alt Hacker NewsOf course plants have feelings and conscious experience, it's obvious to anyone who has spent time living with them. Plants literally think and solve problems, too. But you won't succeed in convincing anyone who doesn't understand such basic truths. Reducing a living being to a mere machine is so 19th century, but just as religions still influence how people see the world, it's going to take generations for science to "prove" it to satisfaction, and for the general public to accept it. We're still missing fundamental concepts, much less ability to measure and quantify it.
You'll probably like the biologist Michael Levin and his research, exploring what a mind actually is and seeing beyond what he calls our "mind blindness". https://www.drmichaellevin.org/
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I don't think it's as obvious as you make it out to be. For one, what we consider evidence of "thinking" is autonomous action by a being as a whole. For as far as I know, there is no evidence that a plant's movements are governed by a central coordinating authority. Can your evidence distinguish between a plant having a single mind or each branch having decision authority of its own?
Interesting to me that you employ religion as the pejorative comparison here, when it's the inherent human religions that have perceived in plants gods and spirits since before the beginning of recorded time.