It’s not circular reasoning; it’s inductive reasoning based on empirical observation.

​We didn’t just sit in a room and arbitrarily decide ‘only animals get to be conscious.’ Instead, science looked at how consciousness actually behaves. We know from centuries of medical and neurobiological data that if you damage, anesthetise, or remove centralised neural networks, consciousness vanishes, even while the rest of the body’s cells remain alive and chemically responding to stimuli.

​Furthermore, this baseline doesn’t just limit consciousness to mammals like us. Science actively recognizes consciousness in octopuses, which are invertebrates with a radically different, alien brain structure.

We don’t have absolute proof of many things in science, we have large bodies of evidence that require equal amounts of evidence to support alternative hypotheses. For example, we haven’t absolute proof of the theory of evolution but no one serious would doubt it without ignoring the entire global fossil and genetic record.

We haven’t fundamentally proven that consciousness requires a brain, but every piece of empirical evidence we have links subjective awareness, like feeling pain or fear, to centralised neural processing. If we abandon that baseline, we lose any objective way to measure it.

You resorted to declaring troll and in doing so dragged the conversation down to ad hominem exchanges.

Pointing out that you have failed to understand high school level biology (plants don’t have a central nervous system) is barely ad hominem anyway.

You asked for citations which I provided. You’ve now moved the goalposts by rejecting science’s framework of consciousness.

There’s nowhere else to go here.

It sets out a framework for levels of consciousness and implies that plants are way below that threshold.

Even if we go outside mainstream scientific understanding and near universal intuition and accept plants as conscious, this paper (and others if you did some cursory research on a subject you seem to care so deeply about) would still point to plants being considered less conscious than animals.

It builds on a framework which defines what the minimum threshold for what neuroscientists can consider consciousness is.

Plants neither possess nor require consciousness.

For consciousness to emerge, an organism requires a massive degree of centralised structural, organisational, and functional complexity. This paper builds on the “threshold brain” framework established by neuroscientists, which maps out the absolute minimum neural machinery needed for subjective experience. Animals possess centralised nervous systems designed to integrate disparate sensory streams into a single, unified perspective. Because plants have a decentralised, structurally simple organisation completely devoid of neurons or brains, the authors note that the likelihood of them possessing consciousness is “effectively nil.” Their behaviors are hardwired, genetic reflexes, not conscious choices.

Which is why I’m seeing myself out.

I’m not here defending vegans, I’m here questioning your batshit insane take that animals have an equivalent level of consciousness as plants.

For what? Burden of proof is on you.

Oh dear, seek help.

I said “consider there might be” whereas you were all over the thread speaking in absolutes to support your weak hypothesis.

Nuance is obviously lost on you which is a shame as it’s kind of a prerequisite for the philosophical debates you keep attempting to engage in.

A foolish and irresponsible way to think about consciousness would be to pretend we can actually define it, then go around professing things are either conscious or not without considering there might be a scale.

Either meat or plant is just as conscious as the other [citation needed]