I think a lot about what it would be like to be a plant or more specifically, what a plant experiences as it goes about the business of living.

The fact that I persist in what is probably an impossible task I owe to Thomas Nagel and his essay “What is it like to be a bat?“ That essay really pissed me off, which, I suppose, is a good thing since it made me think about ways in which we connect to the world in which we live. And it got me reading Phenomenology and various philosophies of the mind. So all in all, a good thing that anger.

The thing is that Nagel is almost certainly right, although what his rightness means to the larger question of the status and importance of subjective experience I don’t know.

I can’t imagine what it is like to experience light like the lupin does. But what I can do is stretch my conceptual edges outward toward “plantness” using what I observe, and what I learn about how it lives and then compare those things to my animal situation. That isn’t experiencing “what it is like” to be a lupin, but it’s something.

For example, the seed pod is how Lupinus polyphyllus (Red Castle) is in October. It’s fine red flowers have long gone, the flowers not really being the point of life for the lupin.  That furry, mousey-looking seed pod, that’s the point of things. All of its life energies point to the production of seed. The lure of its pollen attracts butterflies and bees, the beauty of its flowers attracts me and between me and the bee we propagate the plant’s life, ensuring a home for its resultant seeds. Apart from the question of awareness, how different is that from the strategies I as a mother have utilized to ensure the survival of my children in what is sometimes a hostile world?

There is the question of awareness, of course, and it can’t be discounted.  I can think about my children’s future, be aware that they will have time long after I am dead and a lupin cannot do that. I can admire the beauty and efficiency of a lupin seed pod; at best the lupin perceives me as alternate light states as I block then move out of the way of it’s light source, and even then there is no awareness, just a change in chemical and physical states as the plant adjusts. But still, what underlies my ability to think about the future is the same set of biological imperatives that generated the lupin’s lures.

Bodily states, it seems to me, are the only basis through which I can reasonably continue the impossible quest of trying to understand the experience of being a plant. My awareness, must, at bottom, be related to a functional bodily state. That is, awareness must have evolved predicated upon some other non-aware function. This must be true since at some point in our evolutionary history we were not capable of awareness and today we are. Unless of course awareness is an alien implant.

Kidding aside, it is there, in that join, the origin state that makes possible awareness, that is the place I try to reach, and that is the place where I think I can come closest to stretching myself out far enough to understand something so radically other as a plant.