Plant Neurobiology

Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of ‘plant neurobiology’ describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocentric moral extensionist framework requiring plants to anthropomorphically meet animal standards to be deserving of moral respect. I argue this strategy is misguided because moral extensionism is an erroneous ontological foundation for ethics.

Contemporary plant biologists take seriously the notion of plant cognition or intelligence (Gross 2016; Trewavas 2016), yet there is still no consensus on how these abilities are to be described (e.g., Calvo 2016). Most contentious has been the formulation of the intelligent behaviour of plants as ‘neurological’ (ibid; Alpi et al. 2007). I argue that there is no consensus because there is yet to be a principled way to distinguish between the adaptive behaviours plants display (Cvrčková et al. 2009, 395). What are needed to settle this matter are principled distinctions for the kinds of behaviour attributed to plants. This can be achieved by the application of criteria that generally delineate the cognitive, and that discriminate between kinds of cognitive abilities. To this end, I use an evolutionary taxonomy of cognitive control developed by Kim Sterelny (2003) to establish principled grounds upon which the plant cognition debate can be resolved.

Plants can differentiate between rhythmic music and non-rhythmic noise, between their own spe-cies, relatives or foreign plants without even staying in physical contact with each other. It is said that they have 15 different senses and they are intelligent. Plant seed germination can be stimulated by exclusively human thoughts and intentions. These are just a few examples based on scientific experiments, that show partly yet unexplainable plant behavior phenomena.
The aim of this assignment is to search for plant phenomena in scientific literature. The assignment is further divided in:
• plant intelligence
• influence of music on plants
• electric signals in plants
• influence of healing energy, intentions and thoughts on plants
In more than 80% of investigated scientific papers, plants could differentiate between not only rhythmic music and noise, but also between different types of music. Plants are able to send and use electrical signals and they react to ether in the same way as animals do. Ether paralyzes the nervous system of animals and the electric signals in plants in a similar way.                                              One of the most controversial and so far unexplainable phenomena - Plants can even respond to human thoughts and intentions by increasing their growth, total protein in the plant and many further reactions.
There are several phenomenal plant experiments, which clearly indicate, that there is a non-physical, measurable interaction possible between plants and humans. Interestingly, this phenome-non is more studied in field of parapsychology than in environmental sciences. In parapsychology, the non-physical interaction between humans and plants, enzymes, bacteria, animals etc. is widely accepted, but in environmental sciences, it is rather avoided.
The idea of materialism, which says all that exists is matter, became well known as scientific mate-rialism and is accepted today in academic fields. Even today, many still believe that the mind is nothing but the physical activity of the brain and that our thoughts cannot have any effect upon our brains and bodies, even though it is based on an assumption originated in the 19th century. Howev-er, this assumption should be improved as it is proven that mental events can affect the physical world.

According to F. Adams [this journal, vol. 68, 2018] cognition cannot be realized in plants or bacteria. In his view, plants and bacteria respond to the here-and-now in a hardwired, inflexible manner, and are therefore incapable of cognitive activity. This article takes issue with the pursuit of plant cognition from the perspective of an empirically informed philosophy of plant neurobiology. As we argue, empirical evidence shows, contra Adams, that plant behavior is in many ways analogous to animal behavior. This renders plants

On a July night in Berlin in 2019, Lucy Powell and Ally Bisshop gathered together an assemblage of plants known colloquially and quite gloriously as the ‘Queen of the Night’. Their Latin scientific name is Epiphyllum oxypetalum. E. oxypetalum blooms once a year, and for one night only – its beautiful, pale and heavily perfumed flowers wilting before the break of dawn. The plant has other names: Orchid Cactus, the Night-Blooming Cereus, Gekka Bijin - meaning ‘Beauty under the Moon’ in Japanese. As she lures our worship and admiration, so we chose to bestow upon her the title of Queen.

The genus name, Epiphyllum, translates from the Greek as ‘upon the leaf ’. Upon the leaf is where the journey of this elusive flower begins, and ends. The Queen of the Night plant is cultivated from and passed between human caretakers through leaf clippings, which are then pressed hopefully into the soil. The flowers for which this plant is prized grow from stems that themselves resemble leaves. Flower upon leaf upon leaf upon leaf upon flower.

The plants assembled for this specific encounter were all cultivated from the leaves of a single plant body. They were clones, plant bodies that also express the impossibility of absolute mimesis – each plant performatively expressing its difference from the other, in the curl of its limbs, the drape of its leaves. Life proceeds through such differentiations.

Integrating post-structuralist conceptual frameworks, conclusions on the nature of unconscious intelligence from plant neurobiology,  the psychological observations of French and Italian moralists, and dramaturgical analyses based upon Stanislavski's method, we construct a new foundation for psychoanalysis. Although our new conceptual framework for psychoanalysis differs in many important respect from Freud's we nonetheless conclude that Freud's major discoveries, namely the Oedipus complex and primal repression, are valid. We find support for Freud's theory of primal repression in Nietzsche's theory of the mnemonics of cruelty, that is to say, we conclude that primal repression is effected by the trauma of castration anxiety, which effectively writes a new, repressive memory for the subject while pushing the subject's Oedipus complex out of consciousness. We support the use of psychedelics for psychotherapy, in conjunction with the traditional talk therapy of psychoanalysis.

