this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Plants are not sentient
Just because there is no indication of their suffering doesn't mean they don't suffer.
Dude common, really?
Plants don't have a central nervous system. Pain and suffering is not in any way an evolutionary need for plants. We have a CNS and get the impulses, because we have the ability to do something about. Hold your hand above a flame and the pain will make you retract your hand. Hold a flame under a leaf and it'll just burn.
Furthermore your claim is currently infalsifiable. We can't proof that you're suffer even if you tell me that you're suffering.
Indeed. Many plants even bear fruit that is intended to be eaten. I don't think any animals intend to be eaten. Fruit is specifically supposed to look and taste good, so that animals eat it and crap out the seeds elsewhere. Even edible leaves are beneficial, as the animals leave fertiliser (more shit).
Though, to say the plant wants to be eaten would be a stretch. There's no evidence of a thought process, it's entirely developed just from evolutionary gain. Animals, however, do think.
Have you considered that certain parts of a plant wouldn't feel pain if plants can feel pain just like we don't feel pain when cutting our hair for example even though our hair is a part of us
Just because they don't have a central nervous system doesn't mean they don't feel. Perhaps there is a different mechanism for pain that we simply haven't discovered yet.
Just because the moon doesn't have a central nervous system doesn't mean it doesn't feel pain. Perhaps there is a different mechanism for moon pain that we simply havent't discovered.
Ever heard of unfalsifiability? If yes, go join any religion you want, because they'll be really receptive to you.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/climate-and-environment/this-canadian-ecologist-discovered-how-trees-communicate-underground-1.5434980
Prior to about 15 years ago we also thought plants couldn't communicate. Then we discovered a new mechanism through which they do actually communicate.
Ever heard of discovery? Apparently not, and I think any science group you might want to join will be unreceptive to your close-mindedness.
There are exactly zero good scientific reasons to believe plants feel pain my dude. I'm not being close minded nor open minded, I am just being sensible. Being "open minded" about anything without any solid justification isn't being open minded, it is being naive. Are you going to call me close minded for not believing purple swans exist? We didn't use to know that black swans existed, so maybe purple swans exist? I believe just as much in that plants feel pain as I believe in that santa exists, which is effectively nil.
To quote the website I found (doplantsfeelpain.com):
"We consider the likelihood that plants, with their relative organizational simplicity and lack of neurons and brains, have consciousness to be effectively nil". That is not entirely zero, but for all intents and purposes zero.
This is not only based on non-extrapolation, but also based on our knowledge of consciousness, feelings and pain.
We used to say those same things about communication and decision making.
We used to think rocks were completely solid, then we discovered they are actually mostly empty space. Perhaps one day we'll discover rocks feel pain too.
Have you ever heard of epistemology?
I recently found this website and I was reminded of you:
Have a look: doplantsfeelpain.com
🤡🤡🤡
Since you think it's possible plants suffer, you should go vegan, since more plants are consumed to provide an omnivorous diet than a vegan one. All those cows/pigs/chickens/etc need to be fed before you get to eat them. So your comment is actual an argument for going vegan.
I don't know whether plants can suffer or not. I just think it's silly for someone to use it as a reason not to eat meat when there is not strong evidence that plants don't suffer.
If plants don't suffer, then a plant based diet has less suffering. If plants do suffer, than a plant based diet has less suffering.
Only if you assume the suffering of a plant to be less important than the suffering of an animal.
It takes more plants for an omni diet than it does for a vegan diet. So even if plants suffering is worse, a vegan diet is still better.
They aren't but they're not far off... Trees communicate with each other through fungus in their roots, if one is being attacked it let's the others know, I can't remember what evasive action the others take but still...
So what? Traffic lights communicate with each other as well. That doesn't mean we should grant them moral worth. The ability to suffer and be conscious does.
I don’t know. I wouldn’t venture to eat a traffic light.
I doubt that we stop at plants not because they’re worth less than animals and it’s somehow morally alright. We stop there because we may not be able to survive without eating some kind of living thing: directly or not. I don’t know if there is a diet that doesn’t involve either plants or animals.
Perhaps. It all depends on how you look at it. Personally I don't think of plants as moral agents, because they don't have a capacity to consciously suffer. At least that is according to my definitions.
But perhaps for some definition of consciousness and some definition of suffering even a plant can suffer. Perhaps according to those definitions even a traffic light can suffer. Sounds crazy, but it all depends on the definition. If something responding to stimuli to serve some goal is consciousness then a traffic light has consciousness. There is no universally accepted defintions.
Yet then the difference between a pig and a traffic light is so extreme that a cut off point seems reasonable. I certainly also don't consider mosquitoes as important as pigs. Then we can assign certain moral weight to anything within some range of intelligence and capacity to suffer. At some point we might even have to consider sufficiently powerful AI moral agents. Perhaps the neuron count would be part of that scoring equation.
The least amount of harm that we can inflict on other living creatures weighted by this set of scores while maximizing our own happiness, yet not over estimating our own worth, should be the goal.
Under those conditions eating plants is still better than eating animals, because animals eat plants and thus you indirectly cause more plant death by eating animals.
We would then have some suffering index and could calculate that by going vegan you lower your suffering index by a factor 10, similar to how we know it reduces your carbon footprint by a factor 2 or so.
This post isn't about the ability to feel pain or sentence, it's about the paradox of people eating something they claim to feel compassion for. I can feel compassion for both animals and plants but will still eat them
That depends on how you define sentience, how you intepret the definition of sentience and the fact that science could change the definition