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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Very obvious bait post.
Plants are not sentient. Animals are.
All living organisms show basic reaction to external stimuli. Plants follow that. That does not indicate sentience.
Animals have significantly more intelligence than that. They form bonds, form relationships, mourn, and so on.
No living being except probably photosynthesis driven plankton can live entirely without consuming anything alive.
Recent studies actually show the opposite of "no sentience". Plants communicate with each other, even across different species and kingdoms. That means certain animals for example can understand signals from plants better than they understand us.
And that's just communication. The world of life on earth is so much more than the naive human way of thinking. In fact, it's likely we've already encountered multiple different life forms from space already, and we just have no way to know yet.
So please. Jump off the high horse, take off your hat, and acknowledge that the food on your plate has had a very diverse, colorful life. You can still choose not to eat animals. Just like I choose not to eat dogs and cats, some people see them no different to cows, pigs, and plants.
It's all just nutrients. So respect it.
Edit: Here's an example of how much we understand what dogs see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf4k0VgCQjg
Fungi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tjt8WT5mRs
A pretty detailed discussion on the topic:
https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1772&context=animsent
All living beings are capable of responding to external stimuli, both active and reactive. They are capable of basic friend/foe recognition. They are capable of adapting. These are just basic aspects of literally being alive. Even an amoeba can do these things to some extent or the other.
But does that put a turnip at the same level as a dog? It doesn't in my books.
I'm not any high horse. The field is in it's very nascent stages. But the evidence so far isn't supporting the notion. We don't live in Pandora.
This post is clearly trying to ruffle some feathers.
At some point it just comes down to ethics.
Is a turnip as complex lifeform as a dog? Of course not, not that we know of anyhow.
Should we still disregard it as a living being? No.
Just like we don't disregard heavily disabled humans. Or abandon heavily disabled pets.
Plants may be however complex lifeforms, but to claim they're simply piles of lifeless mush is to disregard any science progress of the past 100-200 years.
I'm not saying the OG is/isn't bait, I'm saying humans need to be less narrow minded, and more open to discussion regarding these kinds of things.
I never disregarded anything as a living being!!
I never said plants were lifeless!!!
That's what I've been emphasising so far over and over.
There's a distinction between being alive and being sentient.
All sentient beings are alive, but all alive beings aren't sentient.
Plants show all the evidence of being alive, but so far we have no evidence of them being sentient.
Disabled humans are humans all the same. So that's not a fair comparison. (At least in my mind it's very clear).
It's all just about what you consider "conscious" to be. To be alive, to me, is to be conscious.
One might raise the couple issues with that, and to an extent, they have a point. Such as completely comatose people.
We've recently discovered comatose people are conscious, and are working on ways for them to communicate.
What about people who are kept "alive" only by machines, with no brain activity? I'd consider that person dead. It's only that his organs are being kept stable, in the event he can be recovered, or until the organs get donated.