Why Aren't Plants and Microbes Considered Conscious?

Pozessed said:

Is memory an instinct? Why do plants and bacteria have the attribute to retain and recollect information if there is no conscious ability?

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Because conscious experience and what you're talking about are separate things, things that do not necessarily have to happen together. For example, your brain does all kinds of stuff unconsciously. The beating of your heart, controlling your digestive system, calculating how hard to swing your arm and when to release in order to launch the basketball through the hoop, your reflexes, etc etc. All of this activity is happening in the background and yet you have no experience of it. This is because conscious experience only comes about as a result of a particular kind of brain activity (and we still don't have a good understanding of what exactly this key ingredient, what this "special sauce" is). But what we can say from the limited amount that we do know is that plants don't appear to have any structures going on that are remotely similar to the structures in us that appear to be part of the "special sauce".

Pozessed said:

Defining consciousness itself is a tricky subject.

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Right. Define it first in everyone's satisfaction and then we can continue the discussion about the nature of consciousness.