ABSTRACT
This chapter defends a relatively new and insightful theory of mind that rejects that assumption, making room for the possibility that plants do have minds, primarily because they are alive. Panpsychism is the idea that all things—not just persons or plants, but also puddles, rocks, planets, hair, fire, worms, birds—have a mind or a mental aspect. Aristotle thought there were three types of psuche, the highest of which was intellect. The two lower types were nutrition and perception. For him, plants engage in nutrition, the lowest sort of soul, but not the other two; nonhuman animals engage in nutrition and perception, but not intellection; and humans engage in all three. Whereas the mechanical philosophy and Radical Behaviorism might seem to nourish the idea of plant minds only by relying on implausible conceptions of minds, things look different with the Computational Theory of Mind.
