp.16-31

(fictional footnotes and indexes)

17. In My Own Way: An Autobiography, Watts, 1972, p.327

18. The Archaic Revival, p.219