Plant Systemic Intelligence Without a Central Organ is a falsifiable conceptual working paper that develops a framework for understanding plant intelligence as distributed, resource-efficient, and state-dependent regulation of living processes. The paper does not attribute consciousness, intentionality, or neural cognition to plants. Instead, it proposes that plants can be understood as living systems that process environmental stimuli through decentralized cellular, physiological, and ecological mechanisms. The framework synthesizes existing findings from plant physiology, stress priming, systemic signaling, plant memory research, and mycorrhizal studies. It distinguishes between instantaneous signal traces, medium-term cellular state changes, and long-term priming or structural memory. It further considers the rhizosphere, mycorrhizae, hyphae, arbuscules, and soil–root–fungal interfaces as external ecological pre-structures that may influence plant response capacity. A central claim of the paper is that plant environmental information should not be understood as a stored copy of a stimulus, but as an altered response function. A prior stimulus is considered functionally relevant only if it produces a measurable state change that persists beyond the immediate stimulus and alters a later response. The paper introduces the concept of an activation range to describe the conditions under which subsequent stimuli may reactivate prior preconditioning. The contribution of the paper lies in organizing heterogeneous findings into a testable conceptual structure. It proposes falsification criteria, operational distinctions, and measurable parameters for evaluating claims about plant information processing, memory, readout, mycorrhiza-mediated effects, and minimal regulation. The work is intended as a theoretical and methodological framework, not as an experimental primary study or a claim of plant consciousness.
Rudolf Schaefer (Thu,) studied this question.