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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

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Your comment was correctly downvoted and flagged because it broke the site guidelines badly—several of them.

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? We've had to ask you this many times. If you keep it up we'll have to ban you. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

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Ah, they didn't have us apologize to plants - only to thank 'em. It wasn't a guilty thing we did, but it was a lesson to appreciate that they were growing and that we could enjoy them.

I'm surprised you didn't stop at the idea that it also implies plants have hearing and can understand language and process some kind of human meaning - I feel like those are more absurd than the idea than a plant feels. (More organisms on this planet demonstrate something like feelings than the capacity to verbally communicate.) But yes, I project the idea the plants have something like human feelings, and that's definitely a product of that kind of education reverberating through my life. It was a kind of spiritual lesson, and the school incorporated other spiritual elements like performing the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address during some school assemblies and camping trips. I'm not confused about those as an adult.

I also know that a plant's experience on this planet is alien to mine, and it's silly to apply human meaning to what I think it's going through. I think our brains have enough space to hold these ideas up there though and reflect on them, and I think children deserve more than a functionalist education. I don't think I'm messed up as a result of that education, and I'm living a happy life - fair to say I had a heck of a time catching up on math and language in middle school though!

If we are viewing this spiritually, then yes, plants have consciousness, though not necessarily human consciousness.

There are shamanic practices involving plant teachers and interacting with the spirit of the plant. There are these Tantric ideas of plant medicine and the afflictions they heal, arising together.

Or that, our bodies are optimized for walking, yet we carry the means as climbers when our ancestors lived and learned from the standing people. (our lats are both the largest upper body muscle and the most underused one in day-to-day modern life). There is meaning and significance in climbing and walking. I can go on.

I love both your comments and am saving them as references to be used in a book or essays that I am working on that discusses the lack of non-selfist values in modern culture and how this is far more consequential than whether we choose a socialist or capitalist laws and economic system.

Also, if you've never read Ursula K LeGuin, you should give one of her sci-fi books a go. In Left Hand of Darkness a non-human character feels a deep sadness when they abandon a sleigh that has carried them across a frozen polar region, saving their lives. The human doesn't understand this, as the sleigh is just an inanimate object, a tool, and they had known all along they'd have to abandon it once it served its purpose.

I think that modernity had shifted the mainstream view away from that, but it need not that way. When I look at Christopher Alexander’s life’s work and what the various people tried to do during the Renaissance, you can still be in relation to all around you. Alexander’s talks on centers and unfolding brings you to designing in this way.

I appreciate that! I'll have to keep an eye out for it. I definitely agree with that perspective - I don't think it matters much how we organize the bits and pieces of the system if we don't have a shared value for life beyond our own. I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values. But I'm also not sure if it's tractable or "good" for a worldwide population to develop shared values - I think "valuing life" is something we should all practice, but who's to say how that actually renders out in the minds of 7bn people? Tricky stuff, and I have no answers haha. I was a CS major, and I'm sure freshmen philosophy majors could do circles around me on this.

Hoo - I remember that scene and the mix of feelings it brought up for me. It reminded me of an attachment to physical objects that I attribute to watching Toy Story growing up. I love the way she wrote, and I still have a long list of her books to dive into. Another scene that left its mark on me is from The Dispossessed when Shevek shares a moment with the pet otter at a dinner party:

  The otter sat up on its haunches and looked at him. Its eyes were dark, shot with gold, intelligent, curious, innocent. "Ammar," Shevek whispered, caught by that gaze across the gulf of being – "brother."

From Shevek's perspective, he had never seen or known this kind of creature to exist, and he was staring at something alien to him and still finding a connection. I think in a way thanking the herbs was a lesson in looking across the "gulf of being", though the herbs didn't return the attention with a gold, intelligent gaze. Maybe it was something more like what Werner Herzog sees in chickens haha [1]. To me, when he calls a chicken's gaze "stupid", I don't think he's saying that in a negative sense but instead in a way that's recognizing their being as it is in human terms. The connotation that we put into the word "stupid" is what makes his perspective sound like a harsh judgement, but I think he's just being "brutally honest".

I can't help but mention the song "Spud Infinity" by Big Thief as well [2]! Definitely a song (and album) to get lost in:

  From way up there it looks so small
  From way down here it looks so small
  One peculiar organism aren't we all together?
  Everybody steps on ants
  Everybody eats the plants

...

  When I took another look
  The past was not a history book
  That was just some linear perception

...

  When I say celestial
  I mean extra-terrestrial
  I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart

...

  Kiss your body up and down other than your elbows
  'Cause as for your elbows, they're on their own
  Wandering like a rolling stone
  Rubbing up against the edges of experience

I think the motif underlying each of these that matters to me is embracing "radical alterity" or "the other". "Accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart" and recognizing the "edges of [your] experience" and where you can and can't know yourself. Adrienne Lenker frequently talks about how LeGuin is one of her favorite authors, and I think this song is definitely in conversation with LeGuin. There's so much in there! The whole album is worth a listen (and several more) if you haven't heard it already.

Thanks for reading!

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhMo4WlBmGM [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYFBNA7uaJQ

(Edited for formatting)

> I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values.

Agreed, but I think that will fall out naturally from having a non-selfist value system, which would dispense with the current world's elevation of selfishness from vice to virtue. As long as we continue to worship at the alter of selfishness, no alternative to capitalism is going to do much better. To your point about some monolithic value system: we wouldn't want that. Just as for physical evolution diversity of the values "gene pool" is healthy. But the selfish gene (intentional play off Dawkins' idea) needs to become recessive at most. It's both fine and healthy if people disagree with how to create a better community and how to share the world empathetically and morally as long as we share the same intention: sharing the world empathetically and morally. Selfism by definition is immoral as morality by definition by my reckoning is all about choosing the common/greater good over one's personal gain. Moral conscience is that voice that tells you "Yeah, I know you want that so much, but you have to resist because it hurts other people."

