In the world of plant science, the subfields of plant physiology and plant neurobiology (also known as “plant signalling and beha- vior”) have been arguing in the academic literature for at least a decade. The latest controversy is about consciousness. Should we consider the possibility that there is “something it is like” to be a plant? If we do, we need a theory. Consciousness is a famously diffi- cult subject, inspiring a range of attitudes from “consciousness is an epiphenomenon” to “everything is conscious”. The trouble begins with a taken-for-granted theory of representation, encodingism.

Representation, or specifically the encodingist theory of repres- entation, is where things begin to go wrong. The qualities of ex- perience are simultaneously available and unavailable to awareness, suggesting that they have both explicit and implicit content. But encodings have none of the latter. Encodingism renders the prob- lem not just hard, but impossible. In this paper, I will present an alternative to encodingism, based in James Gibson’s ecological psychology and Mark Bickhard’s interactivism, and explore its ap- plication to the question of plant consciousness.