Is Cannabis Intelligent?

Pictures are of the transition zone between trunk and root, of a male Kerala x Skunk #1 plant, that was culled at approximately 4 weeks from seed. This part of plant anatomy has been studied in plants, along with studies in intelligence in plants, and the scientific results indicate that this zone may have cells similar to neural cells in animals. Could this be possible for cannabis? If so, these pictures display the area in which cannabis plants' "brain" would reside.

Root apex transition zone: a signalling?response nexus in the root

Plant intelligence

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(Short Answer)

No.

(Slightly longer answer)

It has no nervous system, it does not feel pain, it cannot move, it has no concept of 'self' or 'other'. Humans suffer from hyperactive agency detection regarding all sorts of various inanimate objects.

From wiki
The high cost of failing to detect agents and the low cost of wrongly detecting them has led researchers to suggest that people possess a Hyperactive Agent Detection Device, a cognitive module that readily ascribes events in the environment to the behavior of agents
 
Maybe, just maybe, hundreds of thousands of years ago, cannabis developed Cannibinoids and THC as humans developed the endocannibinoid system. This symbiotic relationship would ensure survival of its species due to ongoing cultivation and consumption by a more intelligent animal, us.
So maybe it is intelligent..........?
 
(Short Answer)

No.

(Slightly longer answer)

It has no nervous system, it does not feel pain, it cannot move, it has no concept of 'self' or 'other'. Humans suffer from hyperactive agency detection regarding all sorts of various inanimate objects.

From wiki

Also from Wikipedia (
Plants do not have a brain or neuronal network, but reactions within signalling pathways may provide a biochemical basis for learning and memory.[27] Controversially, the brain is used as a metaphor in plant intelligence to provide an integrated view of signalling.[28]

I didn't say plants have brains/nervous systems, I said that it's been found that plants possess neuron-like cellular structures. ;)

There have been studies of certain plants, that have been proven to communicate, chemically, with each other. They seek out sunlight, they grab hold of structures, they climb, they even communicate with each other. Plants are by no means inanimate. How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other

Maybe, just maybe, hundreds of thousands of years ago, cannabis developed Cannibinoids and THC as humans developed the endocannibinoid system. This symbiotic relationship would ensure survival of its species due to ongoing cultivation and consumption by a more intelligent animal, us.
So maybe it is intelligent..........?

Interesting concept. I'm not sure cannabis chose us, but if there ever was a symbiotic relationship, it's the ones we've developed with cultivating our own medicine.

Plants are not so different from us. They are multicellular organisms, evolved from the same primordial soup that we came from. Animals and plants evolved alongside each other. I'm not exactly sure when cannabis finally appeared in its present form, but we humans did at some point in the last couple million years, give or take a whole lot of time.
 
I believe that everything, plants included, has consciousness to some degree. But I in no way believe that cannabis is "intelligent" in the way that humans are intelligent. Then again humans don't always seem all that intelligent to me either.
 
My two cents on the topic? Well yes and no!

First the easy one, no! No plants are not on the same level of intelligence we are, as to my knowledge no one has ever had a true back and forth conversation with a plant. Sure we watch and "listen" to them to get an idea of what they need, want, and prefer but thats not the same as actuallly talking.

Now for the not so easy one, yes! Yes plants are intelligent, in their own way. Plants are smart enough to know what they like, want, and need and will try its best to avoid things that are harmful to them, changing the directoion of growth toward a light sorce is proof of this as without light the plants dies. Plants have also been shown to develop a sort of symbiotic relationship with its caregivers (I.e. You), each being effected by the others moods and behaviour. In other words the more love and happy emotions you share with your plants the better off they will be and the opposite is true as well negative emotions will stunt your plants and perhaps more.

The truth is we don't know how intelligent anything other than us humans are, because we have no way of understanding how they communicate and as such we pass them off as less intelligent than us.be it right or wrong, it is how it is.
 
There are ways it makes ME more intelligent. That's really all I can give you. All plants react to their environment, but intelligence is several levels above that.
 
