Hey, let's not insult plants like that
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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if you rank "care about plants" people way up there with AI worshippers, you're lost to propaganda.
Do “people who care about plants” really think they have feelings and are intelligent? I consider myself a person who cares about plants and I think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
It's used to discourage effort and to minimize the suffering of non-human animals by trivializing it: "even plants feel pain, pain is everywhere, there is no point thinking about reducing pain and suffering, it's futile."
Such people usually have some other criteria of "who matters", which ignores suffering. Usually, it's a hierarchy.
The same hierarchy extends, at upper levels, to human intraspecies hierarchies, which is how you realize that the AI bro TESCREALists are fascists, racists, eugenicists and so on. They mention sentience in passing, and then skip to "intelligence", a much more vague concept, but something that they love to track ... as in the tradition of IQ and race science.
think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
Just to play devil's advocate.... The more we understand about consciousness and the more we study animals like invertebrates, the more we keep finding out our previous assumptions keep getting proven wrong.
Terms like feelings, emotions, and intelligence are all open to interpretation and debate.
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I think that part of the memr isn't about "caring about plants", but about people who use that argument against vegetarians. I've met quite a few dumb fucks of this sort and immediately thought of them. While plants, fungi, and all living organisms are more complex and valuable than most of us think, there's a huge difference in suffering between killing a vertebrate and picking lettuce.
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Why bring in the plant thing? I don't think I've seen anyone talk about that. The ai death cult thing sure, but the plant thing I haven't even seen before. Seems weird.
I have, as a rebuttal to vegetarianism. It's really dumb.
I have, unfortunately. It's an argument made to trivialize the suffering of animals (i.e. under human control) by making pain and suffering an unavoidable and universal constant (appealing to the futility and foolishness of trying to reduce it or think about it.)
Seems more niche than the ai argument but idk it's clearly something that happens often enough to you to bother you so go off monarch
It's niche to you.
Plants probably do have their own version of feelings, like any living organism. Just not human ones.
The smell of grass cutting is a warning to other grass.
A warning to do what? Run?
From what I understand it's a pheromone(?) reaction that causes the grass to send water and nutrients lower down into the plant, so they can more easily survive being grazed on / lawnmowered.
There are evolutionary mechanisms that let many plants excrete foul tasting or smelling compounds when they’re alerted to nearby danger, from their other leaves being eaten, or those nearby that release warning compounds.
Plants also work in tandem with fungus and other microbial life to sort of message needs to get support for survival, possibly defense as well.
To get their affairs in order
There are a bunch of people who've bought into the enchanting myth that plants feel things and "scream in pain".
It's not really surprising since most people don't know botany or plant psychology, but love a nice TED talk.
Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness: Trends in Plant Science
I think people liken it to human consciousness because that's what they know, but I think most people understand that's an abstraction and the reality is much more sciencey and nuanced
Plants absolutely "feel" things, they can sense gravity and the sun, some plants respond directly to touch (Venus flytrap, shameplant), there's tons of research on their ability to "hear" (check out buzz pollination and beach evening primrose, super interesting). They have vibrational and chemical communication abilities we're only just beginning to understand. If you mean they don't feel human emotions, well yeah, they're not human. But to say they don't feel is simply inaccurate.
Paywall so I can't actually read the whole article but from the abstract:
Based on a survey of the brain anatomy, functional complexity, and behaviors of a broad spectrum of animals, criteria were established for the emergence of consciousness.
"We've drawn an arbitrary line around 'consciousness' and have decided what's on either side" isn't exactly the concrete dismissal they seem to think it is.
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A lot of plants put out those smells as a way of saying ‘something’s eating me!’ to the local predators.
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The typical smell from cut grass is actually microbes. The soil is very much disturbed by the way we cut grass (not talking about reaping hay/wheat/etc here, just your typical suburbanite with a lawn mower). I can't remember what they are now for the life of me, but the microbiology professor at my college loved explaining to the younguns that the reason the local water tasted/smelled bad (compared to most places) was that the same variety of microbe responsible for the cut grass smell was present in high concentrations in the source for the city water. Once he pointed it out, you could pick out the similarity.
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Trees and Mushrooms are known to communicate. If you fell a tree, the whole forest will know within minutes. Whether they have feelings or not I can't tell.
Also the reason Giraffes eat from down-wind, so that nearby plants do not deploy (evolved over a long timescale) self-defense mechanisms
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"how do you know YOU aren't an LLM???? Hmmm???"
Because my water usage is very low.
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Learning ≠ intelligence. Intelligence is the presence of parameters in a system that can change and send a signal back to itself.
Plants are NOT intelligent; they simply learn and follow a program, just like a robot vacuum cleaner. They do NOT self-modify.
But AI can be intelligent; this has been possible for a long time.
We might not understand intelligence. Plants might be "intelligent". At minimum we know that plants communicate within their cells and with each other and that they can learn.
I like to fantasize that a large oak is a huge mass of neural tissue and that alder stand that is the largest organism or something is a super brain.
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Fun fact there are theories that the Sun may have a sort of consciousness
There are also theories that corporations are sentient.
There are theories that managers are sentient.
Despite their highest effort.
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