Define metacognition for me. I wouldn't be surprised if a forest (an organism composed of many trees and such) had a way to store memories for example. Ants hav

Define metacognition for me. I wouldn't be surprised if a forest (an organism composed of many trees and such) had a way to store memories for example. Ants have several forms of external memory assuming the colony is a single organism. Its harder to say if a forest or an anthill can reason about itself in part because we don't really understand how cognition works. Edit: Killing a plant might be more similar to killing off chunks of an organism's brain cells. As such it may be ethical to kill individual plants assuming we maintain the integrity of any existing colonies.