Hacker News Reader

Comment by coginawheel | Hacker News Reader

Do you believe all other forms of life have souls?

I'm curious because you made the vegetarian and vegan argument which I always find interesting. I was raised Hindu (now atheist) and the religion has a belief that all forms of life have a soul and have consciousness. As a consequence of this you accept that in order to live, your life relies on extinguishing other forms of life. I always find it weird that when people talk about diet, animal rights, and souls, there is an arbitrary distinction between animals and the rest of organism (plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.). The concept of a soul is an abstract non-scientific belief, so given its an abstract concept with no scientific basis, why do we make a distinction between one form of life and another?

View on HN

Because I don't want to be eaten if I become mentally disabled in an accident, but I want to eat things that could perform equivalently on some tests.

I don't understand your comment. Can you explain further?

In the west, the generally accepted public narrative is that only humans have souls, not other organisms. And whether or not it is acceptable to eat something is frequently more or less tied to intelligence.

I really enjoyed your above comment. I sometimes give push back to the vegan moral superiority stance where they act like eating animals is evil, but eating plants is totally fine. I tend to view all organisms as "having a soul" so to speak and I don't think there is anything inherently morally superior from that perspective in eating only plants, not animals. (I think there are some other bases for arguing that it is morally superior wrt to preventing war, etc.)

But when you see these arguments in public (among "westerners," for lack of a better word), they are almost always based on the idea that plants don't have brains, thus they don't have awareness, so this somehow makes it not a problem to kill them that we might live, where killing animals is posited to be a bad thing.

If you take that argument to its logical conclusion, than perhaps it is morally acceptable to eat other people if they are in a vegetative state. It is one of my objections to such framing.

Yes, I've had similar viewpoints.

I personally think tying of the soul to intelligence seems a weird distinction. Does that mean that if person goes into a vegetative state, they have lost their soul? Do animals that are less intelligent have a less likelihood of a soul? If you can breed animals without mental faculties are they soul-less? Does the fact that we can't understand if plants are intelligent meant they lack souls? These seem like petty distinctions.

To me there is a notion that life has some intrinsic value to it. In parallel there is a notion that to exist as life, humans have to rely on destroying life. To me these are equally important, recognizing that life has worth but also to exist you must end life. I find this paradoxical duality to be beautiful.

Now from a practical point of view there are social rules for how you end life. So some cultures thought it was ok to eat all forms of life as long as that life wasn't part of your tribe (societies with cannibalism), other societies thought it was ok to eat all forms of life except for your pets (most Americans), some exclude animals based on religious beliefs (pork in Islam and judaism, meat and beef in Hinduism), and some think it is ok to eat all forms of life that are non-animals (vegetarians).

I think its hard for any of these groups to claim moral superiority. The truth is in order to exist we need to destroy life, but at the same time, most can see that life is precious.

My feeling is that the practice of saying grace before a meal is rooted in the awareness that "something died that I might live -- and there but for the grace of god go I." When we die, unless we are intentionally preserved, we also get consumed, even if only by microorganisms and plants growing in the soil where our body decomposed.

As far as I know, other animals don't give pause over that detail. We seem to be the only animal who has this uncomfortable awareness and wrestles with it in various forms.

There is no reason to believe anything that would be described as a soul exists. Logically everything is an emergent property of complex systems including plants, animals, and us.

Not being able to distinguish eating an orange, a chicken, a human, a human in a vegetative state etc is just a failure of analysis.

There is no moral dimension to eating an orange and we don't eat people even when their brain is irretrievably ruined out of inherent disgust,desire not to catch a disease, and moral respect for those they may have left behind.

Eating animals is legitimately complicated. We probably shouldn't do it any more

" Logically everything is an emergent property of complex systems including plants, animals, and us."

I'm sorry, but I fully disagree, please see my note above.

This is a materialist view that presupposes that there is only matter/energy and laws that govern it - and only with that (unproven) presupposition first in place, can anything such as you have described be 'logically inferred'.

For example - you mention 'morality' - from the purely physical perspective, you are merely a random wave form, there can be no intelligence, experience, consciousness - let alone morality from that perspective.

It is considerably logical that our current version of materialism is a very helpful tool for understanding some material aspects of the universe, but that by it's own definition is not very useful in terms of understanding life itself.

Materialism is like a ruler we can use to measure stuff. But it gives us little information on 'who is using the ruler'.

'Soul' or 'spirit' or whatever - are the words that we use to crudely describe that which seems to otherwise differentiate life from other stuff, beyond merely 'complexity'.

Although we have been thinking about the matter for at least 12000 years we have no reasonable theory for things that aren't matter or energy that isn't hand waving and nonsense. The most prevalent current theories are extrapolations from what goat herds who believed illnesses and earthquakes were caused by evil spirits.

As an example most people would agree that chemistry is just applied physics but most people don't do substantial chemistry by simulating all the particles involved not because they believe that chemicals are somehow magical in a way that isn't capturable by physics but because its challenging and intractable.

Further if we did arrive at some theory that described qualities and entities not presently qualified by physics those things including souls would become part of the universe because the term universe grows to encompass everything we presently understand.