I haven't read the The Dispossessed yet. I'll move it up my list. I was introduced to LeGuin in a class at Berkeley titled Women in Religion offered by the Berkeley School of Theology / Graduate Theological Union (separate from UC Berkeley but they have a collaborative relationship, and students of each can take classes in the other) and taught by a feminist theologian woman... I'm an atheist leaning agnostic and it was one of my favorite classes I ever took at Berkeley.

I never heard of Big Thief and will give their music a listen, definitely!

It might be years before my writing sees the light of day, but if you would be so kind, shoot me an email so we can keep in touch. I'll send you one as well, given all the spam filters that hinder such first time comms.

Thanks for writing!

I remember a sci-fi book where the main character asked the robot to do something, and the robot did, and the character thanked it. And someone said "why did you thank it? It has no feelings and can't understand it." The reply was something along the lines of "the thanks comes from me, and if I stop doing it for robots I'll stop doing it for people, too, eventually."

And here I am burning tokens on my GPT prompts with please-and-thank-yous in 2023 haha

It's really fascinating that you appear to register 'thanking' as 'apologizing'.

And I thank you for that, as I think it just helped me better understand a broad group of the general population I could never quite figure out.

> I think this is interesting too. To me it seems the attitude stems from conflating gratitude with weakness.

More examples I thought of:

* Extreme opposition to mask wearing, perhaps due to conflating nurturing/protecting with weakness.

* Stand your ground laws. Backing down from a fight, even when it is neither strategically or tactically logical perhaps is perceived as weakness.

* Vehement opposition to environmental laws... (again nurturing/protection).

* Fart cars with noisy exhausts and Harleys. Used a s a tool to project aggression, i.e.: the perceived opposite of weakness.

* Victim blaming. Sympathy/empathy conflated with weakness?

I think this is a rich vein which might yield some insights into aspects of human behaviour.

A similar concept has also been discussed in the article "The World's Most Toxic Value System¹.

[1]: https://stevedutch.net/pseudosc/toxicval.htm"

See also:

Could you share your understanding please? I can't quite wrap my head around registering thanking as apologizing.

From the original post:

> One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one

And the response:

> It's messed up for a school to get children to verbally apologize to plants. It implies that plants have feelings.

The followup to that is about the confusion/"these are the same things" for thanking something being the same as apologizing for that same thing - that gratitude is the same as remorse.

---

The difference is:

> Thank you for the leaf that I will use for tea

> I'm sorry that I'm picking your leaf for my own enjoyment

The first example here is thanking (a plant) and the second example is apologizing for taking action implying feeling sorry for the harm caused to the plant.

Thea person you are responding to understood that; what they didn’t understand was what the person they were responding to had come to understand about part of the population from the person they were responding to conflating thanking with understanding.

And, I think that was the hardest to understand thing I’ve ever said.

The person read thanking and registered apologizing. My hypothesis is because they see both as more or less equivalent, or a form of weakness.

And if I may expand on this, if someone conflates thanking and apologizing and/or associates both with weakness, it has profound implications for how that person will behave within a society. It may (at least partly) explain why there is so little "instinctive" kindness towards other people, especially when these people are not part of your social circle or they are "abstract" (i.e. when they are featured in the media).

The original post only talked about thanking the plants. The reply only talks about apologizing to the plants. Clearly the reply thinks that's the same thing here.

   messed up for a school to get children to verbally apologize to plants

interesting that you conflate thanking with apologizing.

Why not be grateful regardless of whether things have feelings?

The practice of gratitude is a good one, internally and externally, for the living and the inert. We don’t have to imagine the plants have souls; it’s the simple act of acknowledgment and appreciation that instills a sense of value and importance upon the things that keep us alive.

They don't learn to apologise to the plants, they just learn to be grateful for what they can take for "free". That probably doesn't fit into your tiny narrative of "green activists" being all shamans who believe plants have feelings, so you extrapolate, project and make a fool of yourself.

Its not about teaching kids that plants have feelings.

Its about teaching kids that they have feelings. Saying thank-you to a plant may not benefit the plant much, but it does improve the mood and tone of the individual saying it.

Being thankful for things actually helps with mental health. If you can't be thankful, even to the trivial little life forms that provide you with food and comfort, you've got a thankfulness imbalance that no amount of chemical consumption is going to help you fix...

They didn't apologize, they expressed gratitude (that's what "thank you" means). Although the usage here was debatable, as the plant didn't have any say in its leaves being cropped, and of course it only makes sense to thank for a deliberate act. So, in a way, these children were taught inconsistent logic.

Personally, I don't see anything inconsistent about being grateful for something that wasn't a deliberate act. I can see at least two reasons for doing so:

Part of expressing gratitude is for the benefit of the person expressing gratitude rather than for the person being thanked.

Even if it wasn't a deliberate act, the person being thanked may appreciate knowing that they benefited someone. Although, this wouldn't apply to plants which aren't sentient.

It is only insofar inconsistent as most spiritual/social norms are. This seems to me to be very similar to the gratefulness expressed i.e. by Christians and other religious people towards a higher power (which often explicitly is "incomprehensible" and thus probably not really addressable with human comprehensions of gratefulness).

It's like when you get a -Thank you for your services- note while getting fired or layed off.

lmao

Please elaborate.

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