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17. Plant Biohybrid Signal Integration

Scientific Boundary (Read First)

Plant electrophysiology records surface electrical potentials from living plants. It does NOT indicate consciousness, sentience, or moral status. Plants lack a nervous system and are considered non-conscious. This module uses plant signals as an ethical, non-conscious biological input.

Overview

The cia.plant_biohybrid extension adds a non-invasive hardware-to-software pipeline for plant-based electrophysiology signals. The extension is intentionally designed as an environmental sensor module and does not claim that plants are conscious or capable of suffering.

Pipeline:

  1. Ingest plant signal windows from CSV or serial packets.
  2. Preprocess with detrending, band-pass (0.01-5 Hz), notch suppression (50/60 Hz), and normalization.
  3. Extract spectral/statistical features.
  4. Encode a normalized plant state.
  5. Derive a control signal for optional CIA modulation.
  6. Run a closed-loop step using PlantBiohybridAdapter.

Architecture

  • schemas.py: Pydantic schemas (PlantSignalWindow, PlantFeatureSet, PlantState, PlantControlSignal, SafetyAssessment)
  • plant_signal_ingestion.py: CSV and serial ingestion
  • plant_preprocessing.py: detrend + filters
  • plant_feature_extraction.py: bandpowers, spikes, entropy, drift, quality indices
  • plant_state_encoder.py: feature-to-state normalization
  • plant_conditioning.py: state-to-control mapping
  • plant_adapter.py: closed-loop wrapper around CombinedConsciousnessIndicatorSystem
  • plant_safety.py: hardware safety checks and warnings
  • plant_reporting.py: markdown session summaries
  • docs/20_hardware_setup_guide.md: practical hardware guide

Hardware Setup

See docs/20_hardware_setup_guide.md for component list, ASCII signal chain, wiring and safety constraints.

CLI Usage

After registration under cia plant commands:

cia plant demo
cia plant ingest --path examples/plant_biohybrid/synthetic_plant_signal.csv --sampling-rate 250
cia plant features --path examples/plant_biohybrid/synthetic_plant_signal.csv --sampling-rate 250
cia plant closed-loop
cia plant safety-check --voltage-range-v 3.3 --isolation --electrode-type "Ag/AgCl surface electrode"

Python Usage

from cia.plant_biohybrid import PlantBiohybridAdapter
from cia.simulation import CombinedConsciousnessIndicatorSystem

system = CombinedConsciousnessIndicatorSystem()
adapter = PlantBiohybridAdapter()
result = adapter.run_closed_loop_step(system, "Plant-conditioned context input")

print(result.state)
print(result.control_signal)

Ethics and Safety

  • Surface electrodes only.
  • No current injection.
  • Battery-powered front-end with optical isolation.
  • Use safety checks (evaluate_hardware_safety) before data collection.
  • Treat outputs as environmental/sensor context, not cognition.

Notes on Interpretation

The plant module is useful for embodied, biohybrid experimental setups where non-conscious biological variability can condition AI processing. It is not a neuroscience pipeline and should never be interpreted as evidence of plant consciousness or moral status.