Plant Sentience

Abstract

Abstract Recent advances in plant biology have revealed that plants and their survival depend on plant-specific cognition and sentience. In fact, sessile plants need to monitor more signals from their environment than animals that might be able to run, fly, and hide from stressful environmental threats. Although plants are sessile, their organs are actively moving and use very complicated sensory systems to accomplish this plant-specific behaviour. From the perspective of our CBC theory, the assertion that plants enjoy plant-specific sentience should not be unanticipated. As noted several times, when successful traits are established they are maintained and become the foundations for further evolution. Hence, flora should display sentience. However, the dominant view is that plants are devoid of cognition, contingent behaviour, sentience—which the authors find surprising considering that the cognitive behaviours reviewed in Chapter 2 are more readily accepted in bacteria and protists than in plants. Perhaps, the best example of a primary obstacle for accepting sentient plants is the long history of misunderstanding plant sex and their sexual organs. Although plant sexuality was discovered by Rudolf Jacob Cramerarius in 1694, it was accepted by leading botanists only some 200 years later, at the end of the 19th century. Those prior sexualist versus asexualist hot debates are still mirrored in our contemporary reluctance to accept plants as truly living organisms relying on their plant-specific sensory systems, adaptive cognitive abilities, and sentience.