Who is There?

​Susan Lahey begins a recent Popular Mechanics article with a wonderfully destabilizing possibility: we may be surrounded by trillions of conscious beings and simply have failed to notice them.

She means plants.

The evidence she surveys is fascinating. Plants respond to their environments in ways considerably more complicated than we once imagined. Some communicate chemically. Some appear capable of habituation. A Mimosa pudica, repeatedly subjected to a harmless disturbance, may eventually cease its defensive response. Plants respond to anesthetics. Trees under attack can release chemical signals that alter the behavior of neighboring trees. Beneath a forest floor, roots, fungi, microorganisms, water, and nutrients participate in networks of extraordinary complexity.

From such observations, some researchers have begun asking whether words such as learning, memory, cognition, and even consciousness might properly apply to plants. A still more adventurous proposal asks whether something like consciousness could emerge at the level of an entire forest.

There are good reasons for caution. Responsiveness is not the same thing as cognition, cognition is not necessarily consciousness, and consciousness is certainly not the same thing as self-consciousness. A sunflower turning toward light does not prove that somewhere inside the sunflower is a little subject contemplating the morning.

But perhaps the strangest thing about the argument is how quickly we imagine that those are the only alternatives.

Either the sunflower is essentially a machine, responding through biochemical mechanisms, or it must possess something sufficiently like our own interior life to qualify as conscious. The argument begins with us and then works outward. How much like a human being must another creature become before we permit ourselves to imagine that there might be somebody—or at least something experiential—there?

More than a century ago, Alfred North Whitehead suspected that the problem lay much deeper.

Whitehead thought modernity had made a disastrous philosophical mistake by imagining the universe as fundamentally composed of inert matter. On that picture, nature consists first of things that simply exist. Eventually some of those things become alive. Much later, a few acquire consciousness. Finally one species develops the peculiar ability to wonder whether anything else is conscious.

The result is a mystery that modern thought has never entirely solved. If reality is fundamentally dead matter, where does experience come from?

Whitehead reversed the problem. Reality, he argued, is composed not primarily of substances but of events, “actual occasions” that receive their world and respond to it. He called this reception “prehension.” Every actual occasion takes account of other realities and incorporates those relations into what it becomes.

This does not mean that rocks think.

Nor does it mean that trees compose poetry when no one is looking.

It means that the sharp division between dead matter and experiencing mind may itself be mistaken. What appears relatively late in evolution as human consciousness may be an extraordinarily complex form of something much more primitive and pervasive: reception, relation, response, and experience.

Seen from that perspective, the recent research on plants becomes interesting in a different way. The question is no longer simply whether plants have crossed some invisible threshold and joined the club of conscious beings. We can ask instead what kind of experience belongs to the peculiar form of life that is a plant.

A tree inhabits a world. Light, water, gravity, temperature, injury, neighboring plants, microorganisms, seasons, and soil are not merely external circumstances surrounding it. They enter into what the tree becomes. The tree receives a world and answers it.

That sounds remarkably Whiteheadian.

And the forest makes the question more complicated still. A forest is not merely a collection of trees standing near one another. It is a community of organisms and processes whose lives penetrate one another: roots and fungi, insects and animals, decay and growth, water and atmosphere. Yet even here caution is necessary. A network can be extraordinarily complex without becoming a single subject. Whitehead gives us reasons to take the relational life of the forest seriously without requiring us to imagine that the forest possesses a giant mind.

What he does not permit easily is the assumption that whatever lacks a human sort of mind must therefore belong to the category of dead mechanism.

That assumption has suddenly become important for another reason.

Artificial intelligence presents us with almost the mirror image of the problem.

With plants, we encounter living things radically unlike ourselves and are tempted to conclude that there can be no meaningful interiority because their behavior does not resemble ours. With large language models, we encounter something whose behavior can resemble ours astonishingly well and are tempted toward the opposite conclusion. The machine speaks, explains, jokes, apologizes, writes poetry, and appears to understand us. Surely, we think, somebody must be home.

Plants and AI therefore expose opposite sides of the same anthropocentrism.

The plant does not look enough like us, so we deny subjectivity.

The machine looks remarkably like us, so we attribute it.

In both cases, resemblance to ourselves has quietly become our test for consciousness.

Whitehead suggests that we may need better questions.

What is receiving a world here? What is integrating experience? What possesses continuity? Where does response become experience, and experience become awareness? What kind of unity exists among the processes we are observing? Most importantly, are we discovering another form of subjectivity, or merely projecting our own upon something we do not yet understand?

These are scientific and philosophical questions, but they are also theological ones.

Christian theology has never actually required a dead creation.

“The heavens declare the glory of God,” the psalmist says. Mountains and hills burst into song before God; trees clap their hands. Paul imagines the whole creation groaning in labor pains. Francis of Assisi could address sun, moon, water, fire, and earth as kin. None of this requires us to suppose that medieval Christians believed trees possessed nervous systems. It suggests something more fundamental: creation was not imagined merely as scenery surrounding the human drama.

Modernity taught us to see otherwise. Nature became increasingly the stage upon which the genuinely interesting actors—human subjects—appeared. Everything else became environment, resource, mechanism, or background.

Perhaps the recent fascination with plant intelligence is important even if scientists ultimately decide that consciousness is the wrong word for what plants do.

The discovery may be less that trees are persons than that the world was never as impersonal as we imagined it to be.

Whitehead once described reality as a process of becoming in which each moment receives what has been and contributes something new to what will be. Christian theology has another vocabulary for a creation that exists through gift, reception, relation, and response.

It calls such a world creation.

And perhaps the most unsettling possibility raised by these experiments is not that we are surrounded by trillions of conscious beings.

It is that we have spent several centuries learning to inhabit a world full of neighbors while imagining ourselves alone.