Lemmyworld admins be like
Removed by mod
Their fault for dressing so sexy
I mean if you stretch it enough even cells know they are being eaten
Yeah, that’s absolutely what keeps happening with these news items. “Lifeform demonstrates reaction to stimulus!”
What will Staples do?
Is that the browning that goes on on the outside when baking some meat?
That’s not how knowledge works.
There’s a type of person that thinks Joe Rogan is clever because they agree with him.
Carnivores eat animals that eat a lot more plants than humans could ever eat.
That’s why I only eat baby animals. They only drink milk, which hurts no one.
Everything that is, is alive.
Yeah, that’s what most people don’t understand… People should do some shrooms/LSD to get out of their head and back to their heart.
This would solve most if not all the cognitive dissonance we strugle with every day…
Joe Rogan 🤮
“Know” is a stretch. Plants respond to attack by releasing chemicals (e.g. nettles and grasses), curling or retracting their leaves (e.g. acacia), or by changing their morphology (e.g. holly); but they have no nervous system - let alone a brain - so it’s not like you’re killing an animal.
by this logic do people even truly exist. Maybe you’re just the only real person in the world, maybe im the only real person in the world, we have no way of proving this.
Plants having no nervous system is being challenged with the idea that the plant itself is its central nervous system.
They react to stimulus, they emit sounds (different ones when in “pain”), and communicate with each other.
They don’t have consciousness in a way we understand
I dont mean this as a “dunk” but more of a how neat is that
Huh, neat.
I dont mean this as a “dunk” but more of a how neat is that
It’s truly shameful that disclaimers like these feel necessary in this age of shitting on everyone else online. Lemmy users suck too.
Yeah, but on the other hand I’m old enough to know that when I get excited about something I can talk about it in a way that “clobbers” so I like to disclaimer myself when I know I’m exhibiting that kind of behavior.
It’s always funny to me how people eat up the concept of a distrubuted neural network in tech but scoff at the same idea applying to something like a tree or a fungus.
Pando is the largest organism by area, and the Humungous Fungus is the largest by mass. The idea that those organisms don’t “think” in some way is laughable.
“In some way” is doing A LOT of heavy lifting there. … although in the general sense, agreed.
Especially given how many outright wrong or otherwise assinine conclusions some “thinking” animals come to… Perhaps communicative consciousness is overrated on the intelligence scale.
because humans invent things from scratch that nature has already created and optimzed, it’s why we’re seeing a lot of optimizations on current tech that comes from nature itself.
It’s a really weird problem to have.
Go find that video of a slime mold optimizing Japan’s rail system by finding oats in a maze
isn’t this similar to or equivalent in concept to letting water pathfind through a maze for example?
No. The slime mold doesn’t just solve the maze. It figures out the optimal path and grows only where it needs to reach the goal. It’s a fascinating thing to watch in time-lapse. The “water in a maze” idea is that if it fills every passage, the only drain would be the exit.
You should read the book “entangled life” if you haven’t already. It’s fascinating.
It always seems lime some excuse in a counter response by vеgаns
The number of times I’ve responded to them telling them that plants probably process pain in a different way to us has always been shot down by them
Tell them that brains extremely simplified are just on and off responses to certain stimuli / information just like plants have specific reponsonses to stimuli and computers having 1’s and 0’s that respond to information
A mycelium network could be counted as a brain
If you actually believe harming plants causes them pain and that that is bad, you should be vegan. Animal agriculture harms far, far more plants than any plant agriculture ever could.
But then you’re still causing plants pain by farming and eating them. Isn’t that argument no different than saying if you believe that harming animals causes them pain, you should be in favor of eating the ones that are hunted because farming them causes more pain?
I really don’t know if plants can cause pain and I think the environmental arguments for not eating meat are far more compelling than the ethical ones, but regardless, I think this is a poor argument for veganism.
But then you’re still causing plants pain by farming and eating them. Isn’t that argument no different than saying if you believe that harming animals causes them pain, you should be in favor of eating the ones that are hunted because farming them causes more pain?
