Tuesday, December 30th, 2014
Author: Michael Pollan
Source: The New Yorker
Publication Date: December 23, 2013 Issue
Link: The Intelligent Plant
Stephan: This report is a mixed bag. It has so much physicalist attitude that I almost didn't use it. I knew Chris Bird, Peter Tompkins and Cleve Backster very well and for many years, and the point they were really trying to make is that plants have consciousness. As the report describes this assertion created a firestorm in biology in the early 70s, and now research seems to support them. The idea is not do plants have awareness but how to interpret that. This piece is an excellent representation of the physicalist consciousness denier position. But it also gives a pretty good description of the relevant issues and state of research -- which is what decided me. The Tompkins Bird deeper insight that we live embedded in a matrix of life is also correct. The essay describes the phenomenon without dealing with the implications. In fact, my major take away from this lengthy essay is that for those scientists unable to conceive of nonlocal non brain-based consciousness the world is an awkward and confusing place. There are all these phenomena observed in studies that simply cannot be subsumed under the physicalist paradigm.
Credit: workplacecoachblog.com
In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. “The Secret Life of Plants,” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, presented a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream. The most memorable passages described the experiments of a former C.I.A. polygraph expert named Cleve Backster, who, in 1966, on a whim, hooked up a galvanometer to the leaf of a dracaena, a houseplant that he kept in his office. To his astonishment, Backster found that simply by imagining the dracaena being set on fire he could make it rouse the needle of the polygraph machine, registering a surge of electrical activity suggesting that the plant felt stress. “Could the plant have […]
Quacks, my butt. I have read their work over and over because I have done my own research and they Tompkins and Bird are geniuses, even if the did confuse correlations with causes in the beginning. They got the overall message correct, and now we have better proof of their message and a larger one which reminds us all of our connectedness to the Universe.