>Plants don't have a central nervous system or a brain.
So? does that automatically imply that it does not feel pain?
>What science generally understands under pain and suffering plants simply don't have.
Listen, I don't buy the science say this and science say that kind of arguments. ANY living being ( assuming we can settle for what can be called 'alive') will have a mechanism for self preservation, pain is one of them. The onus is on 'science' or people to prove otherwise.
If we think about the function of pain from an evolutionary perspective its basically to encourage, well, not doing whatever is causing you pain (e.g. touching sharp objects, standing close to a fire) or provide motivation to fight or flee (e.g. if I am being attacked by a bobcat).
Neither of these are applicable to plants, so there doesn't seem to be any evolutionary reason to evolve pain receptors.
Assuming that I did not misunderstand you, while fight or flee does not exist in plants in the same sense as animals they do react by producing chemicals/sap etc. that works as a defense. So it's more 'fight', but a chemical warfare at that.
Pain is a subjective experience. It requires a self to feel it.
No central nervous system does imply no mind to feel pain.
If you were to scoop my brain out of my body and keep my lower body alive below the neck the nervous system would not feel pain as there is no mind to feel it.
How do you know that? Science has no idea how the brain produces consciousness (and therefore strong basis to claim that other entities don't). There might be all sorts of selves that you simply can't observe.
We don't know how the brain produces consciousness but we have a good idea from observing people suffering brain damage from accidents how a functional brain is directly linked to consciousness.
Science can't prove the world is not the dream of a giant turtle- so technically I can't "know" anything- so asking "how can you know that?" Is kind of a boring line of questioning. It has no answer other than "Well I guess technically I can't know that, or anything," But that doesn't mean turtle dreams are going to get equal weight with our empirical models of the world.
There might be all sorts of selves that you simply can't observe.
Or there could be none besides those with a CNS. Science may have a long way to go on understanding minds, but speculation on other sorts of minds entirely is still within the realm of science fiction. So, if you're going to assert something like a conscious experience by plants then you should understand that you are taking it as an article of faith.
But science has no way to observe consciousness even in those entities with central nervous systems, not even humans. The inference of consciousness is entirely based on observed behaviours being similar. I'm not asserting that plants have consciousness. But I am suggesting that we ought not to completely dismiss the idea.
Thanks for clarifying. But I would take issue with the statement "science has no way to observe consciousness"
A cornerstone of science is empirical observation, and we can all observe our own consciousness to some degree. It's hardly perfect or even nearly complete, but it's something.
The onus is never on other scientists to prove an assertion false if it is made without evidence. The initial burden is always on the person making the initial claim.
You can play semantics with the word "pain" all you want, but the biological differences between what we call pain as experienced by humans and the stimuli response from plants are sufficiently different to surpass a difference of degree and make it a difference of kind. You need a word besides "pain", or the onus is on you to demonstrate the appropriateness of that term when you are using it so far outside its normal context.
So? does that automatically imply that it does not feel pain?
>What science generally understands under pain and suffering plants simply don't have.
Listen, I don't buy the science say this and science say that kind of arguments. ANY living being ( assuming we can settle for what can be called 'alive') will have a mechanism for self preservation, pain is one of them. The onus is on 'science' or people to prove otherwise.