> “Plants are not just robotic, stimulus-response devices,” said Frantisek Baluska
I don't see how this follows from the finding that sedatives can prevent plants from responding to stimuli. It just means that there's a shared mechanism behind plants' responses and animals' responses, which wouldn't be overly surprising.
Of course, that doesn't mean that plants don't have a lot more going on than we usually realise, just because it happens at timescales so much longer than ours. There's all sorts of cool stuff happening in rainforests with cooperation/competition between plants.
I'd add that "robotic" is, in most uses of the term, extremely vague. In those uses, it doesn't have a clear meaning, it's just a term for referring to things that appear like how present-day automated machinery appears to us.
It's like people who think "computer" means something that appears like the kinds of silicon-based computers we engineer at present, rather than understanding it in terms of the rigorous notion of computation, as something that can perform computation (which can be performed in such widely varying ways, in so many different media)
Moreover, I can have say, my limbs anesthetized, yet remain conscious. I can also be unconscious (sleeping) yet respond to stimuli.
The author of the article seems to assume that loss of responsiveness implies a consciousness which is lost, which is frankly a bizarrely incorrect inference.
It reads to me as: Here is a list of examples of things that plants do that would imply some kind of decision making process. When we anesthetize them they lose those abilities, is that something that tells us they have consciousness.
Secondarily, one can make the argument that due to the fact that you have a nervous system in your arm and your brain loses the signals from that system, in some way you have lost part of your consciousness when you are anesthetized. Since at it's core consciousness is just an awareness of what is happening to you.
Thirdly, whose to say if plants are conscious that their roots don't function in some way as their brain.
My understanding of the traditional definition of consciousness is explicitly not the simple stimulus/response you imply it is, but rather, meta-awareness or control over the stimulus/response system.
That is, I am conscious of my arm if and only if I am aware of the stimulus/response process taking place (or not, as it were). Whereas, there are plenty of processes in the body of which one is not typically conscious (e.g. heartbeat, digestion, anything occuring during sleep or coma).
To claim that you suffer partial loss of consciousness when your arm is anesthetized implies that when asleep, you are not fully unconscious, because your arm still responds to stimuli. This is contrary to almost every definition of consciousness I've heard, and sounds more like a definition of responsiveness.
The model of plants wherein all stimuli/response processes are unconscious I claim is not invalidated by the experiment in the article.
Yet this is the same type of work people are using to argue that that crabs/fish can feel/experience pain. Proving or disproving consciousness is basically impossible.
E.g. I feel like a lot of people aren't conscious :) Prove me right or wrong?
"It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets." - Richard Dawkins
> Yet this is the same type of work people are using to argue that that crabs/fish can feel/experience pain.
Not really: a fundamental requirement in the assessment of pain reception in animals is the presence and stimulation of nociceptors (pain receptors). Plants don’t have any nerves, so they fundamentally lack pain reception. It’s entirely possible that they have developed an alternative system to experience pain (e.g. via analogous action potential signalling) but at this point our conventional model of pain reception completely breaks down.
I’m not arguing that. I’m arguing that a nociceptor is necessary but not sufficient to argue for pain experience. And plants don’t even fulfil this basic, necessary criterion. So the “type of work” shown in the article isn’t the same kind of evidence conventionally used to argue for pain experience.
it's simple, but I don't think that it's exaggerated. If anything I think it just speaks to the hidden power and complexity that can arise from following simple rule-sets.
Although not typically used to describe such (internal) behavior, the text-book definition of 'stimulus' is just "a thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organ or tissue." -- If one were to consider that definition, 'stimulus' would also include everything your brain does; along with introspection, prediction, and everything we include as 'consciousness', and not just external forces that evoke an internal response (like sound,smell, light, touch, taste, etc.).
I think an important distinction is whether the response to stimulus is hardcoded or not, and the degree to which it's not. Saying simply 'stimulus-response' makes it sound like a reflex like pulling back your hand when you accidentally touch a hot plate. There's a world of difference between an automaton that always reacts the same way to a given stimulus on one end and on the other end a deeply learning mind that can store memories, create internal models to predict stimuli, maybe even 'rewire' itself to change what effects future stimuli can have. Sure, you could say that the latter just reacts to stimuli over a greater period of time (e.g. experience is just old stimuli still being reacted to) but to do so would be to gloss over the enormous difference in nature and complexity of such systems. And unless you believe in a metaphysical definition of consciousness, then somewhere in that complexity gap is where consciousness arises, so it seems hardly like something to be glossed over.
This paragraph provides answer to your objection. Plants learn to modify the response based on experience.
> Under poor soil conditions, the pea seems to be able to assess risk. The sensitive plant can make memories and learn to stop recoiling if you mess with it enough. The Venus fly trap appears to count when insects trigger its trap. And plants can communicate with one another and with caterpillars.
