Thanks for the links. They are some oldies, but goodies in there. The discussion has become much richer in the last few years, with new studies more clearly pointing toward plant consciousness and the verification of other border sciences that show consciousness as much more expansive than the human brain.

We are watching the collapse of generally accepted definitions of consciousness, such as that from John Locke in Concerning Human Understanding where he defined consciousness as "the perception of what passes in man's own mind".

But once the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy took the definition of consciousness to be, "The quality or state of being aware of an external object...", that left the door wide open to many other discussions.

Even in the late 1970s, you would see absurd statements such as James Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception where he stated that plants do not move (which is clearly false), lack a nervous system (depends on your definition), do not behave (again false) and do not have sensations (I have graphs that show otherwise), which made them clearly not worth of study. How wrong could one be?!

All that being said, there are still those that want to limit consciousness to humans, maybe a few mammals here and there. I am curious to hear how others see it.