[housedrafta]

What do you consider life that wants to continue its existence, but does not decide? Are plants or viruses sentient?

[qeternity]

This is exactly my point. Plants and viruses are not sentient, but there are very well studied and proven mechanism by which survival traits are naturally selected.

Nobody has yet suggested any such mechanism for an ANN.

[BoorishBears]

No, they're not.

I feel like this is bait to start linking to random "sentient-like" behaviors in plants so I'll head that off with this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-020-01579-w