Opinion | Can You Anesthetize a Plant?

I guess maybe a place to start with the plants is, you taught me something I didn’t know. Which is you can anesthetize a plant. Isn’t that mind-blowing? Can you talk a bit about that experiment and what it seems to imply? So there’s a group of scientists — botanists — and they call themselves plant neuroneurobiologists, which is a very tendentious thing to say, because there are no neurons involved in plants. They’re trolling more conventional botanists, I think. I appreciate when people troll each other in ways that laymen don’t even — I was like, “Oh, that seems fine.” No, it’s fighting words in the field. OK, so they’re plant dorks. Plant dorks. Absolute plant dorks. So, one of the experiments these guys did was take anesthetics that work on humans, including a really bizarre one called xenon gas. I say it’s bizarre because xenon gas is inert, yet somehow, it puts us out if you expose us to the gas. Which is weird because there’s no chemical reaction going on. And if you take a carnivorous plant or a sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica, which is the one, that tropical plant that if you touch it, it kind of collapses its leaves, and you give it the xenon gas or any number of other anesthetics that work on us, they won’t react. There’ll be a period where they appear to be asleep. And then they’ll regain their ability. So the fact that plants have two states of being is a very pregnant idea. And, you know, there’s this —— At least two states of being. – At least two states, right. Two that we’ve identified on and off. Lights on, lights off. So I don’t think it’s proof of consciousness, but it’s really spooky and interesting. You’re a gardener. – Yeah. – Do you think you’re causing plants pain by pruning them? Yeah, so, you’re bringing up the issue that immediately comes to mind when you start hearing about plant consciousness, which is, “Are we hurting them?” Is, “When we mow the lawn, is that beautiful scent of freshly mown grass the scream —— the scream —— the suffering. And that’ll make you crazy. A grim way to put it. – Yeah, but if —— You say it’ll make you crazy. But I actually — people know we’re causing pain to cows and pigs and chickens and just don’t think about it. Exactly — it doesn’t —— It turns out it does not make human beings crazy to cause mass pain to living things on an industrial scale Although there’s all this worry about this in Silicon Valley, that our tender hearts should go out to these machines that might be conscious. And we owe moral consideration to the machines. Anyway. – I think, here’s my suspicion about that because I do think it is possible we’re going to make sentient machines, machines that have some experience of what it is like to be a machine. And I think that you will find there’s a lot of concern about that until the moment it turns out to be against anybody’s interest to act. You’d have to do anything about it. And also, they love the conversation about the far future or near far future of whether it’s boomer or doomer view, because it’s a great way not to deal with what’s right in front of us.