21. The Science of Plant Intelligence & Neurobiology — with Paco Calvo

Written By alexa firmenich

“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.”

- Paco Calvo

 

SYNOPSIS:

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 ?

Today it is my explicit intention to change the way that you think about the kingdom of plants and the intelligence that resides within it. This is a controversial topic with scientists on all sides of the spectrum vehemently advocating for or against concepts.

It was Darwin who first introduced to the Western world the concept of the "root brain" hypothesis, where the tips of plant roots act in some ways like a brain, a distributed intelligence network. They challenge our very notions of an individual. Plants exhibit qualities that are adaptive, flexible, and goal directed – all hallmarks of an intelligence that goes beyond hard wired impulsive responses. They make decisions, perform predictive modeling, share nutrients and recognize kin. Electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants very similar to those found in the nervous systems of animals, including neurotransmitters like dopamine and melatonin.

Our guest today is a professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab) focusing on the study of minimal cognition in plants. He combines insights from biology, philosophy, and cognitive science to explore plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving, challenging conventional perspectives of his field. Paco has said that ‘to ‘know thyself’, one has to think well beyond oneself, or even one’s species. We are only one small part of a kaleidoscopic variety of ways of being alive.

 
 

GUESTS BIO:

Paco Calvo is a renowned cognitive scientist and philosopher of biology, known for his groundbreaking research in the field of plant cognition and intelligence. He is a professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab), focusing on the study of minimal cognition in plants. Calvo’s interdisciplinary work combines insights from biology, philosophy, and cognitive science to explore the fascinating world of plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving. By investigating the complex interactions and adaptive responses exhibited by plants, Paco Calvo has significantly contributed to our understanding of cognition beyond the animal kingdom, challenging conventional perspectives on intelligence and mental capacities.

QUOTES:

  • The fundamental attitude that still permeates science is that plants are verging on inert. The problem with this perspective is that we are only one small part of a kaleidoscopic variety of ways of being alive.

  • So here we are encountering two different questions. Are plants intelligent? And then a second question, are plants sentient? Do they have their own subjective sense of awareness?

  • Why should humans provide any gold standard? Why do we need to compare their smarts to ours? They could be doing things in completely different ways and yet be intelligent, right?

  • We can say, what sort of behaviors deserve to be called intelligent? In plants, in bacteria, in fungi, in protists, in animals, in the tree of life?

  • A behavior that is adaptive by itself doesn't constitute intelligence. So we need to add something on top of a behavior being adaptive.

  • On the one hand, you have the risk of inflating plant behavior, beefing it up, as in, hey, you're anthropomorphizing plants unnecessarily. You don't need to posit these properties to explain plant physiology, to explain plant life. But on the other hand, you have the opposite risk of missing truly smart plant behaviors with the obsession of not beefing them up. So the best way to deal with this or to strike a right balance in between both risks is to forget about ourselves.

  • AF : The environment in a way is where the intelligence and the mind resides. And I think that plants distinctly, really, really help us understand that.

  • What counts is not what's inside the head, but what the head is inside of.

  • Sometimes we are unable to appreciate other walks of life, paradoxically, because we know too much, because we are experts in our fields. And the more we know, the more expert we become, the more we miss.

  • If you know all the physiological nuts and bolts, you might be such an expert that you lose the connection.

  • So to put yourself in their shoes, you must by necessity forget about the way you monitor your surroundings, because that just happens to be one way in which you can be sensitive to your environment.

  • 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.

  • We are obsessed with divisions, frontiers, the lines we draw. We are obsessed with categorizing, dividing, subdividing, establishing classifications. We are obsessed with belonging here or there as if the ethical dilemma emerged by default if you belong to the animal kingdom and doesn't emerge by default if you don't belong to the animal kingdom. What is a kingdom? I mean, kingdoms are abstractions. They don't exist.

  • If we forget about dividing the tree of life, whichever form of life ends up on my table, whatever really matters is whether we have inflicted any form of stress that wasn't truly needed, that was unnecessary.

  • So superficial resemblance shouldn't be what triggers empathy. The development of scientific knowledge should be part of it, because if a life form doesn't resemble us at all, but we find out that it is resorting to the same neurotransmitters, the same molecules, same signaling pathways, being stressed under the same forms of unexpected breakups of light cycles or day cycles. So all these things that could go wrong affect them equally, and yet they don't resemble us, is that a reason not to empathize with them?

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