What is the awareness of a plant?

you get the idea...a spin off of the rock thread, this one about plants.

 

There isn't any difference from tripping from a plant or chemical in my opinion, one was synthesized by a human and one was synthesized by a plant (from evolution and by chance, ITS NOT LIKE IT WAS MEANT TO BE THERE FROM SOME GOD AND SUPERIOR TO CHEMICAL DRUGS).

Unless your talking about the actual concoiusness of a plant, then correct me lol. If that's the case, why is it in this forum?

 

*correcting*

why not?

really, i posted here only because there is a community that frequents this particular forum that i enjoy conversing with.

you could post the same question in every forum on this site and get a completely different thread everytime. im interested in this one.

 

What does it mean to be aware?

 

possesing a conciousness to call its own. somthing that is self existing

 

this is where im trying to go with this thread.....
iv asked myself "what kind of conciousness do other living things possess" (animals or plants) iv been observing my own conciousness for as long as i can remember, and then when i was 13 years old i ate 5 hits of lsd, (i hadnt even smoked weed before). i remember being so blown away by the fact that conciousness as i was expiriencing it (with lsd) was possible. it was somthing indescribable, somthing i could never have previously understood, because i lacked anykind of refrence point. it was a realm so foreign to anything i had previously known. then later on i would be blown away by a very differnt kind conciousness expirienced with salvia. then on and on it went with various psychedelics....

we know that human beings arent very good at accuratly percieving the world in which we live. the spectrum of light we are able to take in with the bodies we have is very limited, compared to what we've discovered through our technology. (ultraviolet light being one example that is out of our scope)

in 1890 a man named George Stratton invented a pair of glasses that would flip the images we see upsidedown. (or rather rightside up, for the image that the retina of our eyes see is inverted) in his expriement he wore the glasses for eight days in a row. On the fourth day, things seemed to be upright rather than inverted. He also found that after removing the reversing lenses, it took several hours for his vision to return to normal.

i hear these things, and i realize that humans arent nessesarily a reliable viewpoint through which to observe the nature of the realm we find ourselves in. i mean, shit, our eyes will flip the world upside down to give us an image we are more comfortable with.
we are limited in observing only that which our conciousness can encompass. and so i wondered, first... what kind of conciousness do other kinds of animals possess? it is clearly somthing different than our own, and really somthing we have no point of refrence for....bats observe nature being able to sence and respond to sonar waves. and bees are more complex than we'll ever probably know. i look around and can see that this is happening, different types of awarness are abundant in the animal kingdom.

so then i start wondering about plants. they are living, but they dont posess the same kinds of sences that we have to percieve the world with.....well, what then? somthing foreign, most definatly.

then i have to wonder, can i better tune myself into what plants are doing, in an effort to understand the type of conciousness they possess? and in doing so i try to observe very closely the way specific plants interact with my own conciousness. how do i feel in their presence? how does my body react with them when i injest them? how does my conciousness react with them when i injest them? ....ect
there are a number of different kinds of plants on the planet, all of them effect us in different ways. some heal, some kill, some make us sleepy, some make us energetic, some invite us into an increadible psychedelic expirience....lol

this is kind of my trip.....expanding my own awarness through exploring others

 

What the fuck is consciousness? This is a far more interesting question to me.

 

awareness?

 

to me, its the same as asking..."what am i"

 

that's easier to answer than "why am I here?"


Why Am I Here? - A Fundamental Question
Why am I here on earth? Where did I come from? What am I worth? Do I have any intrinsic value? Do I serve a purpose? These are all fundamental questions. They are life's "big questions." How you answer these questions determines how you see the world and how you treat the world. Because you are a part of the world, how you see the world also determines how you see and treat yourself. So, it's important that we resolve these fundamental questions. And it's important that we discover the honest truth. Wrong answers to important questions aren't helpful.

Where do we begin in our search for the truth? We begin at the beginning. Perhaps the most fundamental question is: does God exist? It's fundamental because our answers to the other "big questions" actually hinge on how we answer this significant question. For example…

Why Am I Here? - The Atheistic Worldview
Why I am here? Well, if God doesn't exist, that means that life must have come about through some natural impersonal, unintelligent, and ultimately purposeless process. That means we're ultimately as purposeless as the very process which brought us into existence. Life's just an accident and so are you. You can find short term reasons for living like you're here because your parents wanted to have children, etc., but ultimately you're just an accident and so are your parents. Life is one big accident. You serve no purpose, you'll cause no lasting effect, and in the grand scheme of things your life is utterly meaningless. Without a Creator in the beginning, there was nobody around to put you here on purpose which means you aren't here for a reason. It's that simple.

