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Hey, let’s not insult plants like that
Why bring in the plant thing? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about that. The ai death cult thing sure, but the plant thing I haven’t even seen before. Seems weird.
I have, unfortunately. It’s an argument made to trivialize the suffering of animals (i.e. under human control) by making pain and suffering an unavoidable and universal constant (appealing to the futility and foolishness of trying to reduce it or think about it.)
Seems more niche than the ai argument but idk it’s clearly something that happens often enough to you to bother you so go off monarch
It’s niche to you.
I have, as a rebuttal to vegetarianism. It’s really dumb.
if you rank “care about plants” people way up there with AI worshippers, you’re lost to propaganda.
Do “people who care about plants” really think they have feelings and are intelligent? I consider myself a person who cares about plants and I think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
It’s used to discourage effort and to minimize the suffering of non-human animals by trivializing it: “even plants feel pain, pain is everywhere, there is no point thinking about reducing pain and suffering, it’s futile.”
Such people usually have some other criteria of “who matters”, which ignores suffering. Usually, it’s a hierarchy.
The same hierarchy extends, at upper levels, to human intraspecies hierarchies, which is how you realize that the AI bro TESCREALists are fascists, racists, eugenicists and so on. They mention sentience in passing, and then skip to “intelligence”, a much more vague concept, but something that they love to track … as in the tradition of IQ and race science.
My take on life is that to live is to kill, so I’m obviously fine with it, but I also think I don’t really have the right to claim that something isn’t capable of pain.
Plus we’re finding out more and more that pretty much every living thing feels pain. Even bacteria have stress and pain responses.
There’s a nice Venn diagram that would require me to write a paper in some journal to hash out.
I think that part of the memr isn’t about “caring about plants”, but about people who use that argument against vegetarians. I’ve met quite a few dumb fucks of this sort and immediately thought of them. While plants, fungi, and all living organisms are more complex and valuable than most of us think, there’s a huge difference in suffering between killing a vertebrate and picking lettuce.
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Death metal works better, but for an interesting reason: it makes the dust vibrate off of the leaves.
We know for a fact that animals think and feel, even if not on our level, and we still have no qualms about eating them.
Who’s ‘we’ here, because I have plenty of qualms with eating animals.
We know for a fact that humans think and feel, even if not on our level, and we still have no qualms about eating them.
That noise the human makes when you put them in boiling water is just air escaping.
Also the Human is, like plants, a colony of specialized living beings, cells, which comunicate each with others in chemical and electrical way. We all have the same ancestor, the first replicant cell at the beginning of life on earth. Each one evolving individually or in colonies to adapt as best as possible to their corresponding environments. We share a large part of our DNA with a potato (some more than others)
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Some people do have qualms about eating them, though.
Tbf, it’s pretty hard to eat a gpu, and they’re really expensive to boot. I’d have qualms too in their position
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Right, I just brought it up because the people with moral objections to meat tend to ground them in the cruel treatment of animals. If you can be cruel to plants too then I don’t see a way out of making a moral compromise unless you just eat rocks (not the computer rocks though, too smart).
Yeah but you can’t be cruel to plants and even if you could, it takes way less plants eating them directly than filtering the nutrients through an actually sentient animal.
Yeah, what you just described is a moral compromise. “Eating the plants is cruel, but less cruel than letting more get eaten to feed animals to eat instead.”
I don’t think vegans argue that sentience is what makes it cruel, either. Otherwise they’d be fine with eating fish, bugs, and probably chickens. If plants are capable of suffering then that would probably be enough to at least make the argument about eating them being cruel. You’d basically have to follow the diet of the alien hive mind from Pluribus; foraging windfall, scavenging, and autocannibalism.
Are mixing up sentience and sapience? Fish and chickens are definitely sentient, e.g. they have a subjective experience of their existence. Bugs as well, I’d guess.
Maybe! I used sentience because you used it in your comment and can never keep the two straight. If sentience is a subjective experience then plants would have that by having feelings and intelligence, wouldn’t they?
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Learning ≠ intelligence. Intelligence is the presence of parameters in a system that can change and send a signal back to itself.
Plants are NOT intelligent; they simply learn and follow a program, just like a robot vacuum cleaner. They do NOT self-modify.
But AI can be intelligent; this has been possible for a long time.
Fun fact there are theories that the Sun may have a sort of consciousness
There are also theories that corporations are sentient.
There are theories that managers are sentient.
Despite their highest effort.
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Everything has feelings and intelligence. Even you, dumbass ;)
