Different Kinds of Minds: From Bacteria to Plants and Animals

Exciting times characterize the scientific panorama, in which multidisciplinary approaches (neuroscientific, mathematical, philosophical, psychological, etc.) are used to tackle difficult topics, such as the nature and origin of consciousness, as well as to study the living world under new perspectives. In particular, the field of plant biology has seen interesting developments in the last few years. It is not unusual now to find terms like mental, cognitive, or intelligent used to refer to the internal and external behaviors of plants, and to debate as to what degree plants can be considered sentient beings. Plants seem to show sophisticated mechanisms of interaction at different biological levels, which have been compared to similar mechanisms showed by animals. This chapter provides a review of these mechanisms and discuss whether they can endow the vegetal world of the capacity to perform cognitive operations in order to create adequate responses to environment and social dynamics within plant populations. Particular attention is given to the systems of communication within a singular vegetal organism, or between plants of the same or of different vegetal and animal species. Despite the prodigious adaptations they can develop, plants do not seem to have the representational minds that animals have; they nonetheless show complex behavioral patterns and form synergistic networks with other organisms (such as bacteria, fungi and animals), which may support the hypothesis that they might constitute distributed minds as well as the need to redefine the concept of cognition.