Plants are intelligent to a certain degree. I think it's interesting how they can communicate, I forget the details but they've done studies and found that trees that were attacked by herbivores sent out chemical signals to other nearby trees causing them to increase their defenses to prevent or protect against an attack. I know they've done studies like this with lots of different plants including Tobacco, it would be interesting to see a study like that done with Cannabis. Just a thought.
 
Plants are not intelligent, in any way.

They don't seek out light; rather, the plant matter bends and moves toward light due to phototropism, basically, growing unevenly in a particular direction because the light is only hitting it from that direction. So, rather than the the plant seeking the light, the plant is forced by its own matter to grow toward the light. This is just cause and effect, like allowing a draft to feed a fire.

Chemical communication is also not intelligence. It's just chemistry and physics. Our individual cells communicate in this way, and in even more advanced ways, but there is no intelligence behind it. Just cause and effect. Another example of this might be the squishing of a bee. This isn't a cry for help from the bee, it's the result of being crushed. Yet it acts as a signal and attracts other bees to the area, much like your trees signaling other trees example.

As far as emotions are concerned, this may be similar to our ability to get healthier faster with happy thoughts. The plant is doing well so the grower is happy, tending more carefully and dutifully to his plant, making the plant grow better, making the grower happier, and so on. Feedback loop.

Carnivorous plants display apparently intelligwnt behaviors as well, but again, it's just cause and effect.

A plant doesn't direct it's own growth, it's genetics and environment do.


Now, what's fun to think about, is how intelligence is really little more than a highly convoluted version of these natural processes. Simple systems building on each other until intelligence emerges as a result, as the sum of those systems. Break it down far enough, we're not much more than a trillion plants working in concert as a single unit. That's, essentially, intelligence.

Or so I say. I may be full of it.
 
Philosophically, of course cannabis is intelligent. Some of us simply understand the language of cannabis better than others.

Scientifically, we don't know enough about cannabis to make a determination of it's medical usefulness because we have idiots in government keeping this plant on Schedule 1 and thus blocking vital medical and horticultural research. Thus, intelligence is relative to the amount of institutional garbage we retain for stupid reasons.
 
Or so I say. I may be full of it.
Indeed. Experiments on ISS have shown that when you remove cause (gravity), effect still takes place. I leave you with this pri.org summary of extensive research by Michael Pollan:

New research on plant intelligence may forever change how you think about plants
January 10, 2014 · 2:00 PM EST

The Intelligent Plant. That is the title of a recent article in The New Yorker – and new research is showing that plants have astounding abilities to sense and react to the world.

But can a plant be intelligent? Some plant scientists insist they are – since they can sense, learn, remember and even react in ways that would be familiar to humans.

Michael Pollan, author of such books as "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "The Botany of Desire," wrote the New Yorker piece about the developments in plant science. He says for the longest time, even mentioning the idea that plants could be intelligent was a quick way to being labeled "a whacko." But no more, which might be comforting to people who have long talked to their plants or played music for them.

The new research, he says, is in a field called plant neurobiology – which is something of a misnomer, because even scientists in the field don't argue that plants have neurons or brains.

"They have analagous structures," Pollan explains. "They have ways of taking all the sensory data they gather in their everyday lives ... integrate it and then behave in an appropriate way in response. And they do this without brains, which, in a way, is what's incredible about it, because we automatically assume you need a brain to process information."

And we assume you need ears to hear. But researchers, says Pollan, have played a recording of a caterpillar munching on a leaf to plants – and the plants react. They begin to secrete defensive chemicals – even though the plant isn't really threatened, Pollan says. "It is somehow hearing what is, to it, a terrifying sound of a caterpillar munching on its leaves."

Pollan says plants have all the same senses as humans, and then some. In addition to hearing, taste, for example, they can sense gravity, the presence of water, or even feel that an obstruction is in the way of its roots, before coming into contact with it. Plant roots will shift direction, he says, to avoid obstacles.

So what about pain? Do plants feel? Pollan says they do respond to anesthetics. "You can put a plant out with a human anesthetic. ... And not only that, plants produce their own compounds that are anesthetic to us." But scientists are reluctant to go as far as to say they are responding to pain.

