PLANT CONSCIOUSNESS? A Biosemiotic and Embodied Cognition Approach

The main goal that motivates the writing of this paper lies in the defence of a thesis: some living organisms of the plant kingdom would manifest in their life form a hypothetical modality of conscious agency. For this purpose, a preliminary outline of a semiotic theory of basal consciousness is offered, that works in the present research as an attempt at the onto-epistemological foundation on which the argumentative product is erected as a resource for the defence of the thesis advocated. First of all, the unfolding of this argumentation is then set out by means of an interdisciplinary exposition of those theoretical corpus that have been selected to provide sense and referential meaning to a potential “Theory of Plant Consciousness”. It manifests, therefore, the logically relational conjugation of conceptual systems belonging to a finite series of theoretical-experimental research spaces of recent emergence in the Western scientific community, such as embodied cognition (with its proposal of basal cognition), "plant neurobiology" and, finally, biosemiotics (with the extension of the semiotic paradigm to the plant kingdom, giving rise to phytosemiotics). Finally, it concludes with a series of considerations on the research carried out.