Comments by "Lilac Lizard" (@lilaclizard4504) on "Electrical experiments with plants that count and communicate | Greg Gage" video.
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"When I asked about plants getting a "bad" signal alerting them" no, you said you didn't think plants could tell "This sensation is a bad one!", so I explained what plants were able to do and identify with sensations they receive. Pain is a mechanism for protection. Evolution suggests that living organisms won't respond to pain unless there is an evolutionary advantage to them in doing so, so in order to ask the question as to if they will respond to pain, we first need to look at the background information & identify if it would be useful for them.
We see that if they can "feel" a bug has taken a bite out of them, they are able to respond to this with a wide range of different & selective responses, so from this we can see that it would be evolutionary useful for them to develop the ability to detect this has occurred and to develop some sort of stress to this that would cause them to want to make it stop.
Contrast this with a short living insect like a cockroach or cricket. If we rip a leg off an animal, many animals will avoid using the limb & protect the wound, therefore allowing it to heal, increasing their chance of survival so that they can live on to reproduce. In short lived insects, their lifespan is so short that if they rest and protect the injury until it is healed, this will take so long that they will now be dead of old age before they can reproduce. Consequently, it is evolutionary negative for them to develop a desire to rest the wound, as such, when you rip the leg off a cricket, it will pull away/try to stop you from removing it's limbs, but once it's gone, it will carry on completely as normal, with no signs of pain present, as pain does not enhance their survival in the same way it does in plants or longer lived animals.
So all of this means plants have an evolutionary reason to feel pain. They have also had a significantly longer period of evolution than any current animal species on the planet and their dna suggests they have used this extensively. So the question we should then ask is if they had evolved this ability, as seems likely from an evolutionary perspective, would we recognise it/how could we establish it? So I guess that's my question to you, how do you think we could test plants for this ability? What would you catagorise as proof of this & on the side note to this you raise of sentience, what would you define as sentience?
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