"Image making as Post-anthropocentric interfaces" focuses on the problems and controversies that arise in our current planetary 'technosphere', demolishing the myth (inherited from modernity) by which it is possible to separate the cultural, the technological and the natural. Assuming our hybrid ecology, Morilla presents different visualization interfaces that will help to strengthen our relationships with plants, in such a way that we can imagine new possibilities in our coexistence with other living beings, instead of propagating the imaginary of a post-human future.

In this dissertation it is discussed the possibility of attributing “mind” to other beings
beyond the human. In this respect, non-human animals and plants are taken into account
to question to what extent concepts as agency, cognition and intelligence could be applied
to non-human animals and plants. After having considered some possible definitions of
these concepts, two approaches of cognition are presented. On the one hand an approach
to animal cognition and, on the other hand, to plant cognition. In order to consider animal
cognition, I exposed the studies of Cognitive Ethology, a field founded during the 20th
Century with the purpose of studying animal mental states by means of animal behaviour.
This kind of approach involves a definition of cognition that entails the nervous system
and the possibility of high-level cognitive faculties, such as the thinking faculty. On the
other hand, I considered recent studies in Plant Neurobiology, a field founded in 2005
that investigate plant signaling and behaviour in the light of cognition despite the lack of
a nervous system. With respect to that, it has been followed the minimal cognition
approach (or intelligence) proposed by philosophers of plant neurobiology such as Paco
Calvo. Following a minimal cognitive approach some questions arise regarding the
possibility of plant consciousness. Therefore, some considerations will be made in the
conclusions of this dissertation.

This chapter argues that plant intelligence needs to be considered as a teleological activity, whereby the plant organizes and coordinates itself and its environment in a goal-based way. If plant biologists follow behaviourist (and cognitivist) psychology in reducing intelligence to mechanisms of the mind, they risk repeating the dementalization of the organism that was inherent in behaviouristic animal theory. I employ Deweyan transactionalism to explore why a new empirical approach to plant intelligence is necessary and what such an approach might look like.

In this paper, I discuss to what extent plants can and should be considered as persons, in philosophical as well as physiological terms. My aim is similar to that of animal activists who claim a parallel status for nonhuman creatures, particularly primates and other mammals. I first outline conceptual understandings and practiced engagements with personhood, as derived from work in the arts and humanities, and the social and natural sciences, as well as from pieces in popular, industrial and professional media publications. I then draw upon the research of plant scientists, scholars and advocates to assess and ultimately argue in favor of plants being granted a form of personhood. I conclude my intervention by raising a number of ethical and legal issues that such a radical shift in thinking and acting would elicit for members of modern industrialized societies, and provide some possible solutions that would necessarily be both metaphysical and practical in nature. My overall purpose is to present an enhanced understanding of place by blurring the line between the categories of habitant and habitat, and to highlight new insights into the nature of plants, the most populous and critical consumers of water on the planet, and the hardiest and most productive agents of climate, in an effort to view them less as resources to be exploited and more as fellow creatures to be understood, accommodated and respected.

The efficacy of genetic algorithms in the design of models that model specific and experimental aspects of action potentials in a wide variety of organisms is proven. A specific example of a plant action potential is used to illustrate the use of genetic algorithms in the search for parameters of models. The efficiency of the genetic algorithms as a search method is in the short generation span of the convergence of the algorithm. Introduction Neuronal modeling is the mathematical and computational modeling of single neurons and network of neurons in a phenomenological way. Experimental work has shed much light on the topic of ion channels in excitable membranes, but often the parameters of model construction are not derivable from simple experiments, this reduces the modeling to much an art of educated guess work. Specific instances include the kinetics of several of the processes and channels and the spatial density of channels. Much of such data is also very difficult to gather experimentally. To correctly model a neural system by this handwork is a laborious and time consuming process. Often on it is sure luck that models replicate the neurobiological data. Considering that the parameters interact with each other in highly nonlinear ways making iterative hand tuning of the parameters difficult. This is where parameter search algorithms fit in. Further a similarity between the model and experimental data is the sole criteria for hand tweaked models, parameter search methods investigate the whole behavior of the parameter space. They reduce the effort in building compartmental models. By automatically searching the search space for parameters which would lead to good models. Thus several parallel efforts have been made by many groups(Baldi et al 1998, Balla and Bower 1993, Varnier and Bower 1996, Varnier and Bower 1999) in using automated search methods. In the present compilation we use genetic algorithms, the most popular of evolutionary computing, to search the parameter space of a single compartmental model of an algae or a higher plant. Since plant cells do not have a dendritic structure, a single compartment suffices to study plant action potentials.