Pollan's new book argues plants are far more capable than we assume — they sense, remember and signal without neurons — but he stops short of saying they feel pain. Alex O'Connor had just pressed him on why not. Pollan first answers that avoidance behaviour doesn't require pain, then volunteers the motive behind his own position, and adds that he could be wrong.
guessing. There's a lot of guesswork involved, obviously. But do you
do you think, I mean, so isolating just say pain. Pain is clearly, if we're going to tell a story that it's an evolutionary adaptation, it's clearly really effective at just making us do stuff that like benefits our survival. It takes us out of dangerous situations. It's it like prevents us from doing things again that caused us harm. Like I don't see why I'm not going to sort of search for everything that would sort of transform plant consciousness into ours in some kind of strange muriological experiment. But just something like that. I mean, the sort of, I think you're quite confident in the book, like we really don't think that plants feel pain here. And I kind of want to say, why not? If memory can be done without neurons, if sight and hearing and all of these kinds of things or analogous things can be done without neurons, then why not pain? And wouldn't that be like the primal evolutionary urge? I'm kind of imagining like the ancient sort of single-celled organism, like the very first thing which motivates natural selection is that like one thing helps you survive and one thing doesn't. And this primal feeling of like no to that one and yes to that one seems so significant that why not implants, you know?
But you can do that without pain. You can do that based on, I mean, you know, chemotaxis, what single-celled creatures do, that, you know, they recognize that that's a toxin and that's food. And they move toward the food and away from the toxin. So you can do that without pain. Pain is a really good technique for it. And I, you know, I interviewed another scientist who did believe plants felt pain. And he, you know, when I said, so it hurts them when we eat them, he like shrugged his shoulders and say, yeah, you know, it's a dog-eat-dog world. We have to eat them and they feel pain. And that's just the way it is. So he was, so I did present that point of view. It may be for very self-interested reasons that I gravitate or they don't feel pain because I want to continue eating them with a clear conscience.
Yeah, sure.
But, you know, I could be wrong. I mean, it's, it's, it's, we can't say for sure. You know,
I want to talk about something a bit. I also, I've a fear that people who've sort of tuned into this, um, it might, it might be like a bit much, right? I, I, I, I'd, of course, recommend reading the book, but I don't think I want to be very clear at this juncture, just before I ask you something a bit unrelated. This isn't some strange world we're imagining in which plants are like having sort of experiences similar to human experiences, that they, they can literally see things in the way that we see them, that they hear things, that they can sort of understand music and that kind of stuff. We're not sort of implying anything like that. We're just saying that they have sensory apparatus on the outside and it causes them to behave in particular ways. And we know that they're able to remember certain things. And whatever the explanation for that, the view that it involves some kind of primitive awareness should not be like ruled out of the equation, I think is probably a good summary of where we're at here.