Can plants feel pain considering some have physical defences?
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I’ll say that purely as someone in the neuroscience field, absolutely not into vegetal physiology so take that with a grain of salt, someone with a background in vegetal physiology feel free to chime in.
I would say no. Pain is the interpretation of nociceptive signals. Nociceptive signals are roughly danger signals detected by the organism, like when you cut yourself you will send a nociceptive signal to your brain, your brain will interpret it as pain.
Thus you need a nervous system to be able to integrate noxious stimuli as pain and thus feel pain. Plants do not have nervous system so they can’t feel pain.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised if they can still react to noxious stimuli from the exterior by detecting molecules related to a lesion. It wouldn’t be that they feel pain but that they can react to tissular damages.
I’m no specialist in this field but I would think that to feel anything one would need a brain as all sensations happen with the brain. Interesting question. I know though that plants are definitely sentient in their own unique ways.
They don’t have nerves to signal pain, but they can respond to damage by using a chemical response. Felling really require some degree of intellect which plants lack.
Pain is defined as a neurological signal to your brain. Plants lack brains so they cannot have pain by that definition. If you have a different definition of pain based on the general idea of sensing pain not requiring a brain and neurons, then whether or not plants can feel pain depends on how you define pain.
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