What’s wrong with that? We’re just a bunch of talking animals. A huge bunch with complicated tools but technically still wild animals.
As for sun tracking in plants I do agree with you it’s probably not a sign of intelligence. If that’s your point, you can just point out that part.
You can just say humans and plants think in different ways, or through different mechanisms.
Communication efficiency. I'd like to have one short term for this so that I don't need to make elaborate differentiations every time I need to use it.
Good example of ppl who make up new words to "simplify" things as their world gets more and more complex every year are Lawyers and Accountants. But even so sometimes you end up requiring buildings full of them to decipher what one sentence they came up with last year actually means this year.
The problem is not the Lawyer or the Accountant but Human Language itself.
Korzybski, "Manhood of Humanity"
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25457/25457-pdf.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
IIRC, he meant that plant life binds and manipulates chemicals in the immediate environment; animals move matter over the surface of the earth (at a much higher rate than plants); humans shift information through time via culture (and later writing, et. al.)
One way that I like to think about it is that there's a spectrum of "sophistication". Even within the human population, there's gradation: not everyone is great at critical thinking, forecasting, imagining, reasoning, meta cognition, etc.
When I look to the stars, I wonder what levels exist above the human mind.
Looking "downward", are there "thinking processes" that we could assimilate through technology into our own minds?