Comment by slibhb
12 hours ago
> I have come to believe, however, that we have this backwards. As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care. We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them.
I care about my plants and I don't think they're conscious. Hell, I care about my car.
Aren't your plants to a degree conscious though - they're living things striving towards something, either happily or tragically. If you model them to yourself as just mechanisms, there's a part of them that's missing, not just by some poetic fallacy, but a deficiency of real scientific understanding - hence, biology.