The hard part is coming out with an interesting and discussable definition of free will that doesn't smell like the mind-brain duality, which is just a term for spirit.
Your statement presumes that the typical conception of "free will" does indeed exist and that this is a universally held position. As a counterpoint, determinism has many backers.
A typical (grossly simplified) physicalist response to your claim is that the illusion of "choice" is really the result of complex processes playing out.
The quotes are there to indicate that the free will is there but only as a convenient abstraction.
"The idea of the self over time [...] is the property of phenomenal selfhood that plays the most important role in creating the fictional self and the first person perspective. Metzinger defines the first person perspective as the “existence of single coherent and temporally stable model of reality which is representationally centered around or on a single coherent and temporally stable phenomenal subject”."
Free will in this sense is used to model reality in the form of subjective experience, part of which includes ownership of self. In other words we experience free will as a property of our model of reality, but it does not exist outside this abstraction. Objectively we are causally determined, subjectively we experience free will as part of the modeling process by the brain to create predictions about how it should respond to external stimuli.
Self is an abstraction inside a simulation, it does not map onto reality directly. But since our subjective reality is the simulation, we will always experience ourselves as having free will barring a brain disorder, such as the ones mentioned in the wiki link: "Disorders of the self model are implicated in several disorders including schizophrenia, autism, and depersonalization."
I don't think there is actual free will, and I think the appearances of it is just how our minds present things to us -- that is, I basically agree with the description you give.
But I object to statements like:
> the free will is there but only as a convenient abstraction.
Here's an analogy to illustrate my objection. It's inaccurate to say that the person Santa Claus literally exists but only as a mental concept.
The accurate way to put it is that the Santa Claus person doesn't literally exist but we have mental concepts describing such a person.
Free will doesn't exist but we have a mental concept of such a thing.
I think that's a fair point. I usually phrase it that way to avoid coming off too strong to people whose beliefs are unknown to me.
So to sum up, we agree that the concept of free will exists and is experienced, but it is just a mechanism that the brain uses to navigate and make decisions about a dynamic environment and not free will in the classical sense of having control over the decisions we make.
Honestly, after writing that out, I agree even more strongly with you! I think we should relegate the term "free will" to the classic definition and adopt Metzinger's vocabulary for the new metaphysical concepts. Then it's very simple, there is no free will, but there is a Phenomenal Self Model that the brain relies on which can be conflated with classical free will.
I will endeavor to be more clear in the future. Thanks!
Remembering reading about the work done by Jagadish Chandra Bose:
"He researched the mechanism of the seasonal effect on plants, the effect of chemical inhibitors on plant stimuli and the effect of temperature. From the analysis of the variation of the cell membrane potential of plants under different circumstances, he hypothesised that plants can "feel pain, understand affection etc."
Do you have any references? Wikipedia suggests the opposite. I do not find anything wrong with new research but presenting it as groundbreaking is laughable.
Complex exchange of information and response to your environment is fascinating, and should be appreciated. But if we're calling that consciousness, we've watered down the term to the point that it's just a loose metaphor for virtually any kind of complex biological mechanisms.
This really shouldn't even be a debate. It's the special kind of wrong that ought to be embarrassing, like when people equate consciousness to quantum weirdness.
Provided there are single cell organisms with eyes[1], and transcription factors form DNA-based activation/inhibition networks conceptually indistinguishable from neuronal networks, debating whether plants have subjective experience ("a view from the inside" doesn't necessarily implies visual information) is totally on the table.
Whether those organisms experience anything we can relate to is another matter though.
Photoreceptivity isn't consciousness. "View from the inside" wasn't a mere reference to vision. And I would hope that the structural differences between DNA and brains are clear enough that they wouldn't have to be debated in a serious conversation.
Structural differences are no barrier to functional equivalence. Transcription factors are proteins that activate or inhibit the transcription rate of other genes, including those of other transcription factors.
They do form complex regulation networks that are isomorphic to neural circuitry.
Edit: re. ocelloid, I know you didn't literally mean vision.
The structure of the retinal body and adjacent organelles suggests that it is more than a focused, single pixel cam that would be used for simple phototropism, which implies that it is tied to a more complex processing apparatus.
K sooo to (kinda) answer the question: depends. What's your definition of consciousness?
Now as for the implication that anesthetics sedating plants has ANYTHING to do with this/whether or not they are conscious: no. No sorry, not buying it. Need more science.
This just suggests we may have similar inhibitory biochemical responses to certain organic compounds.
That's not surprising since were all made out of hydrocarbons & many anesthetics have relatively simple structures.
Yes, all those discussions dissolve once you use a precise definition, but there is no generally accepted one.
