Unconsciously Conscious– Plants And The Way They "Think "

By Null -- November 11th, 2024

There is no doubt that plants are alive. They breathe and eat and drink just as any other living being needs to do, just differently than your average human or other animals. They require sunlight and shade, cool and warm weather, and a balanced ecosystem to thrive. But, while humans and other animals are equipped with brains capable of thinking and feeling, plants are not. I believe plants do contain some level of “thinking,” but just not something active like other organisms have. Thus, I dub plants as unconsciously conscious.

It comes as no surprise that plants adapt and overcome whatever environment they are introduced to. We see it every day with the vines that grow up the sides of buildings or the weeds that pop up in pavement cracks. We all have seen the way flowers, such as daisies, “move” to face their petals towards the sun as it travels across the sky, east to west. Common house plants droop and flourish depending on how much water they get, how much sun they soak up, seemingly in a state of conservation, a place between promising life and certain death, as they wait for more nutrients to come.

But, is this really thinking? Do plants think about how they need to spread their roots out rather than down to maximize their water intake? Do plants think about how they spread their leaves out to make space for the leaves underneath to get sunlight? I don’t believe they do.

It’s true that those examples can be seen as some sort of thinking, but do beings actively think when they adapt? If a certain species of bird with a stronger beak survives better on a nut-based diet than a bird with a weaker beak, do the weaker beak birds think about having stronger beaks? No… no they do not. Those weak beak birds will die off along with their genetic make, the stronger beak birds will survive and reproduce to pass on their superior genetic make. It’s life, natural selection, recognizing adversity and imbalance in nature and it self correcting.

The same goes with plants. In Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters, she mentions Azolla Filiculoides, a species of small fern that is commonly found in wet environments. Schlanger states an interesting discovery about these ferns: “...it evolved a specialized pocket in its body to house a packet of cyanobacterium that fixes nitrogen” and how this nitrogen is an essential “building block of all life. But in its atmospheric form, it’s entirely out of our reach.” Certain bacteria, though, know how to combine this nitrogen into forms that plants (and all other life) can use. So, the “azolla morphed itself into a hotel for this bacterium” (Schlanger pgs 9-10).

 

This plant, the small but mighty azolla, spent millions of years in the distant past perfecting this little nitrogen-bacterium pocket. Does that mean it learned how to do this? In a way, I suppose. But was it conscious thinking? No, I don’t suppose. Just like many things, the azolla likely struggled for nutrients amongst its bigger plant competitors, dying off slowly. Then, it likely happened that one azolla plant (or maybe a couple) began to grow slightly different from the rest, likely due to some abnormality or mutation, that allowed bacteria filled with nitrogen to make a home amongst the abnormal dips and curves of the plant. So, what happens? Do the plants realize that they have become nitrogen sufficient due to these different growth patterns? No! Simply, the previously normal and bacterium-free azolla begin to perish in the competitive wet environment as the mutated, now normal, nitrogen rich azolla flourish. This new strand of azolla becomes the common azolla as it spreads and grows and passes on this “bacterium hotel” gene.

Plants follow a genetic code, like the rest of us, that lays out how they will live their life and adapt to a wide array of environments and situations. But these codes do not take the place of a thinking brain that makes conscious decisions on how to change. Meanwhile, a human, when faced with adversity, thinks about how life has changed, decides how to move forward, and acts accordingly. Many animals do the same, like when a stray cat is hungry, looks for food, realizes a human will feed it, so it sticks around to get fed. 

Plants don’t know when they’ll get watered again. They don’t know that they will. So, instead, they ration their resources to make it by, even if the plant does get watered once a week on the same day at the same time. Plants don’t know that the sun is moving across the sky, turning day into night. Instead, when no more light gets absorbed by their leaves, they hibernate in the dark, becoming limp and frail as they wait for a light that they don’t know will ever come. But it always does, the sun always rises.

Plants act in ways that do resemble thinking beings, but it is all a form of adaptation passed on from millions of years of natural selection. They can’t think or feel, but they can exist with the uncertainties of life and adapt to varying environments and obstacles. So, in a way, they are conscious, but also not, so unconscious. If I had to label them in an anthropomorphic way, as all humans like to do to non-human things, plants, as I coined before, can only be described as unconsciously conscious.

-Null