If you insist on animal abuse then you should do it through hunting rather than factory farming precisely because of the diminished amount of suffering caused. But it’s still more suffering than would be caused by just eating plants so I’m not sure I understand your point
I’m talking about an argument for veganism though. If you are saying that it’s acceptable for people to eat hunted meat, you’re not saying they should be vegans. And you’re encouraging a massive increase in hunting.
Are vegans fine with fish? Seafood?
If it helps give context, various … factions? (I’m not sure the best word here) consider honey OK and others do not. You can research that more if you want to get an idea of what some vegans might think.
Vegans don’t really have factions. Every single one is an individual with their own values.
Yeah, I couldn’t think of a better word at the moment. “schools of thought” is probably a better one for grouping overall themes that exist within the vegan movement.
Some of them eat oysters, or so I’m told. They lack a brain and centralised nervous system.
One of my exes is very strictly vegetarian and will eat oysters. Oysters lack the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves or the environment, effectively they’re a water pump made out of meat, and they’re one of the most sustainable foods we can make leading to less planetary harm than a lot of plant crops even. It’s definitely a controversial opinion though
Oysters lack the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves
Fish too btw, as far as we know. Lizard brain is an evolution of fish brain, they are basically biological automata.
Makes one think, live getting on land was it getting into hard mode.
one of the most sustainable foods we can make leading to less planetary harm than a lot of plant crops even
I did read about damaging effects of oyster farms though, the ones with cages, because of their poop/piss(?). But sure, because hundreds in one place.
I did read about damaging effects of oyster farms though
Yeah no monoculture farm is without it’s damage, for sure, but oysters are real low on the list. They are filter feeders so don’t need any additional food source or fertilizer you just seed them somewhere and pull them out as needed. A single one filters something like fifty gallons of water a day, capture carbon for their shells, and they’re incredible at pulling heavy metals out of the water but that’s not something they’re utilized for at scale afaik because then humans wouldn’t want to eat those ones
Your fish science is wildly outdated.
When talking about the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves (the oysters) how is that actually measured and what do they look for
How are we sure they are not actually self aware through some other unknown mechanism
I am not a biologist but my understanding is that largely has to do with a lack of central nervous system. It would be like asking if a heart is aware of itself. It can autonomously react to things like low oxygen but that isn’t because those signals go anywhere that makes a decision it’s more like a chemical/biological Rube Goldberg machine. If you really want to get down to it though I don’t think we can know for certain just make educated guesses, and imo oysters are even less likely to have any form of consciousness than a lot of plants or mushrooms
Peak ambiguity.
No, vegans aren’t eating fish or seafood.
Isn’t that how we justified boiling Crayfish alive though?
Some misguided monsters, yes.
We don’t know how consciousness works enough to say they don’t. Having a brain and/or nervous system might not be necessary.
They don’t have muscles either, but some plants are known to uproot themselves and fucking move.
Wait that’s cool as hell, which plants?
Maybe tumbleweeds? I think…
Banana plants for one.
Yeah, plants aren’t stationary. All plants move, just very, very slowly compared to animals. Looking at time lapse videos of vines growing, reaching out for something to grab on to and stuff is pretty neat. They kind of whip around in circles until they feel they’ve hit something worth grabbing onto.
We don’t know how consciousness works enough to say they don’t. Having a brain and/or nervous system might not be necessary.
Hmm sorry but no, there are traits exhibited by conscious entities which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness. This is a nice explainer on consciousness, note that it’s not saying anything about needing a brain to exhibit those traits
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#DesQueWhaFeaCon
correct me if I am misremembering sth
How will we ever know for sure if plants have their own form of consciousness that doesn’t follow a list of requirements that’s based on animals, or can feel pain.
there are traits exhibited by conscious entities which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness.
Implying we have a way of determining whether an entity is conscious or not. That’s the entire point of contention here.
which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness.
See what you did there? You assume a priori which entities lack consciousness, and then motivate this by claiming they lack traits that can be observed in conscious entities. That is very neatly circular.