The definition must apply to humans. It must not apply to rocks. It should probably not apply to plants, fungi, bacteria, and worms. It will probably apply to dolphins, dogs, and pigs. Will it apply to companies, robots, cities, ant swarms, chicken, or fish?
I'm reminded of the xkcd comic about making a computer out of tons of rocks in the desert[1]. Sure, one rock is crystalline (enough) and has essentially no stimulus-processing power. But a pile of rocks, arranged just so, can be set up so as to respond to certain stimuli that, to an outside observer, seems like thought/consciousness. This is the Chinese room problem[2] recast.
By approaching it in this way, we are forced to reconsider: what's so special about humans that makes how you define consciousness more applicable to them than a rock or plant? Why exclude rocks at all?
I'm firmly in the camp that any attempt to quantify consciousness will necessarily be a matter of degree, with no system exhibiting zero consciousness except a perfect crystal (i.e., zero entropy).
Sorry this is late, but check out Dr. Giulio Tononi's mathematical apparatus called Integrated Information Theory. In a nutshell, it considers a system and all the causal relations within it, measures some quantity related to the number of states that system can take, and then considers the graph cut that minimizes this quantity in the subsystems. The difference between the uncut and cut graphs gives a degree of "integrated information", which can be argued is a useful analogue or even the very definition of consciousness.
Thanks for the Chinese Room experiment link. I had never heard of it. I don’t suppposr anyone has any good book recommendations around this train of thought?
That seems more like a definition for intelligence or learning.
My favourite definition for consciousness is the following:
If it is something to be like a particular thing, then that thing is conscious.
If it is something to be like a bat, then a bat is conscious. If it isn’t something to be like a bat - the “lights are off” so to speak - then it’s not conscious.
You probably couldn't use this definition even if you had a magical device which transforms you into a bat and then back again.
After you are yourself again you'll need to interpret the acquired memories. You remember echolocview of the room (bats have memory, it's testable), hunger, disorientation and some other sensations. Does it mean that bat is conscious? What will you remember differently if bat wasn't conscious? You'll remember nothing? But memories are there and you should have access to them. The lack of self-awareness? But you don't know how you would remember the presence of self-awareness in a bat.
But the definition isn’t if it is like something for a human to be a bat. Human experience doesn’t really come into it.
It is like something to be a human. But the conscious experience of a bat (if it exists) may be completely alien to us in every way. That’s not relevant to what it is to be like a bat. The only important thing is if it is like something to be a bat.
What's good in a definition you have no conceivable way of applying? How would you go about testing whether a bat is conscious according to this definition?
It is based on our illusion of understanding what it is like to be a human, but upon closer inspection it bears no real content.
I think you could still use the definition. Because your still conscious, your just something that is aware of its ability to change shape and maintain its awareness through that change.
Nothing is really static in life. So nothing ever really is always just a thing, it was one thing, now it's a slightly different thing.
It was from a conversation between two neuroscientists. They were talking about Nagel earlier in the discussion.
I don’t know if Nagel came up with that definition though.
Could you explain how the way I stated it is circular?
If it isn’t something to be like a bat - the “lights are off” so to speak - then it’s not conscious.
I guess I'm focusing more on the "lights are off" part, although that's just an aside. "Conscious" and "lights are on" seem like alternate ways of saying exactly the same thing.
Nagel's "is it like something to be" terminology has always struck me as wilfully contorted and confusing, but amounting to the same thing again -- you're conscious if you're conscious. It doesn't help us explain consciousness and it doesn't even help figure out what things are conscious and which aren't. Is a plant conscious, or a rock? Writers can certainly imagine what it might be like to be those things.
Consciousness, like Artificial Intelligence, is a slippery concept. They both tend toward being unattainable by anything-other-than-human:
i. As we implement progressively more abstract concepts in computers, those layers of abstraction become mundane things that computers can do.
ii. As we learn more and more about how non-robot-like other organisms are we can quite easily push consciousness further in to the human-only corner by just adjusting the definition of consciousness.
Insofar as consciousness can be defined as the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings the yes, plants certainly are conscious.*
Consciousness described as a physical process is different than explaining how you, visarga, are able to experience reality. Understanding how that idea of internal experience, of being, could relate to a plant, seems the revelation here.
Why not? And if it's power source runs out, the Roomba loses consciousness.
That seems closer to the everyday definition of consciousness most people operate by, than to the hopelessly bikeshed attempts at making it a uniquely human thing.
Humans have a bit more elaborated internal representation of themselves than a Rumba (which doesn't have any. Early versions even had no representation for the room they operate in).
We don’t have point of reference outside of Wall-e to presume a robot is conscious in any way. However a living organism like a plant may experience being.
