Tokapelli;
Plants are living things with cellulose walls, but they are lacking nervous or sensory organs. Animals, on the other hand, do not have cellulose walls, but they do have nervous or sensory organs. Thus animals are able to feel pain, pleasure and various emotions. The more sophisticated their nervous and/or sensory organs are, the more they will be able to feel. Everything suggests that a nervous system and a brain is necessary for sentience, and since plants lack these they are not able to feel anything. There is no justification to claim that plants have sentience, but that they simply react to physical and chemical stimuli governed by very well defined, well known laws of nature. I maintain, with all justification, that plants cannot feel, that they are not aware of their reactions to stimuli, that they are not self-conscious or that they are not conscious beings. They are, however, wonderful biological machines, and in the eyes of evolution actually the most succesful.
And no, it has not been scientifically verified that plants respond specifically to human intent, emotions or thought. The perhaps most notable claim of this comes from a guy named Cleve Backster, who runned some experiments in the late 60's and early 70's he claimed demonstrated that plants respond to these things. His claims have been refuted by several scientists since, and the replication of his experiments have not yielded sufficiently positive results to be considered statistically significant. Backster and his followers clearly don't understand the importance of controls in their studies. Despite the lack of proper scientific support for the notion of plant perception, the idea is nevertheless accepted amongst many as a matter-of-fact. It clearly isn't, and can safely be disputed.
As for Dr. Masuro Emoto's claims, they suffer from much of the same. His experiments doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny, and is thus very very suspect. It is simply not proper scientific work. Furthermore, and this is a huge ring in the alarm bell, he sells products based on his claims. Yet he provides no real scientific reference for the allegedly incredible qualities of his "magic" water, so he fits right into the long line of quacks doing just the same. Here is a few points in which Emoto fails, by the way;
1) He doesn't eliminate the possibility of personal bias affecting the experimental results by performing controls, or double blind procedures.
2) He delibirately tells his photographers to keep the most pleasant photos of the crystals. In science, we don't just choose the results that supports our claims, we publish all of them.
3) He doesn't minimize the sources of errors in his experimental procedures.
4) He doesn't pay attention to, or care, about well tested procedures of the scientific method that yields reliable results.
On top of this, he readily admits he is no scientist. I think we can safely ask him to shove his claims back up his ass, and focus on more important matters, such as why we humans tend to tell stories about things that are not based in reality, and more importantly believing in them =)
