Adrian P. Frazier: On the Possibility of Plant Consciousness: A View from Ecointeractivism

Título: On the Possibility of Plant Consciousness: A View from Ecointeractivism

miércoles, 23 de marzo, a las 10am, sala 2.58, 2ª planta, Luis Vives

Resumen

In the world of plant science, the subfields of plant physiology and plant neurobiology (also known as “plant signalling and behavior”) have been arguing in the academic literature for at least a decade. The latest controversy is about consciousness. Should we consider the possibility that there is “something it is like” to be a plant? If we do, we need a theory. Consciousness is a famously difficult subject, inspiring a range of attitudes from “consciousness is an epiphenomenon” to “everything is conscious”. The trouble begins with a taken-for-granted theory of representation, encodingism.

Representation, or specifically the encodingist theory of representation, is where things begin to go wrong. The qualities of experience are simultaneously available and unavailable to awareness, suggesting that they have both explicit and implicit content. But encodings have none of the latter. Encodingism renders the problem not just hard, but impossible. In this paper, I will present an alternative to encodingism, based in James Gibson’s ecological psychology and Mark Bickhard’s interactivism, and explore its application to the question of plant consciousness.

Organizado por:

Prof. Dr. Paco Calvo

MINT Lab – Minimal Intelligence Lab

University of Murcia (EU)

www.um.es/web/minimal-intelligence-lab