Study: Anaesthetics stop diverse plant organ movements, affect endocytic vesicle recycling and ROS homeostasis, and block action potentials in Venus flytraps
Citation: K Yokawa, T Kagenishi, A Pavlovič, S Gall, M Weiland, S Mancuso, F Baluška; Annals of Botany, mcx155.
Anaesthesia for medical purposes was introduced in the 19th century. However, the physiological mode of anaesthetic drug actions on the nervous system remains unclear. One of the remaining questions is how these different compounds, with no structural similarities and even chemically inert elements such as the noble gas xenon, act as anaesthetic agents inducing loss of consciousness. The main goal here was to determine if anaesthetics affect the same or similar processes in plants as in animals and humans.
Methods
A single-lens reflex camera was used to follow organ movements in plants before, during and after recovery from exposure to diverse anaesthetics. Confocal microscopy was used to analyse endocytic vesicle trafficking. Electrical signals were recorded using a surface AgCl electrode.
Key Results
Mimosa leaves, pea tendrils, Venus flytraps and sundew traps all lost both their autonomous and touch-induced movements after exposure to anaesthetics. In Venus flytrap, this was shown to be due to the loss of action potentials under diethyl ether anaesthesia. The same concentration of diethyl ether immobilized pea tendrils. Anaesthetics also impeded seed germination and chlorophyll accumulation in cress seedlings. Endocytic vesicle recycling and reactive oxygen species (ROS) balance, as observed in intact Arabidopsis root apex cells, were also affected by all anaesthetics tested.
Conclusions
Plants are sensitive to several anaesthetics that have no structural similarities. As in animals and humans, anaesthetics used at appropriate concentrations block action potentials and immobilize organs via effects on action potentials, endocytic vesicle recycling and ROS homeostasis. Plants emerge as ideal model objects to study general questions related to anaesthesia, as well as to serve as a suitable test system for human anaesthesia.
If hearing that choosing to eat plants can cause suffering ruins vegetarianism for you, it should already have been ruined by learning that harvesting land for e.g. wheat causes the death of some small animals. (Mice, rabbits, etc.)
The idea that it's a worthy goal to minimize suffering caused through your food choices, however, is unaffected by learning about harvesting deaths or by learning that plants might be very minimally conscious.
As deep as it needs to be to allow people to accept lab grown meat.
The equivalent of conscientious vegetarians of the future may be those that only eat lab grown human meat, of their own grown cells. Me-steak is the meat of the future. Of course, genetics probably means some of us taste better than others...
There's no reason to believe that single cells can't be conscious too.
You'd have to eat organic molecule synthesized through a non-biological, industrial process that feeds on energy harvested in space, so that all solar energy on earth can be given back to the wilderness.
Yes, using terrestrial solar and wind energy deprives geologic, atmospheric, marine and wild biological processes from the energy they're naturally due, and it is not ethical to use it anymore than it is to eat animal flesh.
More seriously, we're dissipative structures, and we can't survive (i.e. keep our inner entropy low) without raising the entropy in our surrounding. So there's gonna be some environmental disruption if we want to survive, and it's going to be at the expense of other organisms, be they cute, plain or disgusting.
Edit: with all that said, I think our current meat consumption rate is suicidal for environmental reasons. I do think we should limit the amount of meat we eat, but not out of compassion for non-human animals. I may have another opinion if I didn't have kids, but since they're there I'd rather limit as much as possible the cataclysm that's unfolding before our very eyes.
“We're dissipative structures, and we can't survive (i.e. keep our inner entropy low) without raising the entropy in our surrounding, so there's gonna be some environmental disruption if we want to survive, and it's going to be at the expense of other organisms, be they cute, plain or disgusting.”
My one quibble is the defeatist “it’s going to be”. Advances in lower-level physics can open up new possibilities. Even now terrestrial solar, while depriving some types organisms from sunlight, can provide shade for other types of organisms to thrive, and who knows what it would be on balance.
I doubt that avoiding any environmental change is in itself a sensible goal, and framing it as always “disruption at the expense of other organisms” seems not constructive. Like any organism, we change the environment purely by existing and interacting with other organisms. Becoming more and more well-off, stable and conscientious ourselves, learning what conscience is and how many conscious agents are around us that are not us, we’ll have resources to iterate and become better at taking care of those agents, from not breaking them up unnecessarily to helping them thrive and build up complexity themselves.
Eventually, if we don’t go extinct too soon, as a result of our growth I believe we’d expand our definition of “us” to include life and nail energy absorption enough to shift the rising entropy entirely to the outside of that scope. That picture of food being synthesized industrially in space, ensuring nothing is harmed in the process—along those lines.
