Alive is not the correct word to use here. Things that grow and multiply are alive.
Do they mean conscious? There's evidence to suggest plants feel "pain" and are aware when they are damaged. But I don't think plants can accommodate a nervous system sophisticated enough to have thoughts.
You’re welcome to your thoughts but I did want to say- defining a thought is.. well… we get into that whole quagmire of consciousness and sentience. We might FRIMLY stamp our feet that plants lack whatever that is we want to call it… but… society and even science had said that about most animals, many of whom we have only fairly recently demonstrated through newer technologies or stopping to apply old technology and bothering to look… that nah. Lots of animals have cognitive processes we said they didn’t or couldn’t. Dogs, basically humanities evolutionary bestie from way back- lived side to side with us for all recorded history and… we are still struggling to understand their behaviors and comunícate. Communication between organisms as co evolved and similar as man and dog is difficult- plants are en entirely different type of organism. We can’t really even try to apply empathy. A dog we might get some stuff right by similarity. “It seems hurt…” “it’s hostile..”
What does corn do when it doesn’t like you? We have no frame of reference. From our stand point, corn doesn’t appear to really behave or think or feel in any way that looks like those words to us. We barely can relate to concepts of biology in plants but there are some things that are sort of similar enough for us to kinda get it. Their “veins” don’t work quite like ours but the principles are kinda the same. They “eat” or “drink” and “breath” in a way. It’s like me asking you to describe a color- how do you describe blue to me if I’ve never seen blue? You might say it is “cool” or such- use feelings- “calm.” That MIGHT give me some flawed concept- but now… describe the color Mrafladorps- which YOU have never seen, I have never seen, no human has ever seen, and describe it to me in a language humans cannot and do not speak, read, write, or comprehend. And that is what it is like understanding a vastly different life form. We can’t even fully grasp the results of our tools recordings
of our own minds. I do grant that it seems dubious from evidence across known species and observed behavior as well as our understanding of physics and biology that an individual plant would be capable of complex or organized thought as we might conceive it. That does however leave two doors opened at least, asides a fundamental lack of understanding of principles that might make us overlook a valid mechanism of thought. The first being the concept that judging other organisms capability of intelligence or “sentience” based off of our own perception of what those mean is a bit flawed or at least self centered- research does indicates plants Can comunícate and network. At a mechanical level humans are not complex. Our component make up is largely simple biological machines working to form a system. That system becomes a complex thing, an ecosystem of organisms beyond what could be called genetically “us.”
We can grow brain cells and nerve cells and tissues- but most agree that those tissues aren’t “humans” or “organisms” and are too simple to have an identity we would recognize as an organism with rights and “life” beyond the mechanical sense. Certainly not any type of intelligence beyond a logical function or biological programming. The closest thing we have to vague agreement is that at some point when you replicate and link enough of those simple systems and stack them up you get a complex organism with complex thought and intelligence. What point that is… if you find it make sure you let everyone fighting over abortion know because we can’t even agree on when a person becomes a person and even when the cellular seeds of a person begin to exhibit a “human” recognized capacity for thought or intelligence.
At a mechanical level the response you have to reading the stimulus of reading this has more steps and layers but is not really fundamentally different than a blade of grass responding to the wind. Perhaps more generally we can say, we can’t pin point the difference. Input, output. Stimulus triggers chemicals and electrical impulse which causes basic and “instinctual” reactions of simple cells. Somewhere and at some point those reactions produce a slew of thoughts and responses in the organism- or they don’t. Depends. We can’t even prove that any of us have choice and that what appears to be personality or choice aren’t just complex but otherwise predictable chemical reactions. Someone may like SpongeBob or may hate the last Jedi not because of any independent thought but because… the same reason baking soda will bubble up when you pour vinegar on it. That’s a simple reaction and singular. But sometimes you get more bubbles. Sometimes there are none
The composition and purity of the chemicals, the conditions where the interaction are taking place, temperature, elevation… it can change the results. It’s a simple enough reaction to generally be reasonably predicted and it is simple enough to at least understand a root cause of divergence from expectations but to predict the EXACT nuance of how much bubble you’ll get or other properties with accuracy point by point would actually be a fairly involved undertaking of math and scientific precision. And that’s baking soda and vinegar. Simple, small number of things to look at. Now, if the reaction of those components and the viscosity and bubbles and temperature and other things controlled another reaction in a chain and so forth, predicting the entire system would become nigh impossible. We couldn’t definitively say that we knew the out put for an input even if the output at the end of the chain was a light bulb turning on or not. The process has too many dependencies even if each
were simple reactions with few variables. It’s compounded. So whatever I write here might be an inevitable act of chemistry as too will your response to seeing this perhaps. Or not. But we can’t actually say. We don’t really know what thought is or consciousness. Our best guess is it has something to do with certain structures and a complexity in a system. There is to date no effective canine to human translator though so we don’t even know what the inside minds of our furriest pals are let alone some sugarcane. I’m not saying I’m ready to declare avatar a documentary more than a flight of fancy, but I do think there is evidence that plants, or some plants, could be capable of more
Complex thought than might seem evident by individual biology.
Do they mean conscious? There's evidence to suggest plants feel "pain" and are aware when they are damaged. But I don't think plants can accommodate a nervous system sophisticated enough to have thoughts.
Complex thought than might seem evident by individual biology.