I'm sure that "consciousness" is carefully defined in the paper, but, from the article "...whether plants can think, learn, and intentionally choose their actions..." is a much easier position to debate than whether plants are in some sense aware of themselves, their environment and others like themselves, which is what I think of when I hear "consciousness".
Honest question: it what sense can anything that exists in an environment be said to not be aware of it? How do you define "awareness" outside of observed reactions to stimuli, which everything in the universe exhibits to varying degrees of complexity? I submit that what we think of as "consciousness", the awareness of being, is impossible within a model based purely on objectively measurable criteria.
Re: The case against plant consciousness
#131You could very well be right! The term "consciousness" is pretty loaded. Even "awareness" is perhaps too vague and indefinable for scientific discourse.