I've wondered before about whether we value sentience so much because we have it. Of course it's not nice to feel pain... but who said that not pleasant equals bad? Well, Jeremy Bentham for starters I suppose. And probably most philosophers. But then they are all sentient humans with a vested interest in not promoting pain. On the other hand, ask the Marquis de Sade or that Venus in Furs dude.
In all seriousness, I'm not saying that pain isn't bad. I'm pretty sure it is. But I don't think it's the limit to badness. I think that having well-being of flourishing inhibited is bad enough to count as bad. You don't need sentience or consciousness for that. You just need to have to use more resources to heal or survive than you otherwise would - which will have implications for your health and longevity.
To me, consciousness is epiphenomenal. Or, rather, it arose in that way - but then had survival benefits so it was adaptive. It was originally the scaled up representation of the information shared by the millions, billions of cells in the organism. It's a way of processing information and generating appropriate action at the level of the organism rather than at a lower level.
I think trees would become conscious if they moved, if they had to make decisions on where to be. As they don't have to make organism level decisions, they can keep decision-making delegated to parts with communication throughout the whole.
I mean, it's obvious. Really.
But as far as morality is concerned, sure, we can suffer psychologically, so, perhaps to a lesser extent can other animals. Trees can't. But they can still suffer. It's just different.
Consciousness really isn't that much to write home about.
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