Found this one in the MGTOWChristian subreddit, under the title “I hate the false religion of woman worship.”
You gotta give him points for his very vivid imagination!
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
I love that too. I can only assume that, unlike ‘edible’ dormice, Finnish dormice had a say in the name.
As for the sentience thing, this does crop up in vegan debates. Some people argue that it’s ok to eat shellfish as they aren’t really self aware.
Personally I don’t buy that. Apart from the fact they do have behaviours like avoiding predators and pain, it reminds me too much of the old argument that animals are just organic machines. That they don’t really have emotions; they’re just automatically reacting to stimuli and it just seems that way.
To me, perceived intelligence shouldn’t be a factor in who gets eaten.
Although that would make the pub quiz more interesting.
@Alan Robertshaw
Interesting! What is your criteria?
@.45: It’s rare that I have to cut things, when I’m not at home. Pre-COVID, I worked at a place where my car, or my person, could be searched at random. So, that’s another reason why I don’t carry knives.
@Big Titty Demon: Yeah, that’s gruesome. I don’t understand the mentality – to kill an animal for “fun”. One of the reasons why my cats are now indoor pets, is because one of my cats disappeared during the first day of hunting season. It seemed very suspicious, to me.
@ big titty demon
That is a really good question.
To some extent it’s almost intuitive; but if I had to rationalise I could set out some criteria I don’t think should be relevant.
So that would include things like intelligence*, cuteness**, cultural norms*** etc.
But those would be ‘necessary but not sufficient’ as they say.
So I won’t use a natural sponge, even though a biologist could probably make an argument that they’re no more self aware than a plant.
But self awareness or lack thereof doesn’t do it for me. It’s like if I needed a transplant I still wouldn’t harvest the organs of someone in a PVS.
I guess it’s one of those moral questions that isn’t really conducive to rational considerations. At least, if there are any such arguments; they’re beyond my ken.
So basically it’s an almost arbitrary distinction. Plants ok, animals not. That does of course bring up some interesting evolutionary issues over fungi!
I’m not sure what I’d do if it turned out plants did have self awareness. Trees after all do communicate by pheromones; so then I’m using the ‘automatic response to stimuli’ justification that I decried earlier. And some carnivorous plants can sort of count!
But my stance is based on harm reduction rather than elimination. The definition of veganism does contain the ‘so far as practicable and possible’ clause.
So I guess that’s my cop-out if I ever have to justify myself to an angry Triffid.
* So I wouldn’t say I can eat tuna but not dolphin
** I don’t think it’s ok to experiment on (non cute animal) but not bunny rabbits
*** Lots of people happily eat all kinds of animals so I don’t think eating a puppy or a kitten is any worse than eating a veal calf or a lamb.
@.45
That situation seems almost begging for some malicious compliance.
@Big Titty Demon : brain isn’t in consideration for that. Behavior is. And we know that plants have behaviors and feel their environments. Your position is, without trying to offend, about the same as the view over animals in 16-17th century. There were discussion at the time if animals could feel pain, which is an absurd discussion now. I don’t think using the word “pain” for plant is good, but they feel something. Probably in a very alien way compared to us, but being anthropomorphic isn’t a factor.
Now, on average, the most intelligent animals seem more involved with their environment and more conscious than plants. But that’s an average. Grass communicate predators and infections, some plant coordinates their flower, etc ; in a lot of way, I believe they are similar to less intelligent animals, like ground sloths or more commonly, non-colony insects.
Forest impress me particulary, since there’s a ton of interaction between trees of various type, hence why I value trees a lot. Farm animals, on the other hand, don’t impress me particulary.
On a related note, my barrier to consider a robot as worth the same right as a pet, or as a human, aren’t particulary high. I don’t have any indications that, say, deep learning algorithme are above the bacteria level of conscious or even have *any* consciouness or feeling, but if someone made a case for it I wouldn’t find it absurd. The lack of sentient AI in my opinion have much more to do with how we have no fucking clue of how to do them, and will only create them accidentaly.
