A flytrap closes in response to tactile stimuli. Meaning that it has a sense of touch.
The word "feel" is nebulous, but at least one meaning would include that.
The word "feel" is nebulous, but at least one meaning would include that.
I've had flytraps and they are fascinating, though I've found them to be very fragile, at least in the conditions I can provide in my balcony. Their traps often turn black and rot after trying to digest a single fly, and I had one Venus flytrap die after flowering (the advice I found online was: don't let it flower, under most less than ideal conditions, the effort of producing the flower will spend the plant's energy reserves and kill it, and the single flower it can produce is not pretty anyway. I should have followed this advice, but curiosity got the better of me).
Are you able to prove that your behavior is qualitatively different? That you are not merely a sufficiently complex chain of reactions to stimuli?
That, however, is besides the point in my opinion. All taxonomy is arbitrary; there aren't "races" or "species" or even distinctions between "mineral" and "organic". All that matters is that those artificial distinctions are meaningful to us, humans.
In that sense, we consider we humans are qualitatively different than plants, and a Venus flytrap is closer to a plant than to an animal.
I can't rule out the possibility that there are some qualia associated specifically with the neuronal activity corresponding to your mental simulation, but I can say that the leap to the "someone actually being tortured" interpretation isn't warranted. It's clearly not a "someone" in the sense of a human person, and so all bets are off when it comes to interpreting what it's like to be that thing.
> Crazy implications if true!
Well, the implications are most likely delayed until someone invents a qualia detector.
> Crazy implications if true!
Well, the implications are most likely delayed until someone invents a qualia detector
if (yourCondition) {
crazyImplications()
}