Raw LLM Responses

Then we get into phenomenology, and this is tricky because in an objective sense, we can't be sure that *anything* is sentient except our own individual selves. So if you want to be 100% objective in this matter, you're left with no choice but to treat only yourself as a sentient being and no one else. That is, although scientifically and logically speaking not wrong, absurd. So what can we do if we can't assess a subject's subjective experience objectively? Well, we can see the way they behave and make assumptions from there. I see you behaving in much the same way I do, so I make the assumption that you are as sentient as I am, and I extend you the moral values I grant to myself. By the same logic, I do this to cows and mouses -- in the sense that I can asses by their behavior that they have a certain level of sentience, and so I extend them a certain level of moral value (though lesser than I do to you, because you seem to me to have a more developed form of sentience, so if I had to choose between killing you or any other human being or a cow, I'd kill the cow). With trees there is no reason to believe they have *any* form of subjective experience. They have nothing even comparable to the biological tools that subjects that appear to me to be sentient have (a developed brain, for once) and they definitely don't behave at all like sentient beings. So I treat them as I would a rock, for example. Of course, it's *possible* that trees are actually super smart and can quote Shakespeare but just choose not to, but it's also possible that I'm the only sentient being in the universe and everyone else are just automatons pretending. But to follow that logic leads to an absurd place.