Planta Sapiens (or why good wine needs no bush)

10 Jun 2022

2 min read

with Professor Dr. Paco Calvo Professor of Philosophy of Science, and Principal Investigator of Minimal Intelligence Lab, University of Murcia (Spain)

Description

Grapevines take action autonomously according to their own needs. Their behavior is truly flexible and anticipatory. Vines can navigate their surroundings courtesy of their sensory apparatus, and are able to adapt in a fast, and yet coordinated manner, despite lacking neurones. Their excitable vascular system forms a complex information-processing network that allows them to coordinate and integrate information signaling from root to shoot, and to take appropriate action as the need arises. The potential for such excitable network is currently unknown, and yet exciting. Today we know for instance that plants are subject to reversible anesthetic treatment. In fact, it is possible that the origins of subjectivity date back to the origins of life itself. Against zoocentric biases, my talk explores the very possibility and consequences of such idea; an approach that may ultimately bear upon our understanding of life and cognition more broadly, reaching all the way from single cell organisms to homo and planta sapiens.

Professor Dr. Paco Calvo

Professor of Philosophy of Science, and Principal Investigator of Minimal Intelligence Lab, University of Murcia (Spain)

Paco Calvo (PhD, University of Glasgow, 2000) is a Professor of Philosophy of Science, and Principal Investigator of MINTLab (Minimal Intelligence Lab— http://www.um.es/web/minimal-intelligence-lab) at the University of Murcia (Spain).

His research interests range broadly within the cognitive sciences, with special emphasis on plant intelligence, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science. He uses time-lapse photography to explore perception-action and learning in plants. His scientific articles have appeared in Annals of Botany, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, Frontiers in Psychology, Journal of the Royal Society, Plant, Cell & Environment, Plant Signaling & Behavior, Scientific Reports, and Trends in Plant Science, among other journals. He is currently working on a book project, Planta Sapiens, coming out in 2022 with Norton in the US, and Little, Brown & Co., in the UK.