What you and other people who’re objecting to my comment are saying is that there is no way to define consciousness because we don’t know all the different ways something can be conscious. But that doesn’t matter because these organisms lack the properties which we see in other conscious organisms, ie proprieties we do know about
Here’s what I am saying: consciousness is an emergent property of some discrete biological processes, and we have developed some idea of what consciousness looks like when exhibited by an organism.
So that means that all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties. You cannot pick and choose which properties to exhibit because then what you’re doing is something else, and not exhibiting consciousness.
Like, if you’re a heart of some sort, you have to exhibit the same activity as a heart in general across all different organisms to be classified as a heart.
It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious.
So, I’m guessing everyone in this thread has a different conception of what “consciousness” actually is and what we’re talking about here, which makes it difficult to discuss casually like this. You seem to have a very exclusive definition of consciousness, which only serves to avoid the argument, really. “It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious”…you’re splitting hairs. If plants could be proven to be aware, have subjective experience, a sense of self, it would be reasonable to change our definition of consciousness to be more inclusive - simply because such a concept of consciousness would be a lot more useful then.
Emergentism is a popular hypothesis, not a fact. Christof Koch lost the bet, remember? The idea that “all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties” and “you cannot pick and choose” does not logically follow from anything you’ve said. These are criteria that you set up yourself. Take the idea of qualia as an example, how could we ever observe that an animal or a plant does or does not experience qualia? Nobody solved the problem of other minds.
Consciousness is nothing like a heart; the function of the heart can be observed and measured. How do you know that you possess awareness? You can only experience it. (Actually, that we are aware is the only thing we can know with complete certainty.)
Er, that’s what I am saying however is that you can observe and measure consciousness.
You seem to have a very exclusive definition of consciousness, which only serves to avoid the argument, really.
I don’t, I am just going based on current findings.
I am not sure why it’s hard to accept that some living things may not be conscious. Viruses propagate “mindlessly”, they’re neither living nor conscious.
I also don’t understand why you think emergent properties are a hypothesis. Emergent properties of biological processes are fact, look at any cell of any major organ in the body. Why do we treat the brain differently? Because I think we get irrational.
Er, that’s what I am saying however is that you can observe and measure consciousness.
Going with any definition of consciousness relevant to this discussion, say phenomenality and/or awareness, no.
I am not sure why it’s hard to accept that some living things may not be conscious. Viruses propagate “mindlessly”, they’re neither living nor conscious.
That’s not really the point - I don’t claim to know what entities possess consciousness. The point is that you don’t either.
I also don’t understand why you think emergent properties are a hypothesis. Emergent properties of biological processes are fact
Obviously I’m talking about Emergentism as it relates to consciousness, and the idea that consciousness is an emergent property is not a fact, no. And there are perfectly valid reasons - for example, the “explanatory gap” - why someone might find it unsatisfactory.
They have the knowledge and are doing something about it. If other plants can send out this chemical by observing it themselves, that sounds like a reaction from a communication. It may not be cognition like we expect but it is behaving like cognition would. Hard to argue that plants don’t know or care of their friends start dying.
Hey, it’s fine by me if you want to become a fruitarian.
I don’t care what a plant thinks of me; it won’t change the dynamic that I’m motivated and it’s prey.
My point is that plants “think” but do so differently than meat bags. Plant cognition is more like a series of low level chemical reactions that look like thinking, but so does brain chemical squirts if we look close enough. So plants may actually be thinking using mechanisms which don’t rely on complex brain architecture because it has another method of processing that thought. Probably across the whole structure but the process is really inefficient so it takes a long time to finish compute.
Like if a super computer made the judgement of a calculator - they are both crunching numbers but there is an order of magnitude difference in how fast the answer is found. Maybe a plant has low bus speeds and crappy compute limited to simple threaded operations.
I’d argue that knowledge is more than that, otherwise books or state machines could also be said to know things.
The plants are acquiring information and making an independent change to their status with this information. Books do nothing with knowledge other than communicate it to others. Machines are unable to make independent changes to itself unless programmed to do so.
