I don’t disagree with you, but there’s a body of research about plants’ reactions, and some of them certainly look more like pain than just accommodating to negative stimuli.
There’s a leap between react and feel pain. Pain is a useful evolutionary trait that can help survive. For a plant which can’t react quickly “pain” doesn’t offer any value. Sure, they must have systems “know” there’s harm, but without a way to quickly react it’s detrimental.
dbtng@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Pain isn’t some objective thing. You feel pain differently just within your own body, based on where and what kind of damage is being done. A plant reacting to damage is pain, just because it’s not the same as us doesn’t mean it isn’t pain. We know plants react to damage, and that’s what pain is, they even signal other nearby plants of danger.
offspec@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Recent studies show that plants literally respond to anesthetics in a way that is indicative of them preventing “pain” pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6215046. Similarly they also recently showed that plants can be desensitized to negative stimuli, here they drop a plant that physically reacts to stimulus and record the expressed atp. By a thousand or so drops the plant is no longer reactive to the minor stimulus, but still reactive to other similarly impactful stimuli. This could suggest that the plant is able to remember the consequences of the dropping and is no longer inciting a stress response, whereas new/known bad stimuli are still demanding of a defensive stress response.
I just don’t think plant life is as clear cut as people make it out to be. There are more studies showing things like related bean stalks grabbing the same poles but unrelated stalks avoiding sharing a pole together, or trees using root systems to provide nutrients to neighboring trees that would otherwise starve out.