Do plants feel pain?

Seems about a 50:50 chance.

 

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in honour of this thread a special University of Life lecture.

can plants and trees feel pain

 

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Sp,

enjoyed your interesting article. but as an optimist like yourself, i found a flower in place of flour..

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that's extremely bad...I will have to either kill myself now or edit it.

 

that happened because you are obssessed with genitalia of plants..

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Good one spurious

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The conclusion I get from that is although plants can't feel pain, that doesn't make our actions towards them any less loathsome or ugly.

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i confess, it is all true.

Please don't report me to my computer administrator for pervers abuse of my computer. They will find gigabytes of downloaded pics of plant genitalia on my computer.

 

send him an e-flower greetings, he won't complain.

 

Nice essay - but I'd say it was a bit too anthropomorphic to prove much either way.

 

given that many insects and worms apear to feel pain, yet don't have a brain (just a neural ganglion or neural bundle), I would suggest that brains are not required for pain sensation. Given that chemichal pathways, and not just electrical pathways, are a part of transmitting pain signals, I would not be surprise to find that chemical-only pain pathways exsist, and neurons were not required.

Now to persive pain as a negative thing, as opposed to just another physical stimulus, may require some form of neural pathway. While a chemical pathway may react to an overload of some stimulus (similar to pain resistance), without a neural system of some sort, the stimulus may not be differentiatable from any other powerful stimulus.

 

it is a matter of definition, but insects definitely do have brains. As do worms. They might not be very impressive, nor sophisticated and many bodyparts can be regulated independently from the brain. But I personally have seen insect brains.

 

What reason do we have to believe it is not simply chemical for us as well?

When we are cold, the warmth "feels" good so we are drawn to it.
When a potentailly damaging amount of heat is applied to our skin, it hurts and forces us to pull away from it.

Since we do have a central nervous system and it is the system which provides us with our means of experiencing external stimuli, and we have a brain which controls our reactions to these external stimuli, then the most efficient and expedient way to force us to protect ourselves from this danger is to chemically produce a sensation of extreme discomfort.

The value and deep meaning of pain, emotions, pleasure etc, are nothing more than the creation of an active human imagination.

The reality is that they are simple chemical reactions to stimuli.

Canute,
I am not sure if I fully understood your assertion, but...
It does not negate consciousness.
It uses consciousness to effect and immediate positive response.



**All of this is just the opinion of an uneducated layman. I am not claiming this as fact and I can't support worth a shit. But I still like to argue it.

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weel, they do have an assembalage of nerves, however, it's not a lobed brain structure. it's an assembalage of nerves. A 'gangleon'. in worms, there is more than one of these clusters, and if a worm is cut in half, at lest one of these culters must be present in each half for both of them to regenerate. Acts like a brain in many ways, but not an atomically defined brain. As you said, it's a matter of definition.

The sensation is chemical, but the signal processing from external stimuli->brain is carried 80% by electrical current (in most animals). The message is carried chemically between nuerons vie calcium concentrations, but for the most part, it's an electrical signal. For a majority of fear/danger responses, signals are then sent from the brain/spinal chord to different sections of the body - hormone releasing glands, for one. These hormores then chemically bring about a majority of the reactions that the body presents in times of stress.

edit:fixing a cut/paste error

 

River Wind

I was just pointing out that there is no hard scientific evidence that human beings feel pain, just first person reports.

Canute

 

I skimmed through the posts, so if this happen to be a repetition, I apologize

About girraffes and plants, I once watched a documentary stuff (not from Discovery though, the credits said something about Oregon or such) about this:
Plants can 'at least' sense something, as many know, but plants can 'talk' as well. In the case of Girraffes, a tree of which leaves (and fruits) are eaten by a giraffe at first grows toxic thorns to keep the giraffes away. When this proves to be unsuccessfull, the tree starts infecting its fruits with toxin, plus, it sends a 'type of gas' to warn other trees that something 'attacked' the tree.

How's that in your opinion?

 

what would be the advantage of poisoning it's own fruits? the purpose of producing a fruit is to get an animal to eat the seed inside, so it will then help you distribute that seed by later pooping it out somewhere.

 

Depends on the kind of fruit. Some rely on getting eaten and excreted elsewhere. Others rely on wind dispersion and yet others by insect/birds carrying them to other places. Some can't survive digestive juices. Imagine trying to eat and poop a coconut!

Anyway, I have to agree that the definition of "pain" is debatable. Plants obviously react to stimuli - wether or not this can be termed "pain" is somewhat a matter of opinion. They (obviously) don't have a nervous system but they do have ways of transmitting signals both intraplantular and interplantular (I just made up those terms).

 

Do you mean on this forum or literally??

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Yes I realize this post is old. Don't care, its an awesome topic.

People say plants don't have CNS. What if they are all nerve? Isn't CNS just a category? We have a localized (C) chunk that does our 'thinking', but what if those same brain cells were merely spread all over the body thus rendering us brainless but with equal processing capacity? Distributed rather than localized.

How would you find pain then? The screaming? How is that not just an electrochemical reaction?

Perhaps plants are the same way, distributed.

Following all this to a logical conclusion leads to a much better question.

One about life, and free will.

What is the difference between living and dead matter if it's all made of electrons, quarks, strings, etc? Is the universe alive, or are we all dead?

Is not every particle or field in existence simply a reaction to the physical constants?

That being said, all arguments presented thus far against plants feeling pain are mystery mongering and obfuscation offered in an attempt to sell an opinion as fact, because the argument does not, and logically cannot, end with chemistry, biology, or plant studies of any kind.

It's beyond experimentation, much like the enforcement of the physical constants themselves.

 

If a eukaryotic complex lifeform like a tree can feel pain without a nervous system, maybe we can get water from the ground without an osmotically driven vascular system - just stand there and soak it up...?

Or photosynthesise sugar without chlorophyl and leaves. But hang on, we can't do either of those things, why should plants "feel" anything except radiation or osmotic pressure?