Looks like we're in agreement on the fundamentals :-)
My point here is that renewable energy has an ecologic footprint that goes beyond the ostensible animal deaths caused by the blades of wind turbines. It is a zero sum game, and it is disruptive in ways we can't all anticipate (especially in an economic growth context).
Whether or not other organisms are conscious is not very relevant to our survival. What's relevant is how useful they are to environmental stability.
Also re. taking care, nature is generally brutal. Few wild organisms die of old age, sipping mojitos on the beach.
Starvation, injury, disease or being eaten is the norm, and that chaos is part of what makes ecosystems resilient (within bounds that we're currently breaking).
Who knows, maybe we’ll find a disagreement and this will become an interesting argument :)
Sure, other organisms are not relevant to our survival.
What I thought is that if we become able to capture lots of energy from e.g. our local star to maintain a huge sphere of order and low entropy within our habitat, that’d remove the conflict between us vs. other organisms. Basically “our survival” would be expanded to the survival of the whole system of conscious lifeforms we have around.
I mean, on one hand, preserving our natural habitat might keep us humans smart and efficiently developing new cool ways of capturing & dissipating energy at larger scales.
On the other hand, perhaps preserving the whole system of organisms engaging in things like killing each other for whatever purpose within our giant low-entropy sphere will be utterly useless from the universal meaning of life point of view—as in, not at all contributing to energy capture and dissipation.
If that’ll be the case I imagine we’ll evolve quite differently… Something very cyberpunk and AI-heavy comes to mind. Simpler organisms would keep dying away as we & our technology alone skyrocket in accordance with that universal purpose all the way, all the way until the expedited heat death of the universe. Kinda scary how us meatbags too become optional in that scenario.
Even if you believe that plants are conscious eating plants instead of animals is still more ethical because it takes around 7kg of plant feed to produce 1kg of meat. So you’re responsible for the death of the animal and all the plants it ate.
That depends on how much plant feed you need to consume to offset the calories and nutrition from 1kg of meat. This will, of course, depend on the plant and the meat, but I'm sure you could make some reasonable assumptions. I've never done the math, but would be interested to hear if anyone has.
It takes many fewer plant resources to produce the same calories or protein than it does for the equivalent in meat. The ratio can be as bad as 20 to 1.
This is what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism is all about. (The scruples of the Jain are outlandish, but also worthy of serious respect. You won't meet many new-agey types who are as serious about compassion and nonviolence.)
We have known for years that plants give off a pulse ("scream") when assaulted, communicate chemically etc. I have said for years that the idea that eating plants is morally superior because they aren't sentient is basically speciesist, for lack of a better word.
I would argue that there are lots of valid reasons to eat lower on the food chain, many of which can be framed as having a moral impetus. But the idea that it is morally superior based on plants being stupid is repugnant to me. It opens the door on questions like "So, is it okay to eat mentally retarded people?"
Some moral arguments I can agree with:
A mostly plant based diet is less resource intensive. Since most wars are about scarcity of resources, eating less meat is voting against war in a tangible way. It is about promoting peace globally.
There are health benefits to eating less meat.
Meat is very water intensive. Water shortages are a big deal globally at the moment.
There are no doubt others. Just quick and dirty off the cuff thoughts.
If IQ measured the depth of emotional understanding, then yes. You don't have to like it, just find another reason to argue against eating people - there are plenty.
It really doesn't matter, because the rationale you provided was essentially: it is wrong because I don't like it. To keep with your utilitarian line of thinking, a position against cannibalism based on disease transmission would make more sense. Personally, I prefer the classic argument of it being the ultimate violation of personal space - but that is likely because I favor Locke's theory of property and the mixing of labor.
Or for me: I should only eat something that I am willing to kill, clean and cook myself. When we pass the important moral test of killing an animal to someone else or a factory I think we lose touch with the decision we're making.
On the other hand, professionals are more efficient, and you can impose rules on them, as to minimize the suffering. My family is from a rural area, and the stories I've heard of inexpert killings are horrifying, certainly worse than using the wrong levels of CO² or similar.
I wouldn't make human source of food a major moral issue. In the end, we can't eat rocks. We need something organic, be it plants or animals. Of course, if human survival is put at risk by meat consumption, we'd need to adapt.
Ruminant animals are far more efficient than us at turning plants into high energy protein and fat.
And omnivores like pigs and chickens can eat things that we can't/won't (food waste, insects, worms, grasses, seeds), and turn them into protein and fat.
Our current animal feed system is terrible (grow large quantities of monocrop corn and soy on high quality arable land using vast quantities of fertilizer and terrible soil conservation practices).
But farm animals are an important part of the 'circuit' of a viable small farm. Chickens and ducks can help with weeding. Goats and sheep can turn sod into manure, one of them best fertilizers. Having meat/lard/soup bones in the freezer is an important way to get through the winter.
