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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder about this a lot. I love meat, but I'm fairly certain our descendants will judge us the same way we judge slave owners: we were intelligent, we had the necessary mental ingredients to come to the conclusion that some of the animals we consume possessed some level of sentience, but we were unable to do so due to sheer historical and cultural momentum.

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And those descendants will be viewed in horror by their descendants in turn, when they prove that plants have sentience and thoughts.

Not to drift too far off topic, but you may be surprised to learn about biomass transfer efficiency. It takes a lot more plant mass to feed to animals than eating those plants directly. This "plants might feel pain too" gotcha doesn't really play out.

That's assuming the biomass can be eaten by humans in the first place. We can't digest a lot of stuff that can be eaten by animals whom we can eat in turn.

I feel you misunderstood the point being made. Societal norms and attitudes evolve and blindly measuring history against contemporary standards is often counterproductive.

Please don't mistake this as some apology for slavery, wife beating, antisemitism or whatever. It isn't; people did reprehensible things in the past. Just realize that it's extremely unlikely that our current norms are the objectively correct ones that will be forever unchanged.

I believe there is more slavery, wife beating, and antisemitism now than in the past.

Ruminants are the most efficient fiber processors, and we are some of the most efficient ruminant-meat processors. We also cannot process fiber.

I’m sorry, but this comment is in bad faith. Plants do no have brains, they do not emote or feel pain. Someone will chime in with a "well actually ..." no doubt, but to ascribe any form of equivalence between plants and animals in this way is a bad faith argument. And more to the point: our descendants horror will be that we knew we were causing the suffering of living beings and yet we did it anyway.

To nitpick: emote and feeling pain != sentience and thinking. But let's leave this discussion alone, I meant that in humour.

>Plants do no have brains, they do not emote or feel pain.

Science says plant feel & can hear esp. whilst being eaten by insect or are cut.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/plants-feel-pa...

It's also proven that plants communicate with one another, and can share nutrients with one another, even warn nearby plants to get ready for attacks.

https://www.livescience.com/1909-plants-communicate-warn-dan...

Trees have friends, feel loneliness, scream with pain and communicate underground via the “woodwide web”. Some act as parents and good neighbours. Others do more than just throw shade – they’re brutal bullies to rival species. The young ones take risks with their drinking and leaf-dropping then remember the hard lessons from their mistakes. It’s a hard-knock life.

A book called The Hidden Life of Trees is not an obvious bestseller but it’s easy to see the popular appeal of German forester Peter Wohlleben’s claims – they are so anthropomorphic. Certainly, a walk in the park feels different when you imagine the network of roots crackling with sappy chat beneath your feet. We don’t know the half of what’s going on underground and beneath the bark, he says: “We have been looking at nature for the last 100 years like [it is] a machine.”

"The man who thinks trees talk to each other"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/12/peter-wo...

Building off othe dendritic consciousness structures, my own suspicion isn't that trees have brains, but that trees are components of a larger brain-analogue --- forests or ecosystems.

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