Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I met with mockery from Ed Feser and other Neo-Aristotelians for suggesting that plants might be sentient. (Notice how Ed used comics implying that, if Callahan thinks plants might be sentient, then he must think they are monsters ready to attack humans! Note: Aristotelians think that, say, frogs are sentient. Does that mean they constantly fear attacks by monster frogs?) One argument I met with is that plants have no sensory mechanism, so, one should conclude, no sensations. Beh: We are naturally more familiar with the sensory systems in animals than those in plants, but plants have developed equally sophisticated systems . While plants apparently lack the capacity to communicate with one another by sound [which more recent research shows is untrue!] they have, for example, at least three different light-sensing systems, each of which involves a different light-absorbing mechanism and controls an entirely different set of functions... plants can do almost everything animals can ...

Ed responds to a blog post of mine here . In a seemingly common move by modern Aristotelians, he first plays the "but he doesn't really understand what we are saying" card. Well, no, Ed, I understood perfectly well that the issue was about qualia, about whether there is something it is like to be a plant. That being cleared up, let's get down to the empirical issues that we might use to judge whether there is something it is like to be a plant. Here, I believe the key issue is that much of the activity of plants does not look like activity to us, so that only careful scientific investigation reveals how active they actually are. For instance, Ed says: "Hence, imagine that dry grass could feel the oppressive heat of the sun or experience thirst and the craving for water. What would be the point? It would not be able to do anything about its circumstances and would thus, unlike an animal, suffer without being able even in principle to remedy the circumstan...

Contrary to Aristotle, plants are active and communicate to each other , with sounds among other methods. This certainly does not invalidate all of Aristotle's metaphysics. But it certainly does mean neo-Aristotelians ought to drop the idea that plants lack sensations. Whether anything at all has a "vegetative soul" is an interesting question -- I doubt it -- but if anything does, it ain't plants. And, of course, Aristotle would have thought of mushrooms as a sort of plant, and would have had no idea that the mushroom is only the visible tip of a much vaster organism 1 , and one that lives in a totally different way to plants. Having made the mistake of tying Aristotelian metaphysics to Aristotelian natural science once before (at the time of the Scientific Revolution), do neo-Aristotelians really want to do that twice? 1 -The largest known fungal organism in the world stretches out over 2200 acres, is 2400 years old, and weighs perhaps 600 tons.