Legumes don't produce a complete protein that we can survive on by themselves. Vegetarian diets tend to skew too far in the direction of carbohydrates. Plants that produce fats and proteins in the quantities we needs (nuts, avocados, etc.) are pretty much as water hungry as animals.
A pure vegetarian diet may not in fact turn out to be more energy efficient or environmentally sound if it just replaces our monocrop animal feed farms with monocrops of unhealthy insuling-provoking carbohydrates.
Historically, highly hierarchical or slaveholding agricultural societies fed their slaves almost exclusively maize/rice/wheat -- and kept the meat/fish for elites. If you look at the archaeological record and remains of those bodies, the health effects are obvious. Short stature, dental health issues, bone density problems, shortened lifespans. Roman soldiers were terrified of their taller and stockier Germanic/Celtic foes who lived on a more well-rounded diet with more meat and dairy.
>Is war really about scarcity of resources or about conflict over resources, regardless of scarcity?
I think there is a huge difference between the world before the green revolution and after, and I personally think that this difference is a big part of why we haven't seen major power wars after the middle of the 20th century.
World war two was the last major power war, and it was also the last major power war fought when there were not enough calories for everyone to eat their fill. Coincidence?
After world war two (well, after the 'green revolution' that happened in the mid 20th century) there was enough food, and... you could argue that we haven't had a direct major power war since then.
I personally think that the fact that getting enough calories is generally not a problem anymore has a lot to do with the fact that we haven't seen any major power wars lately.
What about the argument that we should minimize suffering created by our food choices, and plants appear to be less capable of suffering than almost all animals? Which animals do you think we would be ethically justified in eating instead of eating plants?
Searching for mushroom nutrition facts, it looks like you wont be getting any micro nutrients. Milk and eggs will add protein and fat, but you will be lacking in fiber, and I don't think you will be getting all the types of fats you need.
When someone says they're a "vegetarian" but eat fish" I always think, "ah, it's the IQ school of vegetarianism: you'll eat anything you think is as smart as asparagus."
Plus fish are in the same kingdom as any other animal , which means you can hardly be a "vegetarian" unless you only eat vegetables (well, fungi and yeasts are OK too IMHO).
I was a vegetarian myself for many years, and now you mention it I don't have any self-declared veg friends or relatives whom I know eat any animal products apart from dairy.
Interestingly some do it for moral/religious reasons and some do it for health reasons, and it does seem the latter are the ones who want to bring it up.
I heard an interesting argument that while eating fish can cause suffering in absolute terms, in marginal terms it's not so bad -- fish don't die gracefully in the wild in the way that a farm animal might otherwise do, they die from being eaten, from disease, or starvation, often more slowly and painfully compared to suffocating in a fishing net.
Of course this analysis ignores things like environmental consequences, and creating new animals through fish farms.
(I'm a vegetarian who doesn't eat fish, just thought it was interesting to hear marginal difference in consequences being considered for once.)
"they die from being eaten, from disease, or starvation"
This is true in the animal kingdom as well. Especially for a farm animal, being eaten. If wolves can catch deer or elk, they can catch a cow. I mean you've seen cows right, not very fast. :) This is also an unfortunate consequence when animal rights activists decide to release domesticated animals, they don't know how to survive in the wild. My family would always take cats people didn't want anymore on our farm, and they disappeared quickly. We assumed coyotes, because their parents didn't teach them how to be careful. :( Instinct can only get you so far, you need to be taught as well, and generations in captivity means the parents didn't know what to teach.
And food gets scarce in winter. I was watching a documentary where one chipmunk was storing acorns, and another was hiding nearby, and just stealing them. I don't remember the name, but it was on netflix, and it was focused on high speed, high resolution camera work. The animals seemed to be an excuse to use the cameras, lol.
Also, if I had to die, I'd rather have a humane execution like a farm animal, rather than being eaten or starving. I know there are 'documentaries' that portray suffering on farms, but the farmers I know take good care of their animals. At least in the dairy magazines my dad gets, they are constantly stressing animal comfort, prevention of disease, reduce stress, etc. Because this maximizes production. First, those documentaries are biased, and second, those farmers aren't good at their jobs. Our cows seem happy and content, and why shouldnt they be? Plentiful food and water, we keep threats away(which is unfortunately why predators are often endangered or threatened), we do everything we can to make them comfortable, healthy, and happy. Keep in mind cows don't care about being in captivity, they don't have the concept of freedom. They just want food, safety, and mating.
Hope this doesn't sound harsh, but that argument is wrong. A good farm is supposed to be the ideal environment for the animal, the same way a garden is supposed to be the ideal place for a vegetable. The animals die much more humanely than in the wild. I facepalm every time i hear on of those "it is more ethical to hunt than buy from the store" arguments.
