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 :)
