Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Sputnik — New Study Suggests Plants Can Learn and Form Memories

The University of Western Australia has published a new study offering evidence that plants are conscious entities who can make links between events to learn about their environment. It was previously thought that only organisms with brains (i.e. most animals) were capable of doing this....
Depends on the definition of "conscious" and "consciousness."

From the POV of monistic idealism, only consciousness exists, that is, consciousness is the Urstoff (primary stuff) and Urgrund (ultimate foundation). This is the view of perennial wisdom.

The other major metaphysical  POV's are 1) monastic materialism, which holds that matter is the Urstoff and Urgund, 2) dualism, which holds that the basic stuffs are mind and matter and the foundation is their relationship, and 3) atomism, which holds that there are two basic stuffs, atoms (elements) and void (space), the foundation being the laws in terms of which they are related. Skepticism is the POV that denies that human can know anything metaphysical and that these are just gratuitous assumptions.

These are the chief metaphysical points of view. There are nuances in each held by different thinker and schools of thought. Epistemology or the study of knowledge, ethics or the study of action, and aesthetics or the study of sensibility are influenced by metaphysical assumptions and these four influence subbranches of thought such as social and political philosophy and natural philosophy, which is now called science.

Everyone has a world view that is implicit and remains so for most people. It is probably impossible to make an entire world view explicit. World views are based on the assumptions of POV whose foundations are metaphysical, epistemological, ethical and aesthetic. These assumptions are the presumptions upon which people operate and for the most part remain hidden and unexamined.

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