it makes no sense to have a nervous system that feels pain if you cannot move to avoid pain. there are perhaps some feedback systems to react to attack, but pain would seem to be extraneous and unnecessary
Do plants feel pain?
- Thread starter icest0rm
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You should read "The Sound Machine" by Roald Dahl. Its a good story.
IOW a neural system is a "better" way of communicating between cells, but a neural system works "on top of" the background chemical signaling.
Plants have the same kind of intra-cellular messaging, with hormones etc, that other eukaryotes do. Systemic responses aren't all that big a surprise...?
Feeling pain is usually meant to mean "neural activation and signalling cascades of cytokines, giving a persistence of activation in the neural network".
Plants have the same kind of intra-cellular messaging, with hormones etc, that other eukaryotes do. Systemic responses aren't all that big a surprise...?
Feeling pain is usually meant to mean "neural activation and signalling cascades of cytokines, giving a persistence of activation in the neural network".
I react to painful stimuli before I feel the pain, very often.
I have been severely injured without feeling much, if any, pain until quite a while afterwards - during healing.
I have had parts of me, with the nerve system damaged , lose the ability to feel pain without appearing in any other way abnormal. A severed piece of finger I reattached took months to regain feeling - nerves grow slowly.
Surgeons know that some parts of the body feel pain, others don't. The brain mostly doesn't - no pain nerves.
All these are common experience.
Separate systems.
Plants react to light, in very complex and systemic ways. That doesn't mean they can see.
I have been severely injured without feeling much, if any, pain until quite a while afterwards - during healing.
I have had parts of me, with the nerve system damaged , lose the ability to feel pain without appearing in any other way abnormal. A severed piece of finger I reattached took months to regain feeling - nerves grow slowly.
Surgeons know that some parts of the body feel pain, others don't. The brain mostly doesn't - no pain nerves.
All these are common experience.
Separate systems.
Plants react to light, in very complex and systemic ways. That doesn't mean they can see.
"...because they don't have a nervous system "
whoever thinks plants don't have a nervous system is a fucking retard...
ds9.botanik.uni-bonn.de/zellbio/AG-Baluska-Volkmann/plantneuro/neuroview.php
does anyone read anything anymore...?
Mod note: You don’t get to come here and use abuse and profanity in your first ever post. An attitude adjustment is required if you wish to continue posting here.
whoever thinks plants don't have a nervous system is a fucking retard...
ds9.botanik.uni-bonn.de/zellbio/AG-Baluska-Volkmann/plantneuro/neuroview.php
does anyone read anything anymore...?
Mod note: You don’t get to come here and use abuse and profanity in your first ever post. An attitude adjustment is required if you wish to continue posting here.
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
This research has not progressed beyond the stage of hypothesis. Peer review is not complete, but so far the evidence has not been widely accepted. The entire concept of "plant neurobiology" is not part of the canon of science, therefore your rude insult is aimed at a number of respected scientists, whose criticisms can be summarized:
In response to these criticisms the researchers have backed down and said that the term "plant neurobiology" is a metaphor, but hey guys, metaphors have proven useful in the past.
I'm not certain if the subject has ever been researched in sufficient detail.
We tend to compare all other living things to ourselves, and if they lack certain components, then we deduce that these other creatures/plants cannot possibly be possessed of similar attributes.
The life force manifested in other things, remains the life force. Without ingesting the life-force and nutrients of these other beings, we could not survive for long.
Here is a song by The Arrogant Worms that contemplates plants as having feelings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK0bZl4ILM
Surely you're not still around, OP, if this was posted in '03? Nevertheless, to illustrate a possible need for forums to delete or archive elsewhere their ancient threads....
You'd have to establish that there were alternate circumstances that experiential pain states could reliably be found in correlation to or conjunction with, other than nervous / brain systems (or their formalized schematic diagrams or functional configurations realized in different substrates) -- one of which the plant happened to possess.
Since you couldn't access such private or phenomenal states directly to confirm such alternates, you would instead need a more elementary explanation of how pain and other manifestations emerged with regard to matter processes (explaining up from the physics level rather than the biological level). With that ability to predict how and when "pain" could/would arise in variable substrates or physical-property relationships, you could then either verify or eliminate the possibility in plants.
Although it seems quite unnecessary as things currently stand, only a step-up from asking if a rock felt pain. Memory is almost certainly a factor in an entity even recognizing, conceptualizing, or classifying a particular message or qualitative state as "pain".
It is quite clear from reading your link that those neurobiological terms are being used as analogies.
Note how many of them are used with quotation marks and how the conditional suffix “-like” is used. You and your link have done nothing to convince us that plants have a nervous system capable of detecting and processing nociceptive stimuli.Fail.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Time to close and lock the thread, before another necromancer with a science fiction book shows up.
This hypothesis has been peer-reviewed and falsified.
Agreed.
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