Ezra Klein

You realize pretty quickly that you have thoughts that you are not thinking.

You have images that you haven't conjured, you know, that you're on the verge of sleep or sleepiness and they just pop into your mind.

Like, where did they come from?

And this idea of thoughts thinking themselves is bizarre to most people, but I just think the poets and novelists are further along than the scientists, as they often are.

And that's one of the reasons I kind of turn toward literature later in the book for a kind of more subtle understanding of the thought process.

Yeah.

So there's a group of scientists, botanists, and they call themselves plant neurobiologists, which is a very tendentious thing to say because there are no neurons involved in plants.

They're trolling more conventional botanists, I think.

No, it's fighting words in the field.

Absolute plant dorks.

And they do all these experiments to see how intelligent plants are, how much they can respond and solve problems and—

And they've also done experiments to try to determine if they're conscious, or I would use the word sentient is more reasonable, although they will use the word conscious.

Do you want to say the difference in your mind between those two words?

Sentience is a kind of more basic form of consciousness.

It's what perhaps all living things have.

It's the ability to sense your environment and recognize what's the valence, is that a positive or negative thing happening, and then respond appropriately.

You know, bacteria can do this.

They have chemotaxis, right?

They can recognize molecules that are food and molecules that are poison and act appropriately.

So it's a very basic form.