> Plants and single cells likely aren't conscious or experience pain the same way we or other animals do. To make a philosophical point: Huge assumption right

> Plants and single cells likely aren't conscious or experience pain the same way we or other animals do. To make a philosophical point: Huge assumption right there. At best we can say that if they are conscious and experience pain, they do so in a paradigm that is fundamentally different to that of animals, one which we as humans are unable to relate, and therefore we care less, prefer not to think about it, and treat them as unconscious agents. We relate to the perceived experience of animals a lot more because superficially they seem to react similarly to relevant scenarios that we interpret and relate to as reflecting consciousness and personality, and their anatomies that generate such consciousness is similar to ours, so we know which parts should be removed in the process of cultivating meat. We know no such thing about plants. In fact, we know jack shit about plant consciousness, and the more we learn the more we realise that plants have their own form of consciousness too (fungal neural networks, eusocial norms and social hierarchies, pain-like/defensive responses, collective intelligence, etc). We prefer to think of plants as a glorified bundle of chemical reactions packaged as a quasi-neural network. But then, you could reduce animals to the same; humans too. The only reason we consider humans to be more than the sum of their chemical parts is because we are able to communicate our suprising subjective experience clearly. The reason we consider it likely that animals share a similar experience, is because we identify some of their behaviours as relatable, and perhaps even as a form of communication for that experience. With plants, we simply don't relate, but this in no way means their behaviour isn't underlied by conscious experience. You have no idea when a plant recoils from your touch or releases chemicals, whether this is "just a chemical response" or if its experiencing a stressful experience in its own manner of consciousness. I have caught myself wondering, imagine if you had to justify garbage collection in your code in terms of ethics. Like, you wake up one day and find out that every single variable you've ever instantiated in code, had a conscious experience. What would you do? Would you leave programs running? Would you let memory leaks happen to avoid 'killing' variables off? Would you only delete some variables but not others?