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Comment by shakna | Hacker News Reader

I can't really answer you clearly without knowing what definition of sentience you expect to be correct. Especially as I've already noted most people think of sentience as sapience, which it isn't.

Trees respond to both negative and positive stimuli, and relay that information to other plants around them, exchanging information about them. They take both reactive and proactive stances in regards to both negative and positive stimuli - which may be sentience.

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Couldn't a robot be programmed to respond to stimuli, and to communicate with other robots? Would that then be a form of sentience?

Yes, they could be, though the question usually arises about whether a living thing is sentient, and it's fairly natural and easy to define life such that robots are not living beings.

Overall the point here is that sentience isn't a very useful measure of anything. If there were an explicit law recognizing the rights of all living things to a decent death, we would essentially be forced to become exclusive carnivores, as its almost impossible to euthanize a plant or fungus.

Fruits (as in from fruiting plants, not fruits in the culinary sense) I assume would still be fair game as they are designed to separate from the parent plant, often falling off without any intervention even.

Well, given that seeds inside the fruit sense their environment and start germinating only in specific conditions, even this would be debatable. Hopefully, if the cells of the fruit body itself are not sentient (if they do not react to their environment in some meaningful way), then eating the fruiting body is probably ok, provided you euthanize the seeds or let them live on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism

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