- Born
- 29 September 1971
- Field
- scientist, university teacher
- In the library
- 4 works, named in 12 passages elsewhere
Minimal intelligence defined
In the 2015 paper with Baluška, the stated aim was to work out which behavioural and biological properties warrant ascribing minimal intelligence to eukaryotes1. The authors tried to see how much intelligent behaviour general mechanisms can explain as cognition scales up. They did not treat scaling up as a problem. They treated it as a chance to find shared building blocks of intelligence across living systems2. Baluška and Levin later cited the paper when reviewing cognition outside the central nervous system8.
Plants as predictors
The 2017 paper with Friston asks whether plants, like animals, are predictive processors, and what form that machinery might take3. Their example is a plant on a seashore. Its roots can follow a salt gradient and turn away from the source. The authors compare this to saccades in animal vision.
Disputes and wider use
Pecere places Calvo in the dispute over plant intelligence. Taiz and co-authors objected to talk of plant learning and feeling as anthropomorphism. Calvo and Trewavas answered that this was circular reasoning7. Pecere also quotes Calvo saying that plants lack neurons and animal intelligence, and that plant neurobiology treats plants as information-processing networks built from cells6. Khattar and colleagues, with Calvo as co-author, hypothesised that researchers' openness to other knowledge systems shapes their views on plant intelligence5.
Understand what sort of behavioral and biological properties and capacities warrant the ascription of a form of minimal intelligence to eukaryotes; and
Calvo P, Baluška F, 2015 · Conditions for minimal intelligence across eukaryota: a cognitive science… · open at passage 5We aim to assess how much of intelligent behavior can be accounted for by positing overarching sets of mechanisms which can be generally ascribed as cognition scales up.
Calvo P, Baluška F, 2015 · Conditions for minimal intelligence across eukaryota: a cognitive science… · open at passage 8we elaborate on the possibility that plant neurobiology may throw a distinctive light upon the more or less radical form that such predictive machinery may take.
Calvo P, Friston K, 2017 · Predicting green: really radical (plant) predictive processing · open at passage 4Roots may keep track of the salt gradient, and turn from the source of salt stress. In this way, plant roots can resample via active inference.
Calvo P, Friston K, 2017 · Predicting green: really radical (plant) predictive processing · open at passage 18We hypothesized that academic researchers in plant-related biological sciences who are more open to different forms of knowledge and ontologies
Khattar J, Calvo P, Vandebroek I, Pandolfi C…, 2022 · Understanding interdisciplinary perspectives of plant intelligence: Is it a… · open at passage 12Plant neurobiology interprets plants as information-processing networks with individual cells as computational building blocks
Pecere P, 2026 · Plant cognition after Darwin: historical and epistemological remarks · open at passage 52Taiz and his co-authors (2019) protested against the resurgent “anthropomorphism” of those who talk of learning and feeling of plants. Calvo and Trewavas (2020) replied: “This is surely circular reasoning”.
Pecere P, 2026 · Plant cognition after Darwin: historical and epistemological remarks · open at passage 51examining examples of cognition outside of the CNS domain of life (Calvo and Baluška, 2015; Lyon, 2015; Calvo, 2016)
Baluška F, Levin M, 2016 · On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems · open at passage 8
2015
2015 · read
2016
2016 · read
2017
2017 · read
2022
2022 · read