What are we supposed to eat?
“Are you going to tell me,” said Arthur, “that I shouldn’t have green salad?”
“Well,” said the animal, “I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.”
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
1) Eat anything your body can consume safely
2) Only eat things without brains
3) Only eat things you hunt/harvest/prepare yourself
4) Only eat animals that are already dead
5) Only eat plants and animals that are invasive or over populated
And the list goes on. Some are easier than others, but I don’t see the moral dilemma in maintaining a certain diet outside of “anything or nothing”.
I hope my dinner knows how delicious it is before I eat it. I would tell it if I could. Although that could get pretty awkward if it's something I don't like much:
"Listen, can we just agree that neither of us is really going to like what is about to happen?"
That's pretty much the only way I eat animals. It may be anecdotal, but supermarkets near me sell all of their meat pre-killed in neat little packages. I've never had to grind the beef off of a live cow to get my burger meat. Lobsters are an exception to that rule, but still generally seem dead by the time people eat them.
So? does that automatically imply that it does not feel pain?
>What science generally understands under pain and suffering plants simply don't have.
Listen, I don't buy the science say this and science say that kind of arguments. ANY living being ( assuming we can settle for what can be called 'alive') will have a mechanism for self preservation, pain is one of them. The onus is on 'science' or people to prove otherwise.
Neither of these are applicable to plants, so there doesn't seem to be any evolutionary reason to evolve pain receptors.
(Maybe not by insects though.)
The fact that fruits need to be eaten to perpetuate the species is not linked to the existence of humans.
Birds, mammals, many species disseminate seeds.
No central nervous system does imply no mind to feel pain.
If you were to scoop my brain out of my body and keep my lower body alive below the neck the nervous system would not feel pain as there is no mind to feel it.
Science can't prove the world is not the dream of a giant turtle- so technically I can't "know" anything- so asking "how can you know that?" Is kind of a boring line of questioning. It has no answer other than "Well I guess technically I can't know that, or anything," But that doesn't mean turtle dreams are going to get equal weight with our empirical models of the world.
Or there could be none besides those with a CNS. Science may have a long way to go on understanding minds, but speculation on other sorts of minds entirely is still within the realm of science fiction. So, if you're going to assert something like a conscious experience by plants then you should understand that you are taking it as an article of faith.
A cornerstone of science is empirical observation, and we can all observe our own consciousness to some degree. It's hardly perfect or even nearly complete, but it's something.
You can play semantics with the word "pain" all you want, but the biological differences between what we call pain as experienced by humans and the stimuli response from plants are sufficiently different to surpass a difference of degree and make it a difference of kind. You need a word besides "pain", or the onus is on you to demonstrate the appropriateness of that term when you are using it so far outside its normal context.
Quite a number actually do have nervous systems [0], using neurotransmitters that have actually been found in mammals. They respond to wounding, both with efforts to repair it, and with chemical deterrents to the cause.
Now, that isn't to say that they necessarily have pain and suffering, but it wouldn't be surprising to learn that some plants possess that capability.
Jellyfish have a nervous system but not a CNS.
I have no idea where the ethical line ought to be here, but if plants have meaningful capacity to suffer then it’s also likely that PETA should be campaigning to limit the mistreatment of even the tiny AI we make while doing MOOCs on the basics of machine learning.
It went on to argue with me about data points it thought were outliers that should be removed.
Is that another word for plants?