Time scale isn't enough to prevent us from recognizing intelligence and cognition in trees (I can't speak for the trees recognizing us). Look at their works, their accomplishments, their cooperative social organization. They've had a long, long time to show us that.
Oh! They've done nothing! No tribes nor social exchanges - never even mention hospitals and lasers and money and law...
No, trees are not sentient, intelligent nor exhibiting cognition.
You seem to use sentience as a synonym for human intelligence. Works, accomplishments, cooperation: if you don't see those things when you leave the city, you're (forgive the hyperbole) blind.
You're using human metrics for accomplishments and applying them to a completely difference class of organism ("lol do trees even have a fiat currency banking system?!"). I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but I'm saying you have no idea whether trees are sentient, how they experience the world, or what kind of intelligence they posess, and you cannot determine any of these qualities by comparing them to humans.
"Brainless fungi trade resources with plants like a stock market"
"In soils across the world, fungi trade resources with the plants they colonise in a mutually beneficial relationship. But it turns out the fungi are savvy traders, taking advantage of their partners by shuttling goods to nutrient-starved areas where plants are willing to pay more than usual"
In addition, not read this paper but it's high on my to-do list:
"Learning by Association in Plants"
extract of abstract: "the possibility that plants are also able to acquire learned associations to guide their foraging behaviour has never been demonstrated. Here we show that this type of learning occurs in the garden pea, Pisum sativum. By using a Y-maze task, we show that the position of a neutral cue, predicting the location of a light source, affected the direction of plant growth. This learned behaviour prevailed over innate phototropism"
Plants can be parasites, practice deceit, produce poisons to kill animals and other competing plants, kill other plants by strangultion as well (and likely other ways). Perhaps that was your point and I missed it.
Sounds almost like intentionality (sentience) there.
Plants sure aren't all sweetness and light. I did suggest that, while sentience leads to inventions, it also leads to (non-feeding) murder, war (largely restricted to humans), and possibly extinction. If we 'have' any advantages on plants, sentience may not be it.
Plants can't move, and can't speak. That may explain why they've been around for oh, 50 times longer than us. And will almost certainly be around LONG after we're not. Smart?
Not agreeing or disagreeing, just pinning stuff down here...
> Sounds almost like intentionality (sentience) there
Hmm. Clarification needed - does the concept of deceit mean the deceiver understands what it is doing ie. has theory of mind? If so, I'd guess plants do not deceive but do something similar driven by evolution[0] that we need a different word for as it's not sentience-driven.
I'm open to the idea of evolution itself has some sentience but I'd not waste time on it as I don't see it's a testable hypothesis.
> If we 'have' any advantages on plants, sentience may not be it.
Agreed, but sentience may actually be an advantage. After all it's not the sentience in mankind that genuinely makes me despair but other features such as greed and short-termism. Fix those and maybe our chances of racial survival would be hugely increased. IOW we have many mental aspects and sentience is only one of them.
> around for oh, 50 times longer than us
Plants separated from aninmls ~1.7 billion years ago (figure from memory), humans have been around a few hundred thousand years, by various definitions of 'human'. I guess you dropped a few zeros :)
Oh! They've done nothing! No tribes nor social exchanges - never even mention hospitals and lasers and money and law...
No, trees are not sentient, intelligent nor exhibiting cognition.