On a second related note, the status of pet is *entirely* determined by the human side. While a pet dog is probably more worth consideration than a pet rock, the pet rock is still a pet. What make the pet dog different is that it’s a dog, not that it’s a pet. And, yes, mankind have had far stranger pet than carrot pets.
@Alan : if I were 100% sure that someone in PVS would never come back, then he is dead and harvesting his body for organs would be ethical for me. (within the limits of the right of his family over his remain). The trick is, currently we cannot be sure. We don’t understand well what PVS is and the rare stories of come back.
To give an actual example of someone who is dead but still have living tissue, I would take Henrietta Lacks, a woman who died of cancer 70 years ago and from which we still use culture of her cells. For me, she’s an example of someone actually dead with still living tissues. People on PVS aren’t that by default, because we aren’t sure. I won’t blame family deciding otherwise, but that’s their decisions.
(the story of the culture of her cell is a scandal through and through tho. She and her family have some right about the destiny of her earthly remain)
@Alan Robertshaw
An excellent point. I would not either, so I guess it’s more about some nebulistic determination of the “capacity to carry consciousness” for me. Intelligence has never factored in, only consciousness. I would agree that it is hard to define, and not my area of expertise, either. I am positive a philosophy expert can run laps around me here.
I think it sort of depends on the motivation to eat the kitten. I used to know someone who ate a cat, and his expressed intent in eating the cat was to offend everyone he possibly could by telling them he ate the cat. This is approximately akin to the dude that eats raw squirrels in front of vegetarians expressly to offend them; it’s different than eating meat from habituation or needing it for sustenance.
@ohlmann
Without trying to offend, Imma recommend once again you look at Alan Robertshaw’s posts, and how he managed to make the same point without having to say, “I don’t mean to offend, but X offensive thing.” That’s some gaslighty bullshit. But since you suggest it, here are some of the differences between me and a 16th-century person with that view of animals: I could be convinced (admittedly, not by you unless you had hard science to back yourself up) that plants can sustain consciousness with appropriate evidence. I do not categorically rule it out; my opinion is based on the best available science. I also am not ignoring evidence such as, real 16th century example, cats being beaten in bags and set on fire wailing in pain to sustain this opinion. I’m also not mistreating my trees and beating them or letting them starve to death willy-nilly in the interim, because I don’t believe they can feel pain or harbor consciousness. These are just some of the key differences.
Your own body does this without the presence of your consciousness. Infections and parasites (predator) responses are coordinated without any input from you. This is an autonomous process, there is no lower-level secondary consciousness directing this in our bodies. I don’t find this a convincing argument. *shrug* I can make a system myself that communicates as much, and in fact have contributed to plant pathology models to study infection response. I don’t consider the model able to harbor consciousness, and never will, but it successfully mimics plant response to infection.
None of this negates that by your moral metric of plants sacrifice = animal sacrifice, eating an animal results in unnecessary mass plant casualties for the same calories.
It seems you and I will have to agree to disagree.
@Dormousing_it
Unfortunately your suspicion is probably correct. My sister’s dogs were shot on the first day of hunting season 2 years ago. Or well, it’s suspected both were and known one was, because she came back with the bullets in and had to have just so much medical care. The other one never came back.
@Big Titty demon : I think one of the big point of discord is more that I don’t see what plants and trees do as terribly different to what animal do, so I really don’t get from where you say they are basically inanimate and consciousless. And plant being aware of their environment is effectively the state of the knowledge in science. It’s like some dinosaurs being feathered in that popular culture might not have caught up yet, but it’s pretty rock solid by now.
“there is no lower-level secondary consciousness” is a statement of faith, not anything supported by science, because we can’t detect thoses “lower level secondary consciousness” in anyone. Including human. We can try to guess their existence by looking at behavior, but with the pitfall that A – it’s very very easy to rewrite the behavior of anything as not driven by a secondary consciousness, B – suffering and stress isn’t linked to consciousness and C – we will be vastly more likely to admit that for human-like behavior, which lead to dogs looking a lot more intelligent and conscious than wolf, typicaly.
