EDWINA: “And it IS an aspect of 'Mind'. As Peirce said - "Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain.”
Ultimately, the question of what role a brain plays relates to thermodynamics. Plants don’t have brains because the choices that they make from their Umwelts are simple, and in “slow motion”. They receive a distributed, limited form of energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil, and so they cannot afford to squander their energy in the same way that brained organisms can… it’s why plants don’t have legs, why they don’t get up and move around. The “brain” of the plant is therefore distributed throughout its body, in its leaves, branches, roots and stem… that’s how I would interpret it. Carnivorous plants, however, such as the Venus flytrap, receive excess energy & nutrients from the insects that they digest, and therefore are able to divert that energy to “hunting” for supplementary food sources. And by the time that some hypothetical plant might develop sufficiently to get up and move around, it would cross an energy-access threshold whereby it would no longer need its leaves… it then becomes an animal and, by necessity, one that requires a brain. Brains are required for more complex conceptualizations, in order to accommodate energy-intensive choice-making from complex environments. From: Edwina Taborsky [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2017 12:42 AM To: [email protected]; Charles Pyle Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] The Secret Language of Plants Thanks for the article. Biosemiotics is very involved with this reality - of plant communication. And it IS an aspect of 'Mind'. As Peirce said - "Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals and throughout the purely physical world'. 4.551. And 'Mind' is most certainly operative in the biological realm. Edwina Taborsky On Fri 24/11/17 5:08 PM , Charles Pyle [email protected] sent: Striking evidence that plants warn each other of environmental dangers is reviving a once ridiculed field. https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-secret-language-of-plants-20131216/
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