It’s difficult to get even rough estimates of the number of individual plants in the world; for the purposes of the reflective equilibrium section, it suffices that there are far more plants than ants. In addition to plants, we are also investigating (in broad strokes) the extent to which prokaryotes do and don’t exhibit the features traditionally taken to be relevant to assessing consciousness. Finally, as your diction suggests you already know, the phenomenon of sea squirts “eating their own brain” has sometimes been exaggerated in the literature. (In fact, adult sea squirts have perfectly good brains.)
It’s difficult to get even rough estimates of the number of individual plants in the world; for the purposes of the reflective equilibrium section, it suffices that there are far more plants than ants. In addition to plants, we are also investigating (in broad strokes) the extent to which prokaryotes do and don’t exhibit the features traditionally taken to be relevant to assessing consciousness. Finally, as your diction suggests you already know, the phenomenon of sea squirts “eating their own brain” has sometimes been exaggerated in the literature. (In fact, adult sea squirts have perfectly good brains.)