> because as cool as plants and fungi are, you don't see any of them doing anything that one can imagine leading to intelligence in any form that we'd recognise.
Reminds me of a documentary I once watched, watching a timelapse of a vine growing upwards. It grows spiraling, and it looks like it is "looking" for where the walls are, adjusting its trajectory whenever it touches a wall.
It's fascinating, and for me it definitely does have some quality of "intelligence" to it.
That's true - and we see that sort of "seeking" behaviour in single celled organisms as well (e.g. https://www.mit.edu/~kardar/teaching/projects/chemotaxis(And...) - but this can be explained by a pretty simple feedback loop, and so the the difference in complexity between that and, say, the ability to keep track of different individuals in a social group and reacti differently, is orders of magnitude.
Reminds me of a documentary I once watched, watching a timelapse of a vine growing upwards. It grows spiraling, and it looks like it is "looking" for where the walls are, adjusting its trajectory whenever it touches a wall.
It's fascinating, and for me it definitely does have some quality of "intelligence" to it.