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Comment by Joof | Hacker News Reader

That's a question where its extroidinarily hard to draw the line. Assuming it is immoral to consume another life form, then there goes 100% of our food source (plants are life and show some intelligence in aggregate).

If nothing can consume anything else then life can't exist.

I'd argue that their ethical standards are wholly separate from our own. For humans, self-preservation as a race is very important.

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Not only that, but plants respond to stimuli, remember, chemically 'moan' when sick, scream when they are being harmed or killed (grass cutting), and talk amongst each other (again, chemical triggers).

If you don't eat living things, that leaves milk and honey.

I'm not saying "become X-ist". I'm saying that in order for us to live, others must die. Plants, animals and others aren't inherently worth more or less than we humans. But it's our responsibility to remember their sacrifices so we could continue.

And fruit. It leaves fruit also. Fruit is produced to be consumed and doesn't take life in consumption.

By that logic, computers are alive. They let you know when they are 'sick' (they crash), scream when being overworked (loud fans), and talk amongst each other (the internet).

Failing to draw a line between two things doesn't mean that they are the same. Plants do not possess a nervous system capable of metacognition. Killing and eating a plant is not the same thing as killing and eating a mammal, bird, or fish.

A computer I'm reasonably sure isn't alive. But the internet with emergent behaviours, I'm not so sure. But that's a "Ghost in the Shell" style discussion.

> Plants do not possess a nervous system capable of metacognition.

Scientists aren't so sure. And we're only finding out more chemical 'sensors' that allow different sensing of our environment. As for a nervous net, it was thought "No"... But again, more study shows that it's not true.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-01-09/new-research-plant-int...

http://www.dw.com/en/when-plants-say-ouch/a-510552-1

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden...

> Killing and eating a plant is not the same thing as killing and eating a mammal, bird, or fish.

That's just moralizing. There is no basis in which to say that X life is better or worse than Y life.

None of your links touch on metacognition. Scientists are very sure that individual plants do not have metacognition. Sensing and communicating are not metacognition.

>That's just moralizing. There is no basis in which to say that X life is better or worse than Y life.

Did I say anything about morality? No. Did I say that plant lives were "worse", or animal lives were "better"? No. I said killing a plant was different than killing a mammal. Do you disagree with that assertion?

Define metacognition for me. I wouldn't be surprised if a forest (an organism composed of many trees and such) had a way to store memories for example. Ants have several forms of external memory assuming the colony is a single organism. Its harder to say if a forest or an anthill can reason about itself in part because we don't really understand how cognition works.

Edit: Killing a plant might be more similar to killing off chunks of an organism's brain cells. As such it may be ethical to kill individual plants assuming we maintain the integrity of any existing colonies.

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