A slightly technical post this time: Do trees feel cold?

These days, Mexico City has been unusually cold, around one and three degrees Celsius in the morning. And so, I saw the trees in my backyard and got the sense that they would be cold if they could feel those sort of sensations. But here's the complicated stuff: if trees could actually have something similar to cold in the first place, they would not feel it the same way we do. Of course, that was precisely Thomas Nagel's (1974) point in his paper "What is it like to be a bat?"; we can't know how a bat (or a tree) would actually feel. Given that we can't know that, a different question can be asked, following Daniel Dennett's, usual line of thought (which I think is quite useful, actually): Would it serve a purpose if trees had something whose function would be similar to human's "feeling cold"? Of course, there is something that trees sometimes do when it's unusually cold; they change their internal structure in order to enhance their possibilities of surviving. Their cells become tighter and they lose leaves or bark in order to make their resources more efficient. In that sense, it is possible that trees feel "something" when it is cold, but possibly not the urge to find a warm place, or any sort of pain. If a tree can't move in order to get away from the cold, and feeling pain all winter wouldn't add to the tree's survival, then, chances are that it doesn't have those sensations at all. This line of thought is merely speculative, and I am very sure that biologists must have a much better, scientific answer to this specific matter about trees. But it serves to illustrate the actual point I want to make in the next paragraph.

There is one thing that goes on in one's body that is usually taken for granted: the ability to feel your own body. This is called proprioception. Its function is to inform us the position of our body parts all the time, and how they are situated in space. In order to know what proprioception actually does I find useful to illustrate what happens when it fails: when you get anesthesia in a specific part of the body and you can't feel it at all, then you lost your proprioception in that part. People that lost their proprioception permanently in the whole body  (usually because of brain damage) can walk and move around, but since they don't really know where they put their feet, or if their back is straight, they look like "drunk" all the time. So, proprioception has a very important function in our everyday lives, that is, monitoring  where our limbs are all the time, and if we actually moved them as we intended to. It gives us mastery of the space we live in. 

Now, along these lines, there is a theory in neuropsychiatry that postulates that the body must have a way of monitoring thoughts so that one effectively knows that your own thought is actually yours. This theory was postulated by Frith (1992). The theory states that, for every thought, an efference copy of that same thought must be generated and sent to a different region of the brain, which would confirm that the thought is effectively, your own. This theory is specially relevant in the context of schizophrenia, because some people sincerely affirm that thoughts have been inserted into their minds. Therefore, Currie (2000) proposed that what is going on with people that say that thoughts are being inserted into their brains is that they have a failure in the efference copy mechanism, and they don't have a way of realizing that their thoughts are their own. However, to me, an efference copy mechanism could be made redundant if one thing were the case: the way we realize that we are thinking is the words in our head. I think that it would be useful for a specialized mind to monitor its own thinking process, a sort of proprioception, in accordance with Frith's original idea. But the only real way we have to know that we are actually thinking are the sentences in our heads, that self-narrative that is always going on whilst we are conscious (which is manifested in propositional attitudes- I owe you the explanation of what a propositional attitude is in a future entry). So, what I'm trying to postulate here is that our thoughts are the proprioception of the mind's process of thinking. I'm not quite sure how this could be proved, or if it has been postulated before. I just thought I'd share with you this idea. Thanks for reading until the end.