And while you act all offended by the comparison with the older position on animal, I must admit I am also irked when people say against all evidence “plants aren’t conscious”, when it’s both science and easy observable that they react to their environment pretty much as well as pidgeons and flies, just more slowly. Carnivorous plant behave differently if they catch a prey or a gust of wind ; you can write that off as an automatic response, but is it different to how a dog behave differently when biting a prey or a lamppost ?
Also notably, you make a stark distinction between animals and plants, while it’s pretty sure that there is a continuum, with virus at one end and human at the other end. It’s very hard to rate anything but the extreme in the continuum, for a lot of reason. For example, insects generally seem to not have much brainpower and don’t show affections to human “owner” like mammals and birds do, but is that due to them being less conscious, or just because they have vastly different mind process where “affection” isn’t a concept that make sense ?
That also extend to plant. It’s pretty sure their perception of the environment is entirely unlike human and that they don’t see community and affection like we do. But does that mean they are worth any less ?
We’re animals. We need to eat.
We’re omnivores. We can eat anything.
We’ve got zero sense. We tend to eat to excess the things we like.
Seems simple enough.
This may be interesting to people here – (UKnian) left-wing journalist Aaron Bastani of Novara Media talking to (USAnian) co-founder of Finless Foods Mike Selden about food from animal protein grown without animals (or rather, without all but the initial animal to culture the cell strains from).
They touch on the science, technology, economics, politics, ethics and environmental impact of producing meat in this way (for example, tuna sashimi on a commercial scale without any fishing except for I guess one initial tuna) with a timescale of the next few years (e.g. 2 or so years to marketing approval in the US and 15 years to mass consumption as a normal everyday food). Plus there’s a little bit of explaining of the unrelated but also interesting things happening in plant-based burgers etc., and why plant-based tech is good for minced ‘meat’ products, compared with animal-cell-based tech for growing fillets and steaks.
In a nutshell (I think) a conversation about massively reducing environmental damage and animal harm producing food that non-rich people can afford and that large numbers of people already want to eat. (pro-vegan; acknowledging a huge population of people a lot of whom are not currently up for that)
The whole interview is about 40 mins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGF5MLuBau4
PS Novara Media is well worth a look for left-wing journalism – they are a shoestring channel, with news three times a week (about 1 to 1.5 hours, Mon Weds and Fri, live at 19:00 UK time but available afterwards), an in-depth interview once a week (Tues) plus ad hoc extras for individual news stories plus articles. All free to access (they request donations/subscriptions (of 1 hour of whatever your wage is, per month) if you like the work and can afford it).
PPS I have no connection with them of any kind except that I like the channel. Youtube channel (hopefully on the link above!) plus website https://novaramedia.com/
@ opposable thumbs
Thanks for that. I’l give it a proper listen on one of my walks. I’ve checked out the first few minutes though and it seems very interesting. Although I do find the idea of cultured meat a bit ‘repulsive’ for want of a better term. Even moreso than ‘natural’ meat. I have visions of weird things growing in vats.
@ ohlmann
I do take your points. For me though there is a qualitative difference between plants and animals. I appreciate I’m using the ‘organic machine’ justification; but, in the absence of any compelling evidence to the contrary, I do think that is the case for plants.
It is true they show some forms of interacting with their environments but, to steal BTD’s phrase, I don’t think it demonstrates a capacity for consciousness. It truly is just mechanical responses to stimuli.
For example; I’ve mentioned how carnivorous plants appear to be able to count. But that’s just it, it’s an appearance, not real. The mechanisms by which they do that are well understood. It’s just a bio-chemical phenomenon; and no more involves ‘thinking’ than when crystals respond, often quite spectacularly, to changes in their environment.
I find it analogous to the old Galvanism experiments that inspired Mary Shelley. Introduce an electric shock to a corpse, or even a detached limb, and it reacts. But I don’t think we would say a corpse or an isolated body part is conscious. Not in any meaningful sense anyway.
And for me it’s the same for plants.
