Plant mind through amalgamated functionalism and its impact on the definition of mind

Abstract

The definition of the mind seems to be a vague and unstable one in the philosophy of mind. This thesis aims to find some solid features through which we could define the mind or chose to remove from its definition with the aid of the analyses of plants, a species quite unlike human beings, and the cognitive capabilities they seemed to possess. After evading the recent objections against multiple realization theory, which is a theory placed at the core of functionalism, and reconciling the embodied and extended mind theses with it, functionalism (or as it is indicated in the thesis; amalgamated functionalism) has taken as the leading theory of mind. The plant mind is investigated in the light of this amalgamated functionalism. The thesis presents the familiar cognitive capabilities plants have and makes a suggestion on which features we definitely should or should not include in the general definition of the mind. In the end, a decision has been made on whether plants are beings endowed with the faculty of the mind.