Comment on Fish have heart too.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months agoyou’re saying it’s not arbitrary. “no, you” is still a form of tu quoque. you haven’t actually made a case that sentience isnt an arbitrary standard, and there isn’t a case to be made: sentience isn’t a natural phenomenon outside of human subjectivity classification. without people, there would be no concept of green or warm or sentient, and any of those attributes is an arbitrary standard to use to judge the ethics of a diet.
oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 9 months ago
Are you saying everything we can talk about is arbitrary because everything we can talk about is with words and concepts?
Are you talking about meriological nihilism? (thanks alex oconnor for teaching me that term lol)
I know sentience is real based on the fact that I’m experiencing things right this moment. Based on my understanding of the brain and nervous system, and the strong evidence that those things give rise to my sentience, I think that it’s reasonable to extrapolate that other, similar nervous systems/brains are also sentient and their experience is worth consideration in a similar way to how I consider my own experience (among the many other reasons to have a basic level of empathy)
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
why sentience and not DNA? or literally any other characteristic? your standard is absolutely arbitrary.
oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 9 months ago
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
the same can be said of DNA. this is a completely arbitrary standard, and you would be better served to embrace that than pretending it’s somehow objective.