It's not even funny. It's an attempt to subvert the very legitimate premise of vegetarianism in order to not face the undeniable impacts of non-vegetarian diets.
No. It is mocking the idea that the food choices of vegetarians makes them morally superior and entitled to look down their noses at everyone else and be awful to them.
My dislike of the tendency for vegetarians to be all holier than thou was solidified while I was homeless and being harassed online by a holier than thou vegan* who claimed to be vegan because she couldn't tolerate the suffering of the farm raised animals. Meanwhile, she took glee in adding to my suffering, though I was extremely ill and desperately poor because of it.
I am a big fan of "go pray in your closet." Making food choices because you sincerely believe they are morally right is totes cool. Being an asshole to anyone who doesn't eat like you, not so much.
* To make matters worse, she wasn't really a committed vegan. In cold weather, she happily added cheese to her diet. She just preferred to call herself vegan for the virtue signaling associated with it.
> It is mocking the idea that the food choices of vegetarians makes them morally superior and entitled to look down their noses at everyone else and be awful to them.
These people definitely exist, as you’ve illustrated, but in my experience they are a small minority.
What’s interesting to me is that vegetarians/vegans have this reputation for being in-your-face about it, yet in reality the experience reported by my veg friends, and later what I’ve witnessed myself, is that they don’t really advertise it or comment on other people’s choices, and when it does come up (e.g. while discussing where to go for lunch) it is all the meat eaters who predictably start in with the wisecracks and the pre-emptive defense of why they eat meat and why being vegetarian is stupid/weak/unnatural/unamerican/etc. You can see it in all the responses to this article!
This is remarkably consistent here up and down the east coast anyway, I don’t know if it’s different in other parts of the country. I’m just sort of bemused by the difference between reputation and reality.
I am well aware that vegetarians are often given a hard time for their choice to not eat meat. I grew up in a meat-and-potatoes family. I was a wannabe vegetarian for a time, but I have a serious medical condition and that simply doesn't work for me. Still, I eat a great deal less meat than is the norm for many of my relatives.
On visits home, I have been accused of being vegetarian because I don't necessarily have meat as part of Every. Single. Meal. For health reasons, it is not unusual for me to choose a vegetarian option. Even when I do eat meat, it is typically the smallest portion of anyone at the table.
I have thought very long and hard about food and ethics. I occasionally spell that out if it seems pertinent for some reason. Getting on my high horse about how my food choices are ethical or about the amount of time I have put into deciding my position on the matter as a means to piss on other people never strikes me as pertinent.
So it rather annoys me when a) I am equally given hell for my food choices by both vegetarians and by those who perceive me as a vegetarian and b) vegetarians inevitably assume that they have thought more on the matter and researched it more than I have simply because I don't agree with them.
Most of the world is raised on either a shame model or a guilt model. If you are choosing to not eat meat for ethical reasons, it isn't surprising that meat eaters will feel judged by you. Most vegetarians are, in fact, judgy about the diets of others. It isn't hard to convey that fact and meat eaters are not oblivious to it.
I rarely get hassled these days, in part because I mostly either eat alone or with my two adult sons. When I do attend a meal at a social function, if anyone comments on a lack of meat on my plate, I go out of my way to make it a non issue. I don't talk about food ethics. I usually avoid talking about my medical situation. I try to frame it as "Oh, the (vegetarian option) just looked scrumptious! I really love cheese dishes!"
Because I am a big believer in go pray in your closet and not interested in making my food choices a political issue between me and friends, family or acquaintances. So I go to great lengths to frame it as a personal choice that implies nothing at all about them.
Yes. Basically if your reason to not eat meat is because you want to minimize your carbon footprint then usually you won't attack people for what they eat, but because they have a larger carbon footprint.
Personally I fly a lot (I don't particularly want to), so therefore I could never use that argument. But I have met people who fly as much as I do who try to pull the morally superior diet card and I just move on because they have missed the point entirely.
Isn't it better to improve at least a little? It is better to save some emissions, and it is better to kill fewer animals.
I still find the vegetarian chism of the past incredible - how can there be a conflict about advocating for less meat consumption by everyone vs trying to convert them all the way to vegetarianism? If you get 50% of the population to eat half of what they had before, it beats converting the 2% you can optimistically get in the short-to-medium term vastly, so just do both.
It's the Copenhagen interpretation of Ethics again - if you interact with a problem in any way, eg by improving it a little, it is now your fault and responsibility to the end. Meanwhile, if you had no interaction, you are morally free not to do anything.
I understand where you are coming from, but instead of judging veganism based on one vegan who harassed you, why not read about the fundamental concepts? Peter Singer or Tom Regan are a good start.
