Towards a theoretical foundation for plant cognition and minimal subjective experience

My doctoral project aims to contribute to the understanding of the kinds of plant behavior that can be characterized as cognitive and which may potentially be indicative of a minimal form of consciousness. I will approach these questions by adopting an organizational approach to plant multicellularity, minimal cognition, and subjective experience. Based on recent empirical evidence from plant behavior, some researchers have renewed the claim that plants should be acknowledged as cognitive agents and that such cognitive capacities should be considered to be a mark of a minimal form of subjective experience. These positions are mainly supported by autopoietic, biogenic, and biopsychic approaches to life, or alternatively by claiming functional analogies between cognitive dynamics in plants and metazoans. However, I will argue that these perspectives overlook the specificity of plants and their capacities in relation to cognition. To understand what cognition amounts to in plants, I believe it is necessary to analyze from an organizational and functional perspective the differences and the connections among three issues: (1) the fundamental overall organization of plants multicellularity, (2) minimal cognition in nonneural organisms, and (3) minimal subjective experience as a mode of being.