As far as asking "what am I worth," without God we don't actually have an intrinsic value, at least not an objective one. Our worth is ultimately subjective. You might think you're worth something but someone else might think you're worthless, and as long as there's no transcendent Assessor to have the final say, no one's ultimately right or wrong. In fact, without God there's really no such thing as right or wrong. John Dewey (1859-1952), the famous 20th century atheist explained, "There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."1

Philosophers generally agree: without an absolute God to make the rules, there is no such thing as a moral absolute; there are only preferences. You don't actually have a right to live; you just prefer not to die. Someone else on the other hand might want to kill you regardless of how you feel about it, and who is to say that they're wrong? In the absence of absolute morality, power reigns supreme; the strong survive and the weak get exploited.

Thankfully most governments see it as their duty to uphold what they see as your God-given right to live, and governments also happen to be the strongest institution among men (which means they can enforce morality upon those who don't necessarily agree with your right to live). The founders of the United States of America put it well when they declared, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…" Unfortunately, some governments don't share this worldview and their people suffer terribly for it.

Why Am I Here? - The Theistic Worldview
Why am I here? Well, if God does exist, that means He is ultimate reality. If He created you for a reason, that's ultimately why your here. If you're valuable to Him, that's ultimately what you're worth. What He says is right is absolutely right and what He says is wrong is absolutely wrong. We may be free moral agents with the freedom to make moral decisions, but that doesn't mean we can choose what actually is right or wrong; that just means we're capable of choosing to be right or wrong. God makes the rules. The question is: will He enforce them? Will God ever hold us accountable for our moral decisions? The prevailing instinct among the majority seems to be that, yes, God will hold us accountable. It's as if most people instinctually know that one day they're going to have to explain all the bad things they've done (which of course means that they also instinctually know that there is such a thing as moral absolutes).

The point is, if God really does exist, terms like "justice," "purpose," and "morality" aren't abstract notions: God has a purpose for you (that's why He made you), He's the one who instituted morality, and in the end He'll see that justice prevails. That's a comforting thought to some, but it's terrifying to others.

So don't begin by asking, "Why am I here?" Begin by asking, "Does God exist?" If He doesn't exist there's really no point in asking "why am I here?" - everything is ultimately pointless. And if He does exist, you'll discover your reason for living when you discover who He is. So begin at the beginning. Does God exist?

 

Everything may or may not be conscious. The only reason humans are different is that we can share the contents of our consciousness to eachother, thus allowing us to evidence (in some way) our own consciousness. All other things in the universe may as well be conscious but lack the ability to let any other part of the universe aknowledge this.

 

There is a big difference between awareness and self awareness. I think a brain is necessary for an ego to exist.

 

So does that mean the brain and mind are a package?like the mind brain special?..Without no brain, no mind...Its included in the life deal?

 

Depends on what you consider a mind. But there is a difference between awareness and perception.

 

I'd say you just answered the "why am I here" and "does God exist" questions for yourself, but what are you?

I guarantee it is not any easier to answer than "why am I here".

 

Well, base on what I posted, if you believe in a "God" then what you are is His creation.

If you don't believe in a "God" then what you are is an evolutionary accident of nature, cosmic dust.


if you believe that you are a "God" then you're egotistically delusional and are free to pick either one.

 

we can share the contents of our consciousness with each other, to a degree, because as a species the way in which we expirience the world is similar enough to communicate.
is it within the realm of possibility that other things in the universe also possess this ability, and that we are just unaware of it because it falls outside the realm of that which we are able to ordinarily percieve?

aye....i use the term alot, and what im reffering to is the state in which we find ourselves. the accumulative effect of everything we are taking in and expiriencing right now. its a state that fluctuates throughout the day, depending on our circumstances....(awake, asleep, deja-vu, feverish, spacey, ect.) conciousness is the expirience. the state of being, that we are.

 

how do you know that plants, animals, etc. aren't reflecting on their own consciousness the same way we do? just because they don't physically talk doesn't mean they don't communicate....or maybe they do talk, outside of our limited hearing spectrum.

like for example, Dolphins or other intelligent Cetaceans, imo, no doubt communicate with each other with an intelligence approach regarding existence.

to the OP - read the book Intelligence In Nature by Jeremy Narby. you can even find a sample online.

 

i'm not going to get too much into it but i was eaten and digested by a rose bush on mescaline--and plants have awareness more than you know---btw the main lessen taught to me by that plant was that humans are cancer of the earth----maybe you can change that to humans are a bad virus killing the earth---and the plant knew that

 

that's essentially what Shamanism is, except in a controlled fashion. the Amazonian Shamans receive lots of knowledge from the spirits which dictate the manifestations of certain plants, in the dimension which is beyond the senses and is infact that 1 sense that our 5 senses branch off of.

like I really just don't think a tree can see so much but have nothing to show for it's knowledge, whether visible or invisible.
further more, I think that the reason we are here is to experience, period. and to experience you need awareness.