The logical conclusion is that a soul if it did exist would be made of matter/energy/information like everything else that can possibly exist.

It would of course be truly shocking if a heretofore incompressible aspect of the universe just happened to mirror thousands of years of superstition.

It would be like if we travelled to another star system and found its denizens were the cast of Harry Potter complete with billions of years of history culminating with a multipart war against Voldemorte.

If you want to posit things out of scope of present understanding you ought to provide some support for them which is notably absent from the above hand waving.

I await an interesting reply but fear it will merely be a critique of my small minded instance that debates consist of facts and arguments.

I think you missed my argument.

Your specific frame of reference is called 'scientific materialism', it's been around since the Enlightenment, and like any metaphysical frame of reference, it requires it's own basic assumptions. For example: "The universe is made of this stuff we call matter and energy and those behave according to a specific set of laws". This is unproven, unverifiable etc.. (By the way, you snuck one in there 'information' - which is an abstraction).

It's a useful tool, but it has some problems.

For example - in the context of scientific materialism - we cannot even be 'alive', let alone have 'intelligence' or have 'morality' if we are merely a bag of randomness. A bag of random particles in the Universe must be random at every level.

Here's a paradox for you: "prove to me that you are alive". Basically, you can't. Life is the most important thing there is, and yet we don't even know what we is. If an alien being made of metal parts landed and 'asked for our leader' we'd have a hard time determining whether it was 'life' or not.

Our entire civilization and existence is framed around the concept of life, and of what is not life.

FYI - this 'gaping hole' in Materialism has given rise to kind of a new field called 'Emergence' which is the beginning of the materialists journey to try to understand how complicated interesting things seem to arise from simpler ones - though the field has no answers, the point is good because it recognizes the 'hole' I mention.

"The logical conclusion is that a soul if it did exist would be made of matter/energy/information like everything else that can possibly exist."

Not really. Humans understood that gravity existed, or how it worked very crudely, and dealt with it ... for thousands of years before we even had a word for it, or were able to characterize it rationally in any way.

We have a rough ways of grasping issues while be develop better tools.

So - I did not indicate anything to validate thousands of years of specific superstitions (chemical processes, or magical cures etc.). But the fact that there are words for 'Spirit' 'Soul' or 'Animus' etc. which have developed independently across cultures over various civilizations is a pretty strong reason to indicate that 'something interesting is going on there'.

It's funny because when one steps back for the very specific and narrow view of Materialism, it's an easy concept, it's just that most people are conditioned to narrowly accept current interpretations of 'energy, matter' etc. as 'Truth' that it's hard to consider another view.

The 'hand waiving' is made by those that simply make up and invent premises such as 'The Universe Is Made Of Matter and Energy and Behaves According to Mathematically Describable Laws" - which is unproven and cannot be proven - and then pass it of as an incontestable fact, and then derive all of their arguments based on this supposition ... especially when this definition of the Universe literally denies the very existence of life.

Scientific Materialism was invented by humans do describe: the material. It should be no surprise that it starts to fail when we apply it to other, more existential concepts.

Science is not Truth. It's just a tool, an interpretation. That's it.

It doesn't deny life it simply lacks the tools to fully describe life in the same way that someone who has discovered numbers addition and subtraction lacks the tools to fully understand algebra.

" they are almost always based on the idea that plants don't have brains..."

I'm afraid this is a strawman argument. Most vegans/vegetarians choose to spare other animals based on their capacity to suffer.

So they claim. But:

A. I'm an environmental studies major and anytime I present evidence that plants are aware of suffering, it is ignored and dismissed.

B. I was homeless for nearly 6 years. A so-called ethical vegan I knew (who wasn't actually a full-time vegan and ate vegetarian, not vegan, as convenience suited them) happily and enthusiastically added to my suffering during that time. Given how often ethical vegans gleefully psychologically torture their non vegan fellow humans over their failure to be vegan, I have zero reason to believe this individual's cruelty towards me was some wild aberration in the veg- community.

Please note the other comment here by someone using terms like no reason to believe, logically and a failure of analysis. The subtext of the framing celebrates this western idea that intelligence is everything.

So we can presumably agree to disagree at this point.

"I'm an environmental studies major and anytime I present evidence that plants are aware of suffering, it is ignored and dismissed."

As it should be. When you say "pain" and "suffering" you mean in in no similar way to your own pain and suffering whereas vegans do. You're co-opting the language of ethics to try and point out hypocrisy. Also, let's apply some logic here and acknowledge that far more plants are "harmed" to make animal food products than plant food products, thus it's still consistent for ethical people to eat a plant based diet.

"I have zero reason to believe this individual's cruelty towards me was some wild aberration in the veg- community."

Vegans are defined by caring for the well being of others. That gives us every reason to think that a vegan would care more than anyone else about the well being of others. Your anecdote about a vegan who was mean to you once is something you shouldn't use to draw conclusions about an entire group of people.

No, she wasn't "mean to me once." She was consistently cruel over quite a long period of time at a time when my life was very much in the toilet.

