In Trewavas’s assessment, the brain is just one strategy for building intelligence and consciousness. Plants simply took a different evolutionary route, according to their needs: their attention and awareness is localized in each of their parts, but each of their parts communicates and strategizes across the whole, producing consciousness all the same. “The individual plant containing many millions of cells is a self-organizing, complex system with distributed control permitting local environmental exploitation but in the context of the whole plant system,” he writes. “Consciousness is thus
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