[TeMPOraL]

> On the other hand, when they are wounded they do make chemical compounds to resist predation and to signal to nearby plants that predators are present (e.g. salicylate). This seems vaguely parallel.

When a fighter jet is hit by a bullet, it releases chemical compounds to stop its fuel from exploding, and signals nearby forces that threats are present.

The reaction to damage alone does not suggest something is capable of suffering. There are other considerations, and there's little suggesting plants are capable of experiencing suffering (or experiencing anything at all).

[azeotropic]

>there's little suggesting plants are capable of experiencing suffering (or experiencing anything at all).

So walk me through this, I'm curious how you know whether or not plants have experiences? How would you know whether any arbitrary life form (or object, since you brought up fighter planes) has experiences? What method allows you to make this determination?

[TeMPOraL]

I can't be 100% certain because we don't understand consciousness yet, but I believe we can derive some logical conclusions.

Starting from the basics: life is just complex, carbon-based nanotechnology. There's nothing we know that suggests cells are anything more than complex machines. There's nothing suggesting that if you put a bunch of cells together, you get something more than a complex machine. From the other end, we're only sure that conscious experience happens in human brains, though through structural and behavioral similarity, we may assume some degree of conscious experience in a lot of animals. Going this route, around smaller insects you may start to wonder whether what you're looking for is more like a machine, or more like a feeling thing capable of experiencing emotions. Plants are biologically less complex than insects, and have no identifiable "locus of cognition".

I mean, you have to note that when guessing whether or not something can experience emotions, we're projecting our own mental states based on that thing's phenotype. Look how works of fictions - pictures, movies, even textual descriptions in books - can make you feel compassion towards a rock, or a car. A skilled writer could rephrase my fighter jet example in a way that would make you actually feel sorry for it. This means our intuition is not a good judge here. Past that, the best we have (AFAIK) is heuristics, like "has no brain/brain-level complexity = probably can't have experiences".