Downplaying what was done to me when you were not there in no way fits with your claim of superior kindness and caring. It quite contradicts it.

I had the fortune to grow up simultaneously in a few variations of christianity. None of them dealt adequately with the argument why animals don't have souls, nor referred to the bible. It was just stated.

Also, none of the dealt with why a person who had never encountered the bible would go de facto to hell.

If we were really made in god's image, then he'd expect us to follow logic, thank you.

> If we were really made in god's image, then he'd expect us to follow logic, thank you.

There's literally nothing in the scriptures (that I've read) supporting this, while there's plenty of evidence God itself is batshit insane, or at least suffers from bipolar disorder, paranoia, and obsessive jealousy. As such, it's entirely plausible to me that we are, indeed, made in such a god's image...

" The concept of a soul is an abstract non-scientific belief, so given its an abstract concept with no scientific basis, why do we make a distinction between one form of life and another?"

A 'soul' is a rational and scientific concept, it's just not materialist or rather, the kind of science we are used to daily.

As far as souls, more complicated, but maybe one simple answer is that more complex and intelligent forms of life have a deeper access to 'the soul' and that it's not like a step function, rather ... some kind of increasing gradient from inanimate matter, to plants, to animals, to humans, to the 'next level' of life.

My second answer relates to the first, i.e. 'Scientific' in sense that his is literally how we divide the universe at least biologically, i.e. life/not life, then domain, kingdom etc..

Please reconsider the notion that 'soul' has no scientific basis, as many would consider that the 'soul' or 'spirit' or 'animus' or whatever is literally the thing that distinguishes us from inanimate material - otherwise - according to a purely materialist perspective you cannot be alive i.e. there is no such thing as life - you are merely a random bag of particles that appears to be alive :).

If you believe that you are alive, that there is love, intelligence, happiness, experience, consciousness, and that you are not simply a purely random bag of particles, then it logically follows you must 'believe in something' that is not bound by strict materialist ideals. This metaphysical concept is not new, and we have some words for that, usually: 'soul' or 'animus' or 'spirit' or whatever. It's not irrational and it's not unscientific, it just by definition does not fit within materialist framework. And to be more clear - materialist science holds as a presupposition that 'everything is a random wave/particle/big of energy' - it is not a 'proof' kind of thing. It holds as a presupposition that 'there is nothing more'. In essence, materialist science starts with a premise of denying all other views, and then goes on to try to explain everything through the lego-blocks of matter type theories. Which don't explain life very well at all.

Sorry for all that. Short answer: Animals are on the spectrum of life, as are we, and there's clearly a relationship there and we can therefore infer a degree of their experience and status in all of this to some extent.

As a sidepoint, I'm going to have to argue that while a soul can be considered a rational concept, it is by know means scientific. I have not aware of any peer reviewed research utilizing the scientific method to show that a soul exists.

But to get to your main point, my question again is why are plants excluded from this state? I really don't get it. You call out that animals are different because they aren't inanimate beings, but neither are plants. Plants are complex, highly evolved multi cellular organisms that are certainly not inanimate.

If the argument is that animals are a life form that are closer form of life to humans so that's why you shouldn't eat them, I can buy that argument. It's a similar moral argument for why you shouldn't eat humans.

But that's a lot different from claiming that animals have souls/spirit/animus and plants don't. From any biological perspective plants are just as alive as animals. Plants communicate, respond to touch, many even actively kill other organisms (venus fly traps, bird catcher trees, etc.), they've been experimentally verified to exhibit some type of memory, and they respond to all sorts of stimuli (for example, turning towards the sun). Rationally, isn't that pretty darn alive? It seems shortsighted to think that plants lack a spirit/soul.

"If the argument is that animals are a life form that are closer form of life to humans so that's why you shouldn't eat them, I can buy that argument. ...

But that's a lot different from claiming that animals have souls/spirit/animus and plants don't"

It's not, it's pretty close to the same thing as we pragmatically view life as something beyond material.

In Scientific Materialism - you are merely a random bag of particles. There literally can be no 'life' in randomness.

By very definition, you cannot exist in those terms.

'Soul/spirit/animus' etc. are crude words we all use to describe that which animates life beyond the pure randomness of our material explanations.

Though you can try to describe life in biological terms, and it's practical ... it's has some major flaws. Surely, after 4 decades of Star Trek we can all cognize forms of life which don't fit our classical biological view. More abstract notions of life would therefore have to be designed and they inch closer and closer to a metaphysical perspective that just doesn't work as Materialism.

So, if you consider the word 'Soul' to mean some concrete idea, but which is totally imaginary, like 'some God' or whatever, then sure - I see your point - but really, the existence of the terminology 'Soul/Spirit' etc. is simply grasping at something more meta, they are used to describe effectively life. Ergo - 'same scale'.

We've used and understood gravity in very crude terms for 1000's of years and yet we did not specifically understand the mechanics of it. It didn't mean we were wrong so much as we just had a crude grasp of it.

Scientific Materialism is a really useful tool, but it's not a Truth. It has it's limits and these issues highlight those limits quite well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com