The Science of Plant Intelligence & Neurobiology
“The different tips, the shoots, the roots — even the very notion, the very idea of an individual, is lost. It doesn’t translate easily. It’s something more akin to a form of swarm intelligence or collective intelligence, like a flock of birds, a school of fish. The plant is not really an individual, it’s a collectivity.”
Are plants conscious? Do they experience forms of cognition and intelligence that go beyond patterned and hard-wired evolutionary behaviors? Do intelligence and consciousness really require a brain and central nervous system? Or should we consider intelligence on Earth to be less brain-bound, perhaps not even residing in the individual self, but rather in an enmeshment within an ecosystem? A swarm intelligence, a networked mind, distributed, adaptive, like a murmuration of starlings in the setting sun. And how would we even begin to start answering these questions empirically ?
Check out the podcast “life worlds” where they are interviewing MINT Lab Director Paco Calvo to answer all of the above questions.