| Us humans are kind of undergoing that experiment right now with climate change and everything else, and even with the strategies available to us it is unclear whether humans will survive the coming hundreds of years :) From a philosophical standpoint, and considering the spirit rather than the details: Is this hypothetical experiment just giving plants a challenge at them which they're too dumb or helpless to solve? It seems there are plenty of analogous challenges which humans alone or in groups are unequipped to deal with. Is any "challenge" humans respond to not a homeostatic correction, like if everything were perfectly perfect for a person would they do anything different at all? Considering also the homeostases we're built to maintain "just because", like novelty vs boredom. If a thing "decided" to change its reproductive rate, or selected different sexual partners based on environmental conditions, is this necessarily a phenomenon unconnected to individual agency? Humans do this too. Developmental neuroscience strongly supports the claim that physical brain architecture requires environmental stimuli, and psychology strongly supports the importance of "nurture" contributing to a person's "self". Do these stimulus responses have no bearing on consciousness? If your conscious experience suddenly became transferred to a tree, and a lumberjack came to cut you down, how could you convince them you're conscious using the behaviors available to you? Consider a conscious alien unfamiliar with human society, or a Stone age tribesperson who somehow doesn't embody human cognitive biases like assuming consciousness of things that look like them. If they observe a financial services office for a few hours, do they think the workers are modifying the environment in an individually considered manner? If plants and humans were both considered by definition to be conscious, would life change? |