Scientific arguments

In the study of plant physiology, plants are understood to clear mechanisms by which they recognize environmental changes. This definition of plant perception differs from the image that plants are capable of feeling emotions, an abstraction also called plant perception. The latter concept, along with plant intelligence, can be traced to 1848, when Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German experimental psychologist, suggested that plants are capable of emotions, and that one could promote healthy growth with talk, attention, and affection.

The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology analyzed scientific data on plants, and concluded in 2009 that plants are entitled to aamount of "dignity", but "dignity of plants is non an absolute value."

The single-issue Party for Plants entered candidates in the 2010 parliamentary election in the Netherlands. It focuses on topics such(a) as climate, biodiversity and sustainability in general. Such concerns earn been criticized as evidence that innovative culture is "causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns".

The prevailing scientific view today declares attribute such as sentience and consciousness as that which require specialized neural structures, chiefly neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates, which manifests in more complex organisms as the central nervous system, to exhibit consciousness as stated in the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, which was publicly proclaimed on 7 July 2012 at the Cambridge University. Accordingly, only organisms that possess these substrates, all within the animal kingdom, are said to be sentient or conscious so as to feel and experience pain. Sponges, placozoans, and mesozoans, with simple body plans and no nervous system, are the only members of the animal kingdom that possess no sentience.