How plants sense and react is still somewhat unknown. They don't have nerve cells like humans, but they do have a system for sending electrical signals and even produce neurotransmitters, like dopamine, serotonin and other chemicals the human brain uses to send signals.

"We don't know why they have them, whether this was just conserved through evolution or if it performs some sort of information processing function. We don't know. There's a lot we don't know," Pollan says.

And chalk up another human-like ability – memory.

Pollan describes an experiment done by animal biologist Monica Gagliano. She presented research that suggests the mimosa pudica plant can learn from experience. And, Pollan says, merely suggesting a plant could learn was so controversial that her paper was rejected by 10 scientific journals before it was finally published.

Mimosa is a plant, which looks something like a fern, that collapses its leaves temporarily when it is disturbed. So Gagliano set up a contraption that would drop the mimosa plant, without hurting it. When the plant dropped, as expected, its leaves collapsed. She kept dropping the plants every five to six seconds.

"After five or six drops, the plants would stop responding, as if they'd learned to tune out the stimulus as irrelevent," Pollan says. "This is a very important part of learning – to learn what you can safely ignore in your environment."

Maybe the plant was just getting worn out from all the dropping? To test that, Gagliano took the plants that had stopped responding to the drops and shook them instead.

"They would continue to collapse," Pollan says. "They had made the distinction that [dropping] was a signal they could safely ignore. And what was more incredible is that [Gagliano] would retest them every week for four weeks and, for a month, they continued to remember their lesson."

That's as far out as Gagliano tested. It's possible they remember even longer. Conversely, Pollan points out, bees that are given a similar dishabituation test forget what they've learned in as little as 48 hours.

Pollan says not everyone accepts that what Gagliano describes is really learning. In fact, there are many critics with many alternative theories for explaining the response the plants are having. Still ...

"Plants can do incredible things. They do seem to remember stresses and events, like that experiment. They do have the ability to respond to 15 to 20 environmental variables," Pollan says. "The issue is, is it right to call it learning? Is that the right word? Is it right to call it intelligence? Is it right, even, to call what they are conscious. Some of these plant neurobiologists believe that plants are conscious – not self-conscious, but conscious in the sense they know where they are in space ... and react appropriately to their position in space."

Pollan says there is no agreed definition of intelligence. "Go to Wikipedia and look up intelligence. They despair of giving you an answer. They basically have a chart where they give you nine different definitions. And about half of them depend on a brain – they refer to abstract reasoning or judgment.

"And the other half merely refer to a problem-solving ability. And that's the kind of intelligence we are talking about here. ... So intelligence may well be a property of life. And our difference from these other creatures may be a matter of difference of degree rather than kind. We may just have more of this problem-solving ability and we may do it in different ways."

Pollan says that really freaks people out – "that the line between plants and animals might be a little softer than we traditionally think of it as."

And he suggests that plants may be able to teach humans a thing or two, such as how to process information without a central command post like a brain.
 
Not sure what you're talking about in regard to ISS experiments. The lack of gravity causes almost everything to react differently, be it a decrease in bone density, the form fire takes, etc.

Anyway, this is about plants.

Regarding sound. Plants don't hear. But, sound is vibration, and plants are affected by vibration. Some plants are likely to be more affected than others, and certain patterns and intensities would also be different between species.

Considering the vast number of adaptations life has invented via evolution through natural selection, I would not be surprised that a plant might develop the automatic ability to produce toxins when a vibration pattern is present. While these people don't seem to offer a suggestion of the actual mechanism, similar effects are seen via other external stimuli.

For instance, the concentration of auxins on the dark side of a plants stem. This concentration causes the plant to lean toward a light source, as auxins are growth hormones, causing the dark side of the plant to grow faster than the lighted side, making the plant appear to intelligently track the light source. While we aren't 100% on the cause of the auxin concentration, we do know that the effect of the plant growing toward a light source is caused by that concentration on the dark side. But, plants don't see.

