Hacker News Reader

Comment by neuronic | Hacker News Reader

What basically kicked off major concerns for me were articles and reports about human cases where people are too disabled to express their emotions and thoughts. Think strokes, major head trauma or birth defects.

From this perspective, I would at the very least become far more careful about judging animals too quickly. Just because we cannot read them and interpret their emotions doesn't mean they don't feel love, comfort, fear, amusement or terror.

How long did it take for us to understand that lobsters feel excruciating pain when boiled alive? It took microbiology to figure that out... whoopsy, what are those pain hormones doing here?

View on HN

It definitely gave me pause - I learned something similar from my dying grandfather, who I thought was becoming uncontactable. Then one day, taken into the hospital and given IV, he really came to and became mostly coherent again. We had a great few hours with him and some of his friends who were there to visit. (He died a month later, and it is long ago now.)

Just think of, how much temporary conditions shape how we see people.

(And yet more horrifying, there are cases of comatose people coming to temporarily, being just like themselves, only to never wake up again.)

> Just because we cannot read them and interpret their emotions doesn't mean they don't feel love, comfort, fear, amusement or terror.

What makes us so confident that plants don't also meet this criteria? Can lab grown algae burgers feel love? How would we know?

I'm not trying to argue that we should stop eating everything. But I'm not sure how we'd draw a line between some/all animals and other things that are even harder to read. I'm genuinely curious where we'd draw a line.

"What makes us so confident that plants don't also meet this criteria?"

Brains or other possible organs for processing information are metabolically expensive to operate and entropically expensive to maintain the genetics required to build them. If there is no evolutionary advantage for plants to have sensations and emotions, they will not evolve the machinery required to have them.

The line drawn by many vegetarians and vegans is a lack of a central nervous system - but even they admit this is arbitrary.

To add to this, there is also another line you can draw: do not eat anything which requires killing (not just harvesting from) another living thing. This is basically the line drawn by Jain vegetarians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism). This allows one to eat milk and dairy but does not allow one to eat root vegetables that require you to kill the entire organism to eat it (and potentially other living beings that live in the soil).

Milk and dairy really don't fit this criterion in any major civilization today. Animals are definitely killed even if they're not consuming them.

I wonder if they can eat the leg of an animal then? Like the joke about the farmer and his favourite pig.

It's very odd to me that not eating mushrooms is part of Jain vegetarianism. If ever there was a case of a fruit that did no harm to harvest, it is your typical farmed mushroom and even many wild ones.

It's not arbitrary; it's based on our best guess of the minimum requirements for sentience.

> What makes us so confident that plants don't also meet this criteria? Can lab grown algae burgers feel love? How would we know?

When it comes to issues of consciousness, I'm loathe to make any strong claims, since I don't think that phenomenal consciousness is amenable to scientific inquiry due to its innately subjective nature. E.g., for all I know, it might feel like something to be a rock. Though I doubt it.

Likewise for plants, I would hypothesize that feeling things consciously requires complex information processing. E.g., such as is done in the brains of many animals.

Plants certainly process information to some degree, but the degree to which they do so would seem to pale compared to the amount of information processing performed by even the simplest animals that have brains.

We have no idea if they feel excruciating pain we know they have a pain and stress response. That isn't actually the same thing. But why not play it safe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com