That was one of my thoughts years ago after playing with early ChatGPT and local llama1: this proves that intelligence and consciousness do not necessitate one another and may not even be directly related.
I’ve kind of thought this for many years though. A bacterium and a tree are probably conscious. I think it’s a property of life rather than brains. Our brains are conscious because they are alive. They are also intelligent.
The consciousness of a bacterium or a tree might be radically unlike ours. It might not have a sense of self in the same way we do, or experience time the same way, but it probably has some form of experience of existing.
But why? A roomba has senses, and can access them when it has power and respond to stimulation. When it runs out of power it no longer experiences this sensation and no longer responds to stimulus.
How is that different than a cell?
You simply defined consciousness as life, which seems like an unusual but also not very useful definition.
> an unusual ... definition
I don't think it's that unusual. It seems to me just to be a narrower version of panpsychism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
Someone that has recently dies has pretty much the same biology as when they were alive. The conciseness is the main difference, I would say.
I think this gets to the conflation we naturally have with consciousness and a sense of self. Does a tree have a sense of self? I imagine probably not, a tree acts more like a clonal colony than a single organism.
It may be helpful here to think about, at what point does a sense of self, of varying degrees, become evolutionarily advantageous?
An animal that doesn't have some kind of pair bond or social arrangement, and doesn't raise its young, has a lot less need for some of this emotional hardware than we do.
Whereas K-selected species that raise their kids have broadly the same need for it as humans.
That doesn't categorically mean it evolved with the first pair-bonding K-reproducer, or that birds have parallel-evolved emotional hardware like ours, but there's plenty of behavioural evidence there - the last common ancestor of birds and humans was small-brained and primitive, but investing in individual children probably evolved around the time of amniote eggs, just because they were so much more biologically expensive to produce than amphibian or fish eggs.
Is someone tripped out on mushrooms experience ego death and total disruption of sense of self still conscious? They may even contend they are more conscious than normal life, what with all the communing with the universe and whatnot.
Trees react to the world around them in many ways.