So, in the presence of a vibration pattern/intensity, I see no reason why this couldn't cause a reaction of increased toxin production. Vibrations cause pressure on cells, proteins are affected, chemicals produced, etc. There is no need to invoke hearing or intelligence. The plant doesn't have the ability so it can ward off enemies. The plant had the ability, via mutation, which warded off enemies, causing the new mutant DNA to better proliferate, and become the dominant strain.

This isn't magic, and it isn't intelligence, it's simply cause and effect.

The very fact that the plant would react only to the sound, or vibration, and not the actual action, is telling. Intelligenc, as stated by the authors, is the ability to process and link external stimuli and make decisions based on that stimulus.

The plant in question does not appear to be doing this. It is reacting to the sound alone. One would think that, in an intelligent plant, defoliation via pests, actual plant tissue damage, would be more likely to cause the described reaction of toxin production. Yet this isn't the case. The sound of the caterpillar approaching, or walking across the blade, would be better as well. It appears, from their own experiment, that the plant is exhibiting a reaction to a cause, rather than making a directed decision based on composited external stimuli.

An easy explanation for why it didn't, is that it never developed the ability in an environment where such mutations were beneficial to proliferation. However, the vibration based adaptation did develop and proliferate.

Look up how the Venus flytrap functions. At the highest level, it appears intelligent, as it "chooses" which food to trap, and which not. But, we've learned that this is no more than cause and effect.

Fire "searches" for fuel and air. Fire "behaves" based on external stimuli. Some cultures believed fire to have intelligence, based on its lifelike behavior and qualities. Fire is not intelligent. I'm sure you would agree.

I'll attribute supposed memory to the same physiological processes.

Not that this is scientific, but it is logical.

If plants were intelligent, and could hear, could remember things, one would expect the plant to remember the feeling and sound of a caterpillar moving toward a leaf, moving across a leaf, biting into the leaf, after being munched on previously. If the plant were intelligent and had a memory, it would remember the sensations leading to the "sound" of being munched on, and would react to the preceding stimuli before the caterpillar had a chance to ever take a bite.

Also, we would see this in far more plants, and plants would react to far more stimuli in this way, if it were any more than a localized adaptation to a particular pest. We do not.

Show me a plant that does that, and maybe I'll consider the possibility.


I think the big issue here is, we're applying a relatively new adaptation, intelligence, to much older life, plants. Intelligence depends on these same features plants have, cause, effect, adaptation via natural selection. Intelligence has more going on, but it is related to the same cause and effect.
 
Not sure what you're talking about in regard to ISS experiments. The lack of gravity causes almost everything to react differently, be it a decrease in bone density, the form fire takes, etc.
That's right, with one exception --> plants! Lack of gravity is not enough to phase them.

Anyway, this is about plants.

Did you even read the article I posted before saying that?
 
Unless that plant is of a geotropic/gravitropic variety. In such a plant, growth in space would be a major issue.

Most plants are phototropic, so light has far more effect on their growth than gravity. High gravity would certainly have an effect.

Plants don't grow up, roots don't grow down. Plants grow toward light (photophilic) and roots grow away from light (photophobic). It happens to appear that they grow up or down, but that's simply an effect of light sources being relatively up. Up is, of course, all relative.

We should expect no to little effect on phototropic plants in lowered gravity.


Of course I did. I found it unconvincing regarding plant intelligence. Nothing they said shows any kind of decision making. Signals between parts of the plant aren't intelligence, they're cause and effect. Yes, the brain uses signal transmission in a similar way, but signals in the brain aren't intelligence either. They are necessary for intelligence to emerge, but by thenselves, they're just signals, like the constant signal to the heart to beat. Even a sort of memory can exist without a brain, like muscle memory. But this isn't the kind of memory we usually mean when we say memory, and it isn't related to intelligence.

Computers communicate all the time. They do seemingly intelligent things, and even appear to make choices. Yet, with the exception of advanced AI, computers, like plants, do what their programming tell them. Cause and effect. It may appear intelligent, but it's just an appearance.
 
Maybe evolution made the plants that were attractive to humans ie cannabis succeed and grow a small symbiotic relationship of sorts but it wouldn't be the plants intellegence as much as the power of natural selection


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