Damaged plants can send out signals to other plants, and chemicals to repel what is damaging them (to the specific area where the damage is being done) and repair their damage.
Could you please explain how this can be distinguished from wound healing in a human. Like what chemicals are sent out? what is the mechanism? are they transported anywhere in particular? are different signals collated in determining a response or does the same hormone guarantee the same response in a dose dependent manner?
Some plants will avoid growing towards areas that they have been unable to thrive in before.
This is surprising to me, is it distinct from following chemical gradients? I have never seen this, or heard about it. The closest I would say I have ever seen is not growing towards salt or dry soil. What is the evidence here please as I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is there a memory effect? if a grass doesn’t grow south and you put it in a new area will it also not grow south?
You still seem to be talking about things from a purely human perspective. Dogs will damage their feet and not even let you know sometimes.
I’m really not, I had a whole thing about memory and will to live and avoiding areas where I specifically spoke about rats.
Whether or not you notice it (and it’s true that many animals will try to hide injuries, humans included) doesn’t mean there is no modifications to behaviour. E.g. licking, protecting the area (less weight on paw, lifiting it up etc), reacting to the same stimulus more negatively such as not eating or growling etc when being touched.
You literally said she stopped using it. Aka she felt pain. Ever eaten after a dentist when your mouth is still numb? you will straight up bite off chunks of your lips and keep eating. If there was no pain she would keep trying to use it and probably just be confused when it didn’t work. Which btw is how she’ll behave if you anaesthetise her!
Also if you’ve ever noticed her behaviour after removing say a piece of gravel from between the pads in her feet you’ll probably notice despite no damage the first step or two will be tentative. She’s anticipating pain, again behaviour modification.
Plants just don’t do anything like this.
You are asking me to sum up the entire science of plant cognition in such a brief window that I might as well have Wikipedia do it for me.
Also we need to distinguish responding to the environment and even making decisions from experiencing pain.
I can make a robot from Lego that follows a line pretty well but I think we’re all pretty comfortable with the idea it is vanishingly unlikely to feel pain (although there are people who feel punishment machine learning schemes are unethical lol).
No I’m not, I’m asking why you specifically believe those things to be comparable.
What specific knowledge do you have which prompts these apparently very deeply held and unusual beliefs?
Specific knowledge? My whole point here is that there isn’t enough knowledge. Why do I need specific knowledge to say “this field is changing by the day and we keep learning plants are able to do all sorts of things we thought you needed a nervous system for, so it is not inconceivable that plants feel pain?”
You do know that I have never made the claim that plants definitely do feel pain, right? I never even claimed that they feel pain the same way an animal does. I even suggested that what they would feel could be described as pain even though it wasn’t the sort of thing we would anthropogenically think of as pain because we do not have good definitions for the concept of pain or the concept of suffering.
I’m not sure why I need to repeat myself like this when I made all of this clear in my initial post.