One way to understand why certain vegans act like this, is to learn about Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is more common than it looks and watching documentaries like Earthlings can definitely trigger it on people who are not well equipped to witness this level of violence.
I am not judging Veganism. I am certainly not doing it on the basis of one extreme example of assholery. But the specific example highlights what is wrong with running around and pissing on other people because you don't approve of their food choices. If vegetarians want to ascribe to themselves the role of moral leader, they need to up their game and figure out how to stop being gratuitous assholes to the millions, if not billions, of animals that are the same species as themselves but don't eat like them.
The thermostat in my house responds to stimuli, unless I sedate it by taking out the batteries. Is it conscious? No, of course not. In an era where charges of "fake news" are flying thick and fast, the NYT, of all venues, really should not publishing this sort of pseudo-scientific rubbish.
Seems to me that consciousness is a matter of degree, with devices like thermostats at one pole, and self-reflective neocortex-style consciousness at the other.
Not that I have a strong desire to defend the consciousness of thermostats. I just wouldn't consider the article pseudo-scientific rubbish, and I definitely wouldn't just write off this type of inquiry or discussion as some kind of harmful fake news.
That's true, but that doesn't mean that thermostats are conscious. Shortness is "a matter of degree" too. Nonetheless, Danny Devito is short (4'10"), and Michael Jordan (6'6") is not. We can argue about Tom Cruise (5'7") and Johnny Depp (5'10"), and with regards to consciousness, we can argue about dolphins and dogs and maybe even cockroaches. But not plants and not thermostats.
No, they are not arbitrary cutoffs. They are universally agreed upon conventions among speakers of English, and they give effective meaning to the words "short" and "tall". Quibbling over that is pure pedantry.
Not in the same sense that we are. If you go by the Aristotelian and Platonic hierarchy of nature then we know that they are life forms by the fact that they are animated insofar as the metabolic process is concerned. They sedated the metabolic process. It's sort of like when you are hopped up on drugs in the hospital and not moving, you require much less caloric intake because you're expending less energy, similar to that I would suspect.
Is the planet conscious but on a time scale that we are out-of-touch with? Plants are just an order of magnitude quicker to react but still much slower than needed to make us care. The truth is, we associate speed with intelligence, it's natural for us. We even have the word "slow" to mean stupid. It's possible we will eventually have a super intelligence able to craftily manipulate matter at the highest ability -- but will still be as slow as a turtle. If it builds shields and preventative measures to compensate for its' slowness, I think we'd consider it a superintelligent species -- slow or not.
I think we might just have to, out of philosophical desperation, define "murder" as a set containing A. the irreversible termination of any economically useful self-directing information processor and B. acts that desensitize our inborn resistance to doing A. The first covers not killing other healthy adults/sentient robots, and the second covers not abusing animals or euthanizing anybody. As far as my gut says that's all you really need out of an ethical system, right?
If I had to assign an evolutionary purpose to why we hate animal abuse so much, it would probably be that whenever the "don't torture squirrels" circuit fails homicide is not far behind.
Transcription factors are proteins that activate or inhibit genes, including the genes of other transcription factors. They form complex regulation network isomorphic to neuronal networks.
It looks like consciousness arises from what the brain does (processing information), and that DNA can do the same thing, so... why not?
I can anesthetize large parts of my body, losing all responsiveness, yet remain conscious.
Moreover, if I had no head (and presumably no consciousness), I would still respond to stimuli via the spinal cord, and could still be anesthetized.
That plants become unresponsive when anesthetized in no way imples that they have some consciousness that they are losing. Why does the article make this bizarre logical leap.
Alan Watts has talked about something very similar with regard to what is intelligence and how exactly do we measure and define it. Here is a short (1m20s) youtube clip of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgZ73Lc5VS8
Hmm, I am not sure how would I live with the thought that every single step in nature I do brutally kills/damages conscious beings. Fun! Theodicy would suddenly seem a small problem...
That biological systems have a low power mode and that this can be chemically induced is not suprising. Suggesting that the presence of a low power mode in biological systems equates to evidence of consciousness is a big stretch.
Some wise hunters dont kill out of spite but necessity.
They say a prayer celebrating the circle of life and thanking the caught animal. And dont take more than necessary.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a lot and we eventually ban such accounts.
Of course you're welcome to contribute if you want to use HN as intended. It works like this: when you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; when you don't, please don't comment until you do.
I don't see how this follows from the finding that sedatives can prevent plants from responding to stimuli. It just means that there's a shared mechanism behind plants' responses and animals' responses, which wouldn't be overly surprising.
Of course, that doesn't mean that plants don't have a lot more going on than we usually realise, just because it happens at timescales so much longer than ours. There's all sorts of cool stuff happening in rainforests with cooperation/competition between plants.