Are trees sentient beings?

Are trees sentient beings?

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tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.4161/psb.27886
bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet
blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/dying-trees-can-send-food-to-neighbors-of-different-species/
rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/14/131/20170096
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Spiritually yes, scientifically no

Is there an inverse relationship between spirituality and intelligence?

If religiosity is a proxy for spirituality and IQ is a proxy for intelligence, then yes.

Define sentient. They probably do have some kind of consciousness, considering that anesthesia does work on them. However, trees probably have completely different kind of cognition and the framework of sentience.

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.4161/psb.27886

No nervous system. This answers your question.

Yes
Actually every atom is sentient
Conciousness is an intrinsic property of matter
The complexity of the conciousness is determined by the harmony of their arrangement

maybe. If they did their experience of time would be far slower than our own. Think reverse dog years. In which case most trees die at a relative very young or immature age.

t. Tree

trees have DNA just like humans

yes
bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet
blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/dying-trees-can-send-food-to-neighbors-of-different-species/

I wish I could shitpost on plant Veeky Forums

quite chill

*More Wis means less Int because based meta God*

go to How many times must I tell you that science is provable theories and /x/ is unproven conspiracy theories

But user, ruculla loves Mozzart, my mother saw it on Reader's digest

could be, personally I think so

kekkers

I can't die before seeing someone unironically using Reader's Digest as source in a scientific paper.

like

Not likely.

Evolutionarily, there's no clear advantage to developing sentience in autotrophs that don't really move, depend on strategy to survive, etc.
Consequently, sentience wouldn't spread into the population because natural selection wouldn't favor sentience over non sentience. Since true sentience develops over a VERY long series of trail-and-error as it did in primates (sentience is a process, not a single mutation), it's not likely to have developed in a species in which it doesn't provide a leg up.

tl;dr no

>using Popper's argument and disconsidering the history and the eternal debate of epistemology
>>>reddit

I think it's likely. They communicate using the same neurotransmitters that humans do, notably serotonin in some cases. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out being the case that forests are their own distributed sentient entities.

Consciousness is one of those things that Veeky Forums dismisses as being pseudo-scientific for some reason despite it being plainly observable to all of us in the same way gravity is.

It also may be a matter of time horizon. We experience time at the rate we do because of our metabolisms, which is measurable through our flicker flash rate. For instance, whales experience time slower than we do because they have large distributed metabolisms that are relatively slower. Flies experience time much faster than us and see the incoming fly swatter as moving slowly relative to how fast us humans see it moving, because we're much bigger and slower than them. This isn't a meme, it's repeatable science. Research flicker flash rate

I'd say forests are likely distributed conscious entities with very low flicker flash rates, and that this helps show that consciousness isn't an "on or off" phenomena but rather a spectrum that emerges from computational processes

fell for the evolutionary purpose meme.
sentience begins at the most basic stages of life, not a higher-awareness but still sentient.

I disagree. I think there has to be some level of complex decision making process going on for there to be sentience. My reason being that the whole reason we feel things is because the brain is interpreting chemical signals in order to make decisions and process thoughts. In a plant without a central brain there is nothing there to "receive" feelings and make a decision, things just happen autonomously without a need for "processing".

As sentient as animals.

No, they are plants. They don't have nerves.

rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/14/131/20170096

They might have an analogous one.

there is though, just not higher-order thinking such as reasoning. the decision making taking place even just at the cellular level is extremely complex, and still uses feedback loops and the like, just like in the brain. there are probably many of the same logical operators. so plants are not self-aware, but there is a sentience within, the fact that information is able to be processed in any constructive way is evidence of a sentience at the very origins of life.
>Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively.
plants can feel, taste, signal, sense the weather and respond, sense seasons, adapt, sense predators & evolve . I would say that's sentience!
i would love to experience their sense of time.
the plant is receiving, at all parts, creating an emergent response, and receiving its own self measurements. the happening is the processing. its not just chemical or lock and key responses there are the evaluation loops and other logic functions being carried out on the "live data" at all times. the decision making is built in. like a computational simulation; its not tangible but exists as logic. its like intelligence is a quality of the universe :)

Something like Eiwa would be.

>most of Veeky Forums doesn't know what sentience means

Yes. Sentience is an emergent property of all biological systems.

>existence
..metaphysically...the world is alive.

if it is emergent and not innate, how do things organise in the seemingly intelligent ways that they do?

but a tree just reacts autonomously to the same stimuli in the same way, right? Trees can produce chemicals to respond to predators, but they don't have to weigh other factors at the same time. Everything is just pure action and response like a reflex.

Whereas something like a dog might receive signals for hunger and danger at the same time and have to calculate which to respond to (search for food or hide?) by analyzing its environment and the strength of the feelings it's receiving.

Unless a tree performs calculations to determine how to respond to things differently depending on the situation and strength of the signals being sent, then I don't think it's sentient. I could be wrong and maybe it does do something similar, but I just don't see how without a brain to calculate.

>but a tree just reacts autonomously to the same stimuli in the same way, right?
if you mean hard-wired responses i'd say pretty much yes with varying responses on genes and size etc. is a jellyfish sentient?
that true, but then a dog has more freewill/autonomy as it's able to walk around and control its various appendages whereas a plant doesn't have that choice it just kinda has to bear the brunt of its environment. the ability to make choice (however deterministic) creates a new level of logic as the being can now surf the waves instead of being subject to the current, which creates the opportunity for multiple possible pathways instead of just being a subject of what is happening in a fixed position (blowing in the wind like a desert plant doesn't count!)
an underlying trait of all of those is that they have DNA, which is possibly itself at the root of sentience, like a little computer. it does have memory and computation with varying levels of resource determining outcome and level of sentience. like mini computer programs based on real math and logic. so i think that everything is equally as sentient. there are varying levels depending on what you're looking at but there is the potential for quasi-infinite possibility.
>metaphysically...the world is alive

>is a jellyfish sentient?

Not him but I actually came into this thread to ask the same thing, because I've always considered Jellyfish akin to plants My opinion is that neither is sentient though, for reasons already covered. It's just an organism that mindlessly runs on reflex.

Alot of things can sense without sentience. E.g. a thermometer or bacteria

Tbh dont you think youre confusing things necessary for sentience for life in general. Its living things that need to sense. Sentience is alot more. Living things need to actively affect their environment which you could easily construe as abstract decision making.

I think it would be more useful to have sentience or consciousness as a higher concept though its probably difficult to define. Plants seem too inflexible and inanimate.

A lot of people in this thread are confusing sentience with sapience.

Yes.