A Litmus Test for Plant Consciousness: Pattern–Temporal Synergy in a Relation-First Ontology

Abstract

Plant cognition has progressed from anecdote to rigor, yet the field still lacks a quantitative test for when distributed plant activity crosses into unified—perhaps conscious—processing. I introduce Pattern–Temporal Synergy (PTS), a substrate-agnostic metric rooted in Dynergeia, a relation-first ontology that defines consciousness as reflexive coherence among five universal patterns—self-reference, division-creation, information integration, responsiveness and flux—phase-locked inside a system’s binding window (τ). Each pattern is operationalized with established signal-processing measures; their mean strength is multiplied by their mean synergy and released only if a τ-specific coherence gate is met.Three preregistered hypotheses anchor the study: H1 baseline PTS > 0 in intact plants; H2 4 % diethyl-ether collapses PTS below threshold φ; H3 PTS rebounds on wash-out. A multispecies protocol—Mimosa pudica, Arabidopsis thaliana, Picea abies—combines 64-channel surface electrodes, glutamate-sensitive Ca²⁺ imaging and micro-optode O₂/heat-flux probes. Sliding 3 × τ windows with phase-shuffled surrogates yield z-scored PTS trajectories, adjudicated by preregistered effect-size criteria.By turning decades of qualitative insight into falsifiable numbers, PTS offers plant biology a litmus test for conscious-level processing, directly challenges Integrated Information Theory and supplies a road-map for cross-kingdom comparisons—including neuromorphic silicon. Confirmatory results would shift debates on plant sentience from speculation to data; null results would equally refine what consciousness requires.