Comment on those damn vegans!
execia@lemmy.today 3 months agoI really can’t tell if you’re being serious or not. Poe’s law I guess. But just in case - every fucking cause or belief or whatever will have idiots doing it for illogical, pseudoscientific, ignorant, etc. reasons. I assure you majority of vegans aren’t downright stupid and ignorant. Though some confuse animals with sentience.
tygerprints@kbin.social 3 months ago
I am serious, in every discussion I've had about it some one always says, "but plants aren't living things." ?? Since when!
I don't mean to imply that vegans are stupid or ignorant, they have their valid reasons for being vegans. And I'm on the same wavelength with them about sentience in animals - I think they very much are sentient beings, and the way they are harvested for meat is cruel and extreme.
I also think plants have a degree of sentience - in that they can breathe and communicate (via chemicals) to other plants, the way trees "warn" each other of pests through their root systems.
But we're omnivores, and there's no way I can excuse any of it, it's just what we are. We all eat living things. It's human nature. Even mushrooms contain living larva - most canned mushrooms, for example, have some maggots since they are where flies like to lay their eggs. It's just something we learn to live with even it it's gross and/or unpleasant.
chetradley@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Based on our understanding of biology, a prerequisite for sentience is a central nervous system. Plants have really amazing abilities to pass chemical signals, but they lack any mechanics that would allow them to internalize the signals they receive. For example, I wouldn’t say that my doorbell is sentient just because it can warn me when someone is at my door. Importantly, animals are different from plants in their ability to internalize pain, fear, sadness, etc. This is why animal ethics and welfare are considered important discussions, and why it’s damaging to invoke plant sentience to distract from that discussion.
tygerprints@kbin.social 3 months ago
This just isn't a big deal to me - I'm not really invested in arguing about it, tbh.
chetradley@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Fair enough. Have a good one.
execia@lemmy.today 3 months ago
Okay now you’re the one getting into pseudoscience. What is sentience in your book? People disagree on what sentience is exactly but I think at a basic level it’s the ability to experience feelings or sensations. The process of touch is associated with our sensory organs and nervous system. First our peripheral nervous system or sensory nerves activate to stimuli and send signals to our cns or brain where we process those signals. Of course that’s a basic explanation but “consciousness” or “sentience” requires a complex nervous system to process that information and generate awareness.
As far as we know plants lack that ability to process information. Of course plants react to stimuli as they’re living as you said. For photosynthesis, it does not require any decision making or sentience. This communication you see are non-sentient responses relying on things such as gene expression. So anyways, I don’t understand the purpose of your generalizations on vegans. I’ll say it again, they are ignorant people in every community and in no way does that reflect the whole community.
For your last argument, veganism isn’t about whether or not we’re omnivores and we don’t rely on your opinion on whether or not veganism is unnatural.
tygerprints@kbin.social 3 months ago
I have a more "dictionary" definition of sentience, as meaning the capacity to feel, and have a degree of consciousness. Even Michael Crichton (in his book, Jurassic Park) argued that the lowest kind of plant, say a potato, has a mean degree of sentience.
And there have been many documentaries about the organization of plant communication around their root systems - many of them. So it's not really considered pseudo-science, it may just be an idea that is beginning to be understood.
And according to those very same documentaries, Plants to possess the ability to process information. In human brains, which are much like a tangled root system, chemical processes are what create what we call "thoughts." It's the same in plant systems, chemical processes exist that enable plants to let nearby plants know if pests are chewing on them, if fire is near, and/or when they are ready to reproduce.
So I'm not really proposing anything that is unscientific here. And when did I EVER state that "veganism is unnatural?" You said that, I didn't. I said we're "omnivores," which means were are physiologically designed to eat and grind up meat AND plant materials, both.