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Redacted

@ Redacted @lemmy.world

Posts
1
Comments
120
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • ​You've moved the goalposts away from my original point of contention which was the premise that plants are as conscious as animals.

    Nevertheless, your new ethical logic has some flaws:

    1. To a deontologist, intentionally slaughtering an animal is a deliberate wrong. Accidentally running over a field mouse with a harvester is a tragic, unintended side effect of producing food. We don't say 'since people die in car accidents anyway, murder is morally acceptable.' Intent matters, equating a freak farming accident with premeditated slaughter is a logical fallacy.
    2. Even if we ignore intent and look strictly at the body count, livestock eat vast amounts of crops. By eating meat, one is responsible for the intentional death of the livestock plus the exponentially higher number of accidental field animal deaths caused by harvesting the crops to feed them.
    3. Consequentialism doesn't require you to be a psychic who knows every future ripple effect; it requires you to make choices based on predictable outcomes. I don't need to know the fate of the universe to know that buying meat directly and predictably finances animal slaughter.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • Saying 'we don't know for sure, so we can't make decisions' is a recipe for total practical and ethical paralysis. Science never deals in 100% absolute certainty; it deals in overwhelming probability based on empirical data.

    ​While rhizomes are fascinating, structurally complex communication systems, they do not meet the definition of information integration. There is a profound functional difference between a network that distributes information and a system that integrates it.

    We have an absolute mountain of neurological, chemical, and behavioral evidence that animals experience conscious pain and suffering. We have zero empirical evidence that plants do.

    ​If we treat the high-probability suffering of a dog and the zero-evidence, purely speculative 'suffering' of a carrot as ethically equal because 'the truth is we don't know,' then ethics becomes meaningless. We would be frozen in place, unable to eat a plant or walk on grass out of fear that it might be conscious.

    We prioritise animal welfare over plant welfare because that is where the evidence of suffering actually exists.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • You’re completely right that we can't prove a negative. I can't prove that rocks, gas clouds, or a laptop don't have some silent, invisible consciousness. But in science, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not on everyone else to disprove it.

    ​Your claim that our definition 'precludes discovering consciousness in non-animals' isn't accurate. Science isn't biased against non-animals; it is biased toward highly integrated systems.

    ​The baseline for consciousness isn't 'it must be made of animal meat.' The baseline is 'it must possess an architectural framework capable of integrating disparate data into a single, unified internal state.'

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • It’s not circular reasoning; it’s inductive reasoning based on empirical observation.

    ​We didn’t just sit in a room and arbitrarily decide 'only animals get to be conscious.' Instead, science looked at how consciousness actually behaves. We know from centuries of medical and neurobiological data that if you damage, anesthetise, or remove centralised neural networks, consciousness vanishes, even while the rest of the body's cells remain alive and chemically responding to stimuli.

    ​Furthermore, this baseline doesn't just limit consciousness to mammals like us. Science actively recognizes consciousness in octopuses, which are invertebrates with a radically different, alien brain structure.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • We don't have absolute proof of many things in science, we have large bodies of evidence that require equal amounts of evidence to support alternative hypotheses. For example, we haven't absolute proof of the theory of evolution but no one serious would doubt it without ignoring the entire global fossil and genetic record.

    We haven't fundamentally proven that consciousness requires a brain, but every piece of empirical evidence we have links subjective awareness, like feeling pain or fear, to centralised neural processing. If we abandon that baseline, we lose any objective way to measure it.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • You resorted to declaring troll and in doing so dragged the conversation down to ad hominem exchanges.

    Pointing out that you have failed to understand high school level biology (plants don't have a central nervous system) is barely ad hominem anyway.

    You asked for citations which I provided. You've now moved the goalposts by rejecting science's framework of consciousness.

    There's nowhere else to go here.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • It sets out a framework for levels of consciousness and implies that plants are way below that threshold.

    Even if we go outside mainstream scientific understanding and near universal intuition and accept plants as conscious, this paper (and others if you did some cursory research on a subject you seem to care so deeply about) would still point to plants being considered less conscious than animals.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • It builds on a framework which defines what the minimum threshold for what neuroscientists can consider consciousness is.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • Plants neither possess nor require consciousness.

    For consciousness to emerge, an organism requires a massive degree of centralised structural, organisational, and functional complexity. This paper builds on the "threshold brain" framework established by neuroscientists, which maps out the absolute minimum neural machinery needed for subjective experience. Animals possess centralised nervous systems designed to integrate disparate sensory streams into a single, unified perspective. Because plants have a decentralised, structurally simple organisation completely devoid of neurons or brains, the authors note that the likelihood of them possessing consciousness is "effectively nil." Their behaviors are hardwired, genetic reflexes, not conscious choices.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • Which is why I'm seeing myself out.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • I'm not here defending vegans, I'm here questioning your batshit insane take that animals have an equivalent level of consciousness as plants.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • For what? Burden of proof is on you.

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  • Oh dear, seek help.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • I said "consider there might be" whereas you were all over the thread speaking in absolutes to support your weak hypothesis.

    Nuance is obviously lost on you which is a shame as it's kind of a prerequisite for the philosophical debates you keep attempting to engage in.

  • Is it morally wrong to be non-vegetarian?

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  • A foolish and irresponsible way to think about consciousness would be to pretend we can actually define it, then go around professing things are either conscious or not without considering there might be a scale.