Citation

Author Website

https://www.um.es/en/web/minimal-intelligence-lab/mintlab-home

Abstract

A growing number of non-human animal species are being seriously considered as candidates for sentience, but plants are either forgotten or explicitly excluded from these debates. In our view, this is based on the belief that plant behavior is hardwired and inflexible and on an underestimation of the role of plant electrophysiology. We weigh such assumptions against the evidence to suggest that it is time to take seriously the hypothesis that plants, too, might be sentient. We hope this target article will serve as an invitation to investigate sentience in plants with the same rigor as in non-human animals.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License

Author Biography

Miguel Segundo-Ortin is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy and member of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Murcia (Spain). His research is in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, particularly embodied cognition, comparative cognition, and human agency. Website

Paco Calvo is Professor of Philosophy of Science and PI of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Murcia (Spain). His research is on (the philosophy of) plant neurobiology, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science. He is co-author with Natalie Lawrence of Planta Sapiens (Little, Brown (UK); Norton (US)). Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1772