Some ramblings about consciousness and plants

One of Gizmodo's better articles, because it's entirely quotes from different experts and not written in their usual, highly irritating, "here's what you must think about this" style.

Consciousness is something where our language seems inadequate to the task. We all know what it is, but defining it is nearly impossible. "Awareness" could refer to any kind of sensory stimuli, but that doesn't adequately convey the experience of thinking - and it can also be used more casually to refer to consciousness itself. The thing about thinking is that it's very hard, probably impossible, to prove that other people (much less plants or computers) are having a similar experience. Oh, we can measure neural activity to the nth degree, but that won't tell us anything about what it's like to be someone else or a cat or a flower or a piece of mouldy cheese.

We don't need external senses to be conscious anyway, at least not all the time, because clearly we do a lot of thinking without reference to what our current senses are telling us. I'm writing this against the backdrop of G+, which currently shows pictures of a bird, the moon, and a spam post in a badly-moderated community. I'm not thinking very much about those while I'm writing this.

Recently I was thinking about blindsight, where people receive visual input from their eyes but it isn't processed by their conscious brain. They can accurately respond to that stimuli, but they aren't conscious of it.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150925-blindsight-the-strangest-form-of-consciousness
I'm wondering if this isn't as strange as is first seems : maybe we're all doing this almost, but not quite, constantly. I don't mean that we have weird mystical woo-woo hunches based on mysterious ESP or anything like that. Rather I mean that when we start imagining things (when we're awake and in the case of visual thoughts, with our eyes open), we're no longer conscious of the external world in quite the same way. Some other part of the brain takes over so we don't trip over ourselves when we go to get a cup of tea and start thinking about data reduction or exploding whales or whatever. In true daydreaming, rather than more causal thoughts, this process is taken much further, but even with random mental images it seems to take hold. At least it does for me anyway. Blindsight, then, only seems strange because it's permanent and specific to one sense, rather than regular (but fleeting) and generic to all senses as in the case where our minds wander.

This kind of mental perception is normally distinctly different from our conscious perception; it's far more dreamlike. But, this all being an extremely fuzzy spectrum, you can have dreams and thoughts which are very close (or even indistinguishable from) conscious perception, and states of consciousness which are more dreamlike. So, consciousness can't be awareness or perception in that sense. It has little to do with the external world in itself.

Memory and knowledge are of no help either because we haven't got much in the way of a good definition of either of them. Take the overflow pipe in my bath. When the water level is too high, it drains away. This very simple device responds in a predictable way to an external stimuli. Does it "know" the water level is too high ? Does it "remember" what to do in the event of too much water ?

Of course not, but it's a very short step into realms of total confusion. Create a more complex device that responds to multiple events, or code that deals with multiple if-then loops. At what point do we say that they are making a choice ? Are we just elaborate versions of overflow pipes : an incredibly complex set of variables that nonetheless run according to fixed, inviolable rules ? If so, in what sense are we conscious whereas plants and pipes and bits of dandruff are not ? Does a calculator or a flower have the sort of internal perception we ascribe to ourselves ? How could we ever prove it ? What sort of consciousness is it ethically acceptable for us to destroy, i.e. why eat plants but not animals ? Why smash calculators but not kill people ?

The Universe is very confusing and I don't like it. For my part I throw up my hands and declare, "Bugger if I know. Look, I'm conscious, you're conscious, he's conscious (even if he's a bit of a dick), that fluffy rabbit is conscious, that rock isn't but I ain't sure about the suspicious-looking daffodil in the back. What's that ? You ask why ? Because I said so, that's why."
https://gizmodo.com/are-plants-conscious-1826365668