I don't see how your link supports trees potentially being sentient.
Sentient is defined as able to perceive or feel things.
The paper linked discusses how trees can “communicate” and “feel” based on release of specific chemicals.
An exert from the introduction: “Recent research has revealed that plants can sense their neighbours without direct physical contact; mechanisms for this include detection of a reduced ratio of red to far-red in light reflected from neighbouring foliage…”
This was also a plot of a terrible M. Night Shyamalan movie.
That’s the connection the poster suggested, as the bar for sentience is quite low.
Intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness seem like three reasonable requirements. I don't really buy the "consciousness" requirement, but it's a stab at what most people associate with sentience.
Calling trees sentient is just nonsense. And I mean that literally. I try not to dismiss people's work out of hand, but there's a certain line of philosophical thought whose best rebuttal is to ignore it.
There are many plants that clearly respond to stimuli (Mimosa pudica(shy plant) as well as the Venus flytrap). As well as almost any plant following the light to grow, as well as plants that send out tendrils to anchor.
> "The subjective awareness of experiences by a conscious individual are known as qualia in Western philosophy"
I'll agree with you that we have no knowledge of plants being conscious.
> "sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly and collectively describes sentience plus further features of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). These further features of consciousness may not be necessary for sentience, which is the capacity to feel sensations and emotions."
That would be _sapience_, not _sentience_. Which is the point. Sentience is a ridiculously low bar to clear.
There's a higher level of intelligence required to "know", rather than to just "feel".
I don't know (it's an actual question I ask myself, not some rhetoric vehicle), but the concept you declare as incorrect is so widespread it makes me wonder... (obviously, the meaning in the legal context we are talking about it's clearly on one side)
The usage in SF stories stands out because often the writer was _intending_ for the word to be using the formalized definition used in science.
When actually trying to rigorously define the word "sentience" we currently have settled on a very basic but measurable criterion: does the living thing we are discussing react to stimuli in its environment, and does it do so in a manner which suggests some kind of memory or other information processing power?
Conversely, consciousness has no similar even slightly rigorous definition, but it is still used as a "higher level" of sentience, sentience + some other stuff that bring you closer to how humans experience the world. Sapience seems to fit somewhere in between.
Trees respond to both negative and positive stimuli, and relay that information to other plants around them, exchanging information about them. They take both reactive and proactive stances in regards to both negative and positive stimuli - which may be sentience.
Overall the point here is that sentience isn't a very useful measure of anything. If there were an explicit law recognizing the rights of all living things to a decent death, we would essentially be forced to become exclusive carnivores, as its almost impossible to euthanize a plant or fungus.