Well, the bar for sentience is actually so low I am quite sure bacteria and even individual cells in multi-cellular organisms pass it - almost every living cell detects aspects of and reacts to its environment.

It is indeed incredibly low. Slime molds [0] can pass it. There is a memory component, which would prevent single cells from passing it, but it's not a metric that is all that useful in determining the intelligence of a species.

[0] http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.15891.43041

Even some single cells maybe https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11677-w

Plastic has memory doesn't it?

Sounds like the sentience tests need to be rewritten

Plastic has memory, but not feeling/sensation nor interaction with the environment. It is also not living by other standards (self-sustaining, reproductive).

I don't see how your link supports trees potentially being sentient.

Disclaimer: i don’t have a dog in the fight…or a branch on a tree, in this context.

Sentient is defined as able to perceive or feel things.

The paper linked discusses how trees can “communicate” and “feel” based on release of specific chemicals.

An exert from the introduction: “Recent research has revealed that plants can sense their neighbours without direct physical contact; mechanisms for this include detection of a reduced ratio of red to far-red in light reflected from neighbouring foliage…”

This was also a plot of a terrible M. Night Shyamalan movie.

That’s the connection the poster suggested, as the bar for sentience is quite low.

I feel like Star Trek handled the question much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY

Intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness seem like three reasonable requirements. I don't really buy the "consciousness" requirement, but it's a stab at what most people associate with sentience.

Calling trees sentient is just nonsense. And I mean that literally. I try not to dismiss people's work out of hand, but there's a certain line of philosophical thought whose best rebuttal is to ignore it.

It is very common for Science Fiction to use "sentient" where "sapient" is the correct word. Star Trek is no exception. Calling trees sentient isn't nonsense; your understanding of what the word means is simply incorrect.

In fact in Italian, which is close to Latin, "sentire", the root of sentient, means to feel. "Sapere", the root of sapient, means to know.

There's a higher level of intelligence required to "know", rather than to just "feel".

Is it really incorrect or does the term just happen to be a homonymous collision of more than one semantic concept?

I don't know (it's an actual question I ask myself, not some rhetoric vehicle), but the concept you declare as incorrect is so widespread it makes me wonder... (obviously, the meaning in the legal context we are talking about it's clearly on one side)

Incorrect in the specific context of a scientific or legal discussion which operates using a formalized definition. In normal conversation it is sort of nonsensical to say that the widespread usage of a word is incorrect, as correctness is defined by widespread usage.

The usage in SF stories stands out because often the writer was _intending_ for the word to be using the formalized definition used in science.

Traditionally, "sentience" includes consciousness, though. The OED defines it as "The condition or quality of being sentient, consciousness, susceptibility to sensation". It's actually science fiction that invented the concept of "sapient" in the sense you mean it -- the OED just refers to it as an old word for "wise" like Milton writing of "a sapient prince"

Well, that definition, like most dictionary definitions of complex philosophical or scientific concepts, is circular or too vague. The quality of being sentient is obviously circular, Consciousness is even more vague a concept than sentience, and Susceptibility to sensation is either circular (if we seek to define sensation narrowly) or too vague (if we define sensation broadly - after all, rocks are susceptible to sensation in some sense, as they immediately move when you kick them). This is not a critique of the OED: dictionaries are meant to explain to humans what other humans mean when they use a word, not give an exhaustive understanding of its deeper meanings and implications (encyclopedias aim for that).

When actually trying to rigorously define the word "sentience" we currently have settled on a very basic but measurable criterion: does the living thing we are discussing react to stimuli in its environment, and does it do so in a manner which suggests some kind of memory or other information processing power?

Conversely, consciousness has no similar even slightly rigorous definition, but it is still used as a "higher level" of sentience, sentience + some other stuff that bring you closer to how humans experience the world. Sapience seems to fit somewhere in between.

> "Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

There are many plants that clearly respond to stimuli (Mimosa pudica(shy plant) as well as the Venus flytrap). As well as almost any plant following the light to grow, as well as plants that send out tendrils to anchor.

> "The subjective awareness of experiences by a conscious individual are known as qualia in Western philosophy"

I'll agree with you that we have no knowledge of plants being conscious.

> "sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly and collectively describes sentience plus further features of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). These further features of consciousness may not be necessary for sentience, which is the capacity to feel sensations and emotions."

> Intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness seem like three reasonable requirements. I don't really buy the "consciousness" requirement, but it's a stab at what most people associate with sentience.

That would be _sapience_, not _sentience_. Which is the point. Sentience is a ridiculously low bar to clear.

As I understand it, the problem is that you need to define “sentient” somehow, and whatever definition you come up with should be applied consistently to all organisms. If you want to capture all the organisms you think should be called sentient, trees are sentient according to that definition.

I can't really answer you clearly without knowing what definition of sentience you expect to be correct. Especially as I've already noted most people think of sentience as sapience, which it isn't.

Trees respond to both negative and positive stimuli, and relay that information to other plants around them, exchanging information about them. They take both reactive and proactive stances in regards to both negative and positive stimuli - which may be sentience.

Couldn't a robot be programmed to respond to stimuli, and to communicate with other robots? Would that then be a form of sentience?

Yes, they could be, though the question usually arises about whether a living thing is sentient, and it's fairly natural and easy to define life such that robots are not living beings.

Overall the point here is that sentience isn't a very useful measure of anything. If there were an explicit law recognizing the rights of all living things to a decent death, we would essentially be forced to become exclusive carnivores, as its almost impossible to euthanize a plant or fungus.

Fruits (as in from fruiting plants, not fruits in the culinary sense) I assume would still be fair game as they are designed to separate from the parent plant, often falling off without any intervention even.

Well, given that seeds inside the fruit sense their environment and start germinating only in specific conditions, even this would be debatable. Hopefully, if the cells of the fruit body itself are not sentient (if they do not react to their environment in some meaningful way), then eating the fruiting body is probably ok, provided you euthanize the seeds or let them live on.