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Facing stress and producing stress responses are crucial aspects of an organism’s life and the evolution of both its species and of the other species in its environment, which are co-evolving with it. Philosophers and biologists emphasize the importance of environmental complexity and how organisms deal with it in evolution of cognitive processes. This article adds to these discussions by highlighting the importance of stress physiology in processes connected to plant cognition. While this article supports the thesis that life means cognizing (i.e., sensing the environment, arranging internal processes according to that perception, and affecting the environment with its actions), it also emphasizes that there are various kinds of organisms. In this regard, plant cognition is not animal cognition. However, given both the variety and continuity in evolutionary processes and the similarities even between the distantly related organisms in the tree of life, I argue that it is usually useful to consider and compare physiological and molecular mechanisms in plants and animals as well as the concepts and research processes in animal and plant science. Although the “pathological complexity” thesis that Veit (2023) presents is fruitful in considering the evolution of consciousness and cognition, I argue that, when thinking of biological processes in relation to cognition, stress can be a helpful concept (maybe even as suitable as pathological complexity) in thinking of organisms’ responses to environmental complexity and their adaptation and acclimation processes. 

While plants provide some of the most interesting cases for individuality-related problems in philosophy of biology (e.g., Clarke 2012; Gerber 2018), no work has examined plant individuality through specifically focusing on physiological processes, a lacuna this paper aims to fill. We think that different domains of biology suggest different approaches, and our specific focus on physiological processes, such as plant hormone systems and source-sink balance regulations, will help to identify coordinated systems at different scales. Identifying physiological individuals is crucial for a wide range of research in plant biology, including research on plant nutrition, transport and accumulation of nutrients in edible parts, and plant responses to various stress conditions such as plant diseases and changing abiotic conditions. Although plants do produce systemic responses to local stimuli (e.g., a sudden wound on one leaf can result in a whole-plant response), considering them as individuals is (often) problematic. They are highly modular organisms, and they can grow vegetatively, constituting clones of what seem, superficially, to be individual organisms. Moreover, as with animals, there are problems raised by their symbiotic relations to micro-organisms, most notably the mycorrhiza, through which they may be connected to other plants. We argue that coordinated plant systems can be distinguished at multiple scales from a physiological perspective. While none of these is a unit that must be necessarily called “the individual,” they offer integrated approaches for various research problems in plant science.