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To Fechner, a soul is something with an interiority, a subjective awareness – an ‘inward luminosity corresponding to the outward luminosity which is apparent in its body’. Tellingly, Fechner often uses soul (Seele) and mind (Geist) interchangeably as belonging to a being that experiences feelings (Empfindungen), including internal urges (Triebe) and external stimuli (Reize); intuition (Anschauung) and emotion (Gefühl). Cast in modern terms, we might simply say a soul is the capacity for subjective experience – what some cognitive scientists call primary or phenomenal consciousness. For Fechner, there is, as Thomas Nagel put it, ‘something it is like’ to be a plant.
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Today, plant scientists who endorse the possibility of plant sentience face significant criticism
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