Do not get too locked into concerns about eating vegetables because they are considered 'conscious' by some. They may interact with their environments in the sense of turning towards the sun but that is a matter of their physiology and not their sentience. This is a Virtual Reality. Everything is just data as Bette is so fond of saying. Well, it is true. You are not actually eating. You are instead experiencing yourself as eating within the data stream that comes to you and creates the experience of the VR for you to interact with. In a very real sense, you are not eating even the animals that appear to create the meat that you appear to eat in the VR simulation. You as an IUOC within Consciousness Space interacting over the Reality Wide Web simply do not eat in any sense of the word. Those entities which have an attached/linked IUOC to provide the decisions within their decision space are the only conscious entities. Plants do not have a linked IUOC. They thus are not truly conscious. They have no decision space. They cannot decide to pick up and move. They cannot decide to reject the nutrients coming their way as contaminated and move over 'there' to obtain a better food supply. The list of what they cannot do that conscious entities can do goes on and on. One may use metaphors to attribute some kind of consciousness to plants and trees but this is in no way the same thing as that of an entity with a real decision space.

Ted