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.
Paco Calvo
Lab Director
Paco is the Director of the MINT Lab and a Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Murcia, Spain.