This is why I don’t eat books
We can’t say that brains are required for a mind to exist; we have no way of knowing.
Lobsters contain 15 nerve clusters called ganglia dispersed throughout their bodies, with a main ganglion located between their eyes. So, according to the logic here whyis it wrong to boil them alive if they don’t have a brain?
For the record, imo it is wrong to boil lobster, crabs, and other crustaceans alive. There is no reason you can’t kill them directly before boiling them.
Let’s assume for a moment that somehow your salad was conscious. That’s an even bigger reason not to eat an animal that has to be fed on plants for a long time.
Well a salad is made of cells that have responses to certain stimuli
The brain if you where to go and simplify it down to its most very basic layer is just responses to stimili
The brain is a collection of responses to stimuli that together create a kind of network that can respond to stimuli in complex ways
Plants are a collection of cells that respond to stimuli
So they very well will likely to be conscious on some level
The above comment is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning. The Code of Hammurabi is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning.
So the comment will very well be likely a significant contribution to human culture.
So the comment will very well be likely a significant contribution to human culture.
i think statistically it would be insignificant based on the sheer amount of written material out there, so it should actually be a function of how long the work is, plus how long it’s been around for, the longer it is, and the longer its been around for, the more complete of a historical document we have.
unless the point is that consciousness is not a disqualifying trait to become food
It wasn’t for the donner party.
Or maybe its just a fundamental fact of life that something has to die in order for you to live and virtue signaling about the degree to which you participate in that death is a pointless exercise.
This logic doesn’t make sense in any other context. Like, if I say we should try to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, you could point out that emitting CO2 is a fundamental part of human life, so something something virtue signaling blah blah blah. Just because something is unavoidable to a certain degree doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize it.
Ah yes, the old “I accidentally stepped on a fly, might as well exterminate the whole biosphere” defense
“our new cancer drug is 99% effective!”
“So it doesn’t work in 1% of cases? Then what’s the point, throw it away, we just have to accept that cancer is going to happen”
These arguments are exactly why people hate vegans. It’s nonsense.
Not only do you jump to an insane straw man. You showcase that you ignore a clear increasing contradiction around your world view and choose reactionary nothing.
If you care about life realize the harder question. If you care about the environment realize clear inefficiencues. Currently, you showcase nothing more than crude thoughtlessness.
I’m not a vegan. Their argument was literally that morally there is no difference in the amount of death caused by any person for the purposes of consumption.
Not only do you jump to an insane straw man.
It wasn’t an insane strawman though? It was literally the argument they made. Something has to die for you to eat, therefore it doesn’t matter how many things you kill or how necessary those deaths are. The fact that you must kill something absolves you of any guilt for any amount of killing, is the ridiculous argument the person made (and which carnists often make) which we are making fun of for being obviously evil and wrong.
It is - it’s a super affirmative position. It takes an extreme position within the sphere it’s trying to criticize to make an exaggerated point to attack. It’s literally a classic strawman.
Your follow up is in the same vein. Its empty rhetoric
That’s called Reductio Ad Absurdum and is a valid, classic form of argumentation. If you take their premises to their logical conclusion, the result is absurd, so their premises must be false.
You don’t get to arbitrarily limit where a premise gets applied in order to pick and choose which conclusions to stand by. It isn’t a strawman to show that someone’s premises lead to conclusions that they would disagree with, that’s literally the point.
Lol I despise people not knowing what a strawman is. Go back to english class.
I’m not a vegan but it’s foolish to think that vegans aren’t objectively correct. Let’s even say that plants are conscious beings on the level of cows or pigs. The conditions these plants are grown in are a million times better than that of the average factory farm animal. Additionally, in order to sustain ourselves on cows and pigs, exponentially more of these conscious plants need to be killed to fatten the conscious animals we are eating.
If we just ate the plants instead there would be several orders of magnitude less suffering in the word, antibiotic resistant bacteria would be a less immediate issue, a significant amount of our greenhouse gas emissions would disappear, and we’d all probably be healthier to boot.
