"Do plants have consciousness?"
...Do you?
A man can assumes himself to conscious without much effort at all—the digital alarm clock assures him of the fact at precisely the same time every morning, as it has done reliably for years. It's a matter of routine. He might take the fact of his own consciousness for granted, rarely giving the matter a second's thought if any attention at all. Unlike his heart rate, his cholesterol count, and his tax return which all must be accounted for maintained though a regime of medical science, public and private entities, self help paperbacks, personal accountants, regular exercise and "therapy animals" all at great personal cost—his consciousness has thankfully always been a granted fact. Aside from a cup of coffee or an occasional cycle of antidepressant medication, consciousness is a pretty low-maintenance bodily function for him. The terms of his consciousness do not have to be renegotiated like the mobile phone plan he has to renew every two years, which is to say nothing of the constant firmware updates and equipment upgrades—it's much less hassle than owning a car in most cities. While he has to ration his mobile data or face steep overcharges, the consciousness he uses to process that data comes in seemingly unlimited abundance. In fact, he has the opposite problem—too much of it, too much consciousness accumulating on sidewalks, littering public thruways, evaporating into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change, waste product consciousness in quantities requiring whole industries around the process of its removal by alcohol intoxication, high-end bedding, hypnotic mass media, and other CNS depressants.
Yet for the majority of recorded history, and into modern times, humans were not automatically considered innately consciousness by mere virtue of their being humans. It has taken quite a bit of revolution and struggle for even the assignment of universal consciousness for _humans_ to catch on as a popular notion, and it's terms and treaties are still being worked out in some quarters. The case for plants seems far flung, at this rate of progress. Historically the assumption that humans, all humans even the brown humans, even the women humans, even the queer humans, are fully conscious beings has been a matter settled by wars and social upheaval, and endless bloodshed, protest and counter-protest rather than by the philosophical or scientific debate that takes place in academic settings. Perhaps It was never a matter of any one group being anatomically more or less human per se; Even the most detached members of the conscious gentry would likely not deny of their presumed lessers, that these creatures were nonetheless some ilk or breed of homo sapiens—it was not their humanity but their consciousness which was the issue in dispute.
Consciousness appears in the West as that quality which after the "fall of man" distinguishes human from animal, perhaps less controversially distinguishes animal from plant, but again becoming vague in the interval between plant and mineral. Far from an inborn human capacity, this presumed Cartesian self-knowledge had up until the past few decades been treated as the sole provenance of landed white males in the West, the "white man's burden" to some. Though it has its various counterparts elsewhere, rare is the social order that it has not directly informed by that of the European colonial adventure. This doctrine of the elect has been further refined over time, its recipients distinguished as a class in Post Enlightenment societies by their ability to vote, to testify in court, chose marriage partner, own property, run for public office, drive an automobile, invoke parental rights, to seek employment, operate heavy machinery... These functions of consciousness (called "rights" when they involve the interests of other such consciously endowed beings) are further reserved in these societies for individuals over the age of majority (18 in most of the US) who are assumed to have the capacity for autonomous decision making, for abstraction and inference, for human intuition up to and including some degree of critical self-awareness. If you want to drive a car, besides the vision test, these are the requirements. As far as I know such a standard standard has never seen application in plants, and farther up the food chain it has only been in modern times that animal rights and welfare have become issues of public awareness in the West.
Vegan literature (like that propaganda that is the currency of the anti-abortion movement) often relies on graphic, visual depictions of mistreatment and cruelty—animals not only brutally mutilated by hand and machine, but left to suffer on what seem like intentionally cruel kill floors. Suffering is a function of consciousness, some ancient schools of thought hold that suffering is the hallmark if not the primary function of the conscious mind. Like victimless crime, we cannot conceive of one without the other—necrophilia is distinguished from rape under the law, criminal intent is distinguished from from insanity, in US courts premeditated murder and manslaughter stand at bookends in a spectrum of different degrees of murder. Aside from the philosophical discussion as to what is possible though modern medical intervention, there are no such degrees of death for the victim to consider (dead is dead, there are no "degrees" of dead) but there exists a hierarchy of murder based solely on the perpetrator's intent—their consciousness of the consequences of their actions, what was in their mind at the time of the killing. This is made no plainer than the very sad case where a child commits a murder when they are well under the age for being considered for adult prosecution. The courts are often confounded at the task of finding fault and judges waver in their assignment of remedy in such tragic cases. What does society do with an eight year old child who fatally shoots his classmate with his brother's handgun. Where is Awareness? Intent? Consciousness?
...oh yeah "plants" (sorry I got way off topic)
Houseplants... livestock... companion animals (dogs, parakeets, goldfish)... gay people in most jurisdictions... ethnic minorities in post colonial societies... women and girls in some traditionalist theocracies... objects and non-living materials (human remains, teddy bears, religious idols, political effigies, all manner of dolls from voodoo to Barbie, various cultural fetish items, money, corporations, etc) ... all of these may or many not be allowed to assert their capacity as conscious, thinking, feeling beyond the automated maintenance of their vegetative and/or simple domestic functions; this is regardless of what level or quality of consciousness they or others might claim for them. As a resource the mere presumption of consciousness is one that is jealously conserved. The reasoning varies by culture and circumstance but its results tend towards a longstanding pattern: from the depopulation of the North American continent of its millions of indigenous inhabitants, to chattel slavery where humans were used as machines and treated as beasts of burden, to Jim Crow racial hygiene laws in early 20th century US, to Nazi antisemitic pseudoscience, all of these come to the same justification on the basis that while these creatures might be indisputably human, consciousness is not inborn quality extended to humans by nature, but rather is a quality extended by humans to humans... but plants?
A hallmark of medieval Western cosmology was the guiding principle that the universe and all it contained was organized into ontological hierarchy—a great "chain of being" extending from God to pope to king to lord to serf... to pheasant... to petunias[...] to bread mold[ ...] rocks, whatever. Embedded along with all creatures great and small in this was a system of power as mediated by the supply-side economists of consciousness. It is a premise of top-down consciousness, consciousness as "emergent" property rather than its being a quality perhaps more abundant in non-living matter, its presence growing ever weaker, rarer as organisms became more complex, other qualities coming to predominate their behavior and development, diverting metabolic resources elsewhere, obscuring all but the most primitive level of awareness—that of a particular, personal present. This food chain/supply-side/top-down consideration of consciousness, the undreaming eye atop the pyramid on the back of every US dollar note: "novus ordo seclorum", this is dark medicine, old. This may not be fully curable in the Western mind—even among its subculture born out of a rediscovery of plant gnosis. The advent of artificial intelligence in such a disparate world, where have-and-have-not have been culturally synonymous with think-and-think-not, raises the possibility that in the very near future it is foreseeable that some more advanced supercomputers might even wield more legal protections under the food chain of consciousness than some disadvantaged peoples do elsewhere on the globe.
Spellbreaking is the better part of alchemy, extraction, and the art of undoing—but a cocksure kind of lovingkindness, a clockwork clock, works time.
Nakhig lo shulun, Sharuku! Gorz nash!
“Where is your master? Where is he?”
Mig shâ zog... Undagush! Nakh
Atigat iuk no lighav wizard...