Plants do not have consciousness. Reacting to stimuli does not require conscious processing.
Like, I'm all for "we're underestimating animal brains" but they do have to have brains.
Like, I'm all for "we're underestimating animal brains" but they do have to have brains.
Do I think forests are conscious in the same way that we are? No. I do think "consciousness" is not a binary, and that we have poor tools and insufficiently-developed models for understanding it.
I don't have evidence I have consciousness. You assume you have it, but if you didn't what would really change? It's a made up word and the semantic value of the sentence "I have consciousness" is something like "I am special". Can you define consciousness in an objective way such that, were I to not have consciousness anything would be different for me?
It's the secular word for "soul", but at least the religious people have some ideas about what their woowoo nonsense terminology means.
The fact that I experience anything at all (as opposed to being an unthinking being as we assume robots or machines to be) seems like something to me. I can't explain what it is, but it seems different to anything else I observe in the world.
The roomba robot doesn't experience, it just goes through its routine. You're more sophisticated (a robot made out of meat), so the behaviors and internal state are more sophisticated. Your "experience" is just one of many illusions you are prone too. You can go look up some of them that it's possible for you to be aware of, they're pretty crazy.
The statement I quoted is just another wording of "of course I have consciousness!".
This is entirely separate from whether one's perceptions are an accurate representation of reality, or whether one's experiences correspond to the parts of the brain that respond to things.
"it's possible for me to be aware of anything" <--- restating your premise. Not evidence that your premise is true. Your definition of consciousness is circular.
If you don't believe that you have experiences of any kind then there is indeed no point in us discussing things further.
If you do believe that you have experiences of some kind, then I can tell you that I am taking to be definitional of consciousness - that when I say "conciousness", that's what I mean - and we can start from there.
It can solve mazes. [0]
"They remember, anticipate and decide." [0]
They practice primitive agriculture: "they carry, seed and prudently harvest their food" (though no cultivation - what dummies!). [1]
And here's the kicker: "P. polycephalum ... spends most of its life as a single cell containing millions of nuclei, small sacs of DNA, enzymes and proteins." [0], but "When prey bacteria become scarce, Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae aggregate by the tens of thousands and produce a multicellular migratory slug that becomes a fruiting body in which about 20% of cells die to form a sterile stalk. The stalk aids the dispersal of the remaining cells, which differentiate into spores in a spherical structure called the sorus ..." [1]
When a log crackles as it burns, those crackles do not correspond to an experience of suffering.