Yes, something has to die in order for any organism to continue it’s existence. Let’s not pretend that only plants dying aren’t a better alternative in every way to animals dying in order to further our collective existence. You accuse vegans of being reactionary but your comment smacks of knee-jerky defensiveness for something you seem to understand is wrong
Devil’s advocate: are they a million times better?
Monocultures, moldboard plowing destroying soil structure and creating an Ap horizon, organics depletion and excessive application of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides…
Suspending any personal beliefs in the matter, it is truly easier to empathize with people, mammals, then others animals because we better understand their experience. We cannot understand the abstractions of a plant’s lived experience. Humans are only just starting to examine the intricacies of plant familial systems through root and mycorrhizal networks.
Fair enough. I’m not going to sit here and claim that out current agricultural structure is perfect or even ideal. I personally think a decentralized and highly local system of food production and distribution would be better for the products themselves as well as the environment, human health, and community strength. A million times better is hyperbole but I think it’s fair to say industrial agriculture is better for the plant than it’s equivalent for livestock.
Fertilizers aren’t great, pesticides aren’t great, soil erosion isn’t great. If we waved a magic wand and turned everyone vegan we would still see a net decrease in these harmful agricultural practices simply because people need less food than cows or pigs (among others), especially in the numbers were raising these animals in. If we’re going to care for the wellbeing of the plants we eat, it would still be better to stop raising animals for food from a purely mathematical perspective.
I also agree that animals are easier to empathize with, and as such, we may overlook other (possibly intelligent) forms of life as a consequence. Perhaps one day we will achieve a thorough understanding on the lived experiences of plants and that knowledge may create another paradigm shift. But we need a planet that is capable of sustaining life for that to happen. Reducing our collective meat consumption is one of the myriad tools we have to ensure that end. Sorry if I’m coming off as confrontational or anything. I’m sick and my brain is foggy so I wasn’t paying much mind to tone in this comment haha. Not trying to start shit or anything, just too lazy to edit
We as humans are blessed with the ability to choose how we interact with these “facts of life”.
Or maybe there’s happy middle where everyone can live comfortably while keeping the harm we cause at a minimum.
Or, at the most selfish, we could make sure we don’t kill ourselves this decade or the next.
There was a Hungarian cult that convinced others that people can survive by eating light. There were some deaths and was quickly shut down, but they exist forever in anorexia-related jokes.
I think you’re talking about Breatherism? There’ve been a couple of those cults all over Europe. It’s not particularly popular, luckily, but they often make it to the newspapers, because someone usually dies.
It originates from Hinduism though. There’s a another Indian religion called Jainism. These are the monks you see brushing away the beetles before their feet, to not step on them. It’s very much about nature and spiritualism and being good. Fasting is a key concept of this religion and the most extreme cases will choose to fast until death to cleanse the world. This is all very spiritual though and takes years of preparation.
Everybody needs to eat stuff. And if it is about reducing pain and having a better climate impact, you should plants all the way. A cow eats 50 times the amount of plants that it gives back in meat.
The cow meat is already there, in the store. Individual choices do not affect the climate. It is disrespectful to not consume it.
demand and supply are a thing
But it tastes better
I’m sure there’s poison that tastes good. Go eat that, Mr. Bigot.
Then raise a cow and kill it.
I don’t have the space for it, though I’d really like to have a little farm of my own.
So the choice is meat or division of labor?
Can’t, don’t really have the space for it, but you want to see my chickens and my ducks? Heck, you can have a picture of my dog, but I ain’t eating that.
but I ain’t eating that
Well, now I’m just disappointed that that’s just a vegan anti meat page.
I was more disappointed by the inconsistency of their claims.
On the front page, they said that, they gave their livestock the highest quality feed and kept them happy in an open environment.
Upon reading further, they changed their tone to keeping them in small cages, followed with stuff like, “don’t worry, you won’t taste it”.They, as a company, lost credibility.
I’m afraid I’m going to need a better argument than “I support killing animals because it makes me feel good.”
lmfao this is hilarious
So many vegans taking this 100% seriously lmao
NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL SHITPOSTING VOL. 68
