[ExI] Bringing new life to dead matter

[Kelly Anderson]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Will Steinberg
<steinberg.will at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kelly, I just think if you're willing to go as far as sea stars having
> *some* consciousness then I don't think it's so hard to give plants, say, a
> millionth of that.

Sea stars interact with each other, they fight, live, love (or at
least reproduce), and move. One could even call it dancing after a
form. No, I would not give a plant a millionth of that. Would you give
a rock a consciousness that was one millionth that of a plant? Where
does it stop? How much consciousness does a hydrogen atom have then?
Or a Quark? Is every subatomic particle in the universe conscious? If
so, then the word loses all meaning. You might as well use the word
"matter" as "consciousness"...

> If a brain is just the epitome of the entity-like
> organizational center, could not plants' simpler informational organization
> give them consciousness?

Not by any definition I can think of as being useful.

> Yes indeed the argument seems unwinnable for now.  And I will admit I have
> been blowing off nervous systems so far--they are definitely the centers of
> the most consciousness I have observed around be.  I only ask that, perhaps,
> in the life of a tree, a forest, of the genetic evolution of all plant life,
> or in the cyclical transcription needed to send to right signals to open and
> close the flower, the stoma...that perhaps somewhere in this great chorus,
> on some time scale, there is a brief blinking iotum of "perception."

Plants have no sense organs (maybe venus fly traps?) for the most
part... without sensory organs, without a nervous system, how would
you get perception? What is doing the perceiving? All chemicals work
with information, but informational processing doesn't equal
consciousness. Most people don't consider computers conscious (yet)
but they process way more information than a plant.

-Kelly