The hogweed outside your door is making decisions right now.
It’s allocating resources in real time, adjusting its growth in response to neighbouring plants, releasing chemical signals when something threatens it.
The nettle you brushed past on your way here restructured its cells in response to that contact. Within seconds.
We’ve decided this doesn’t count as intelligence because it doesn’t look like ours.
That’s not a scientific conclusion. It’s a definition we wrote to flatter ourselves.
Watch a climbing vine for five minutes – properly watch it, not a glance as you pass. It doesn’t grow in all directions hoping to find support.
It searches. Senses. Commits.
The behaviour is deliberate in every way that matters, except that it happens without a brain.
We’ve been asking the wrong question. Not are plants intelligent? but why did we decide our kind of intelligence was the only kind worth noticing?
The moment you shift that question, the living world stops being scenery.
It becomes company.