@ohlmann
Yeah, you can fuck right off. You knew it was offensive because you prefaced it with “without intent to offend, <offensive statement>”. Now you’re saying I’m not actually offended, I’m just acting that way. Good job with the gaslighting. We’re done, because you don’t really want to have a conversation, you want to browbeat your opinion without having to back it up. My experience in this field says nowhere that “And plant being aware of their environment is effectively the state of the knowledge in science.” Plants are not consciously aware. It is most definitely not scientific consensus that they are, let alone “rock solid”. My expertise outweighs your as-yet to-be-cited opinion, and I will not devalue it for you. You consistently fail to acknowledge the basic logic flaw in your original value judgement of vegetarian meals while expecting me to override all of my painstakingly gained knowledge for your opinion.
I will not do it. The conversation is at therefore at an end.
I’m waiting for “hysterical overreaction” next. I know how this conversation goes. It always comes after “you’re acting all sensitive, geez”. We’re done. You say what you want, I’m ignoring your ass.
@.45 – I kinda had the opposite problem. I used to do receiving and stocking at a US craft chain and would use my keys to open boxes if all the box cutters had been claimed. It never failed to get a manager to plop a box knife in my hands, for some reason. Probably because I didn’t care; the keys worked just as well and I didn’t get in trouble for taking them home by mistake.
Oddly enough, management tried to make my carrying my keys and stuff in my pockets an issue since the other women had to leave purses in lockers (and everyone had to leave phones in lockers) while out of the break room. They let it go when I asked when the guys would have to leave wallets and keys in lockers. I don’t carry a purse because of shoulder and hand issues, I wear cargo pants and I don’t wear makeup, so not a lot to carry.
My own suspicion is that plants are not conscious in any meaningful sense. Their responses to stimuli tend to be strictly local, and algorithmically to be simple reflexes. There is no evidence of higher cognition and no evidence of centralized integration of sense inputs into a unified gestalt. Without this I don’t see how there could be consciousness as we know it. It doesn’t rule out little local consciousnesses in each separate part, but a) what purpose would these serve? Human consciousness has the purpose of central planning for the entire body, so is centralized; and b) where is the “brain” wherein it would reside?
I expect that, though you can certainly harm a plant, there is no more experience of suffering than when a surgeon cuts into an anesthetized patient, and strictly less than when you swat a fly. That, at least, has a central nervous system, even if not much of one; it has a central point of sensory integration and may be capable of some form of consciousness.
There’s also a question of selective pressure. Everything indisputably conscious seems to use it for what boils down eventually to motor planning, if not always exclusively for such. I would therefore not expect to find it in something sessile, at least not if it never had a mobile ancestor or larval stage or similarly.
So: plants are almost certainly not conscious.
Absent significant evidence to the contrary I will likely continue to hold this opinion indefinitely.
(The motor issue does lead to the question of whether there are conscious single cells. I doubt this for complexity reasons. Nothing like a brain has been identified in any cell. At the outer edge of possibility, perhaps some of the most “focused” behaving predatory protozoa, ones that seem to have a “head” and a “tail” at least part of the time such as when chasing something, rise to the level of a nematode or a similarly simple multicelled animal, while still being well below a housefly.)
@Lainy – Oh, that Lucy! I remember hearing about her. But this part I never knew:
It’s fascinating, and kind of the opposite of what happened with oviraptors – people thought they stole the eggs that were found near them, so they gave them a name meaning “egg stealers,” but the eggs were actually theirs. (Wikipedia article)
For meat-eating, I guess it doesn’t seem inherently wrong to me to eat other animals, at least because other omnivorous animals do the same. But it’s true that most, or at least many, humans don’t need meat to survive. Plus the part that worries me is the environmental impact.
I’m not vegetarian now – I was for a year and a bit – but I don’t usually use meat when I’m making my own food. I try to avoid things like beef because commercial cattle farming uses up so much energy (grain, water, etc.) But a lot of the times I don’t think about it because I’m not good at thinking about a lot of things at once.
(like right now, I’m supposed to be working on a take-home exam…sigh)