Plant intelligence

Abstract

The concept of plant intelligence, as proposed by Anthony Trewavas, has raised considerable discussion. However, plant intelligence remains loosely defined; often it is either perceived as practically synonymous to Darwinian fitness, or reduced to a mere decorative metaphor. A more strict view can be taken, emphasizing necessary prerequisites such as memory and learning, which requires clarifying the definition of memory itself. To qualify as memories, traces of past events have to be not only stored, but also actively accessed. We propose a criterion for eliminating false candidates of possible plant intelligence phenomena in this stricter sense: an "intelligent" behavior must involve a component that can be approximated by a plausible algorithmic model involving recourse to stored information about past states of the individual or its environment. Re-evaluation of previously presented examples of plant intelligence shows that only some of them pass our test.

Plant intelligence and attention

“…2,17,21,22 In plant-plant communication, the foci of attention can therefore overlap, even if the contexts from which they stand out are different, namely actual drought conditions in the one case and proximity to a stressed plant in the other. Due to an identical focus, the response to a communicated cue will also be the same as to the onset of drought.…”

“…1,2 Although memory has a bearing on all three modalities of time, including a remembered past event, the present of storage and the possibility of future retrieval, it is a marker of intelligence heavily biased toward the past. On the other hand, attention is a feature of intelligent conduct in the present, whereby an organism selectively responds to ever-shifting stimuli in a way that allows it to maintain adequate levels of adaptation to its environment.…”

Plant intentionality and the phenomenological framework of plant intelligence

“…In the second case, even if plant behavior is acknowledged as such, comparisons are prone to accusations of being metaphoric, 1,2 as the basis of any behavior is assumed to lie exclusively in animal conduct.…”

The theater management model of plant memory

“…An advantage of the concept of competitive coherence Keywords: calcium, cell wall, cold shock, chromatin, phosphorylation, hyperstructure, wind from the botanist's point of view is that the operation -or absence of operationof competitive coherence on elements stored within an organism may be one of the criteria needed "for distinguishing mere traces of incidents from true accessible (and actively accessed) memories, which also have to be stored." 3 The other concept is that of functioning-dependent structures, FDSs, which are assembled (or are disassembled) in response to their activity, such as the metabolizing of a sugar. 7 This activity reflects the environment, and hence the FDSs and their bigger relatives, the functioning-dependent hyperstructures, constitute a measure of the plant's response to the environment.…”

“…3 How and where does a plant encode information from the environment? How does the plant reconcile what appear to be very different aspects of memory?…”