Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

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> Good grief. I wish we could skip the incrementalism for once and just put an end to all animal slaughter, extreme or not.

At some point - we have to eat something that is alive. Even plants react to being damaged in intentional and measurable ways (including trying to repair themselves, signaling neighbors of the damage, and passing nutrients to each other in response). I think it's impossible to ditch incrementalism, because EVERYTHING we eat is already somewhere on that sliding scale of "something alive that is trying to stay that way".

I am in favor of reducing the harm I am able to, while still acknowledging that simply existing requires that I consume resources (And those resources have to be a living thing, because humans are consumers... not producers). Those resources could have gone to keep another living thing alive, but I am using them. At some point, I expect to die, and it will be something else's turn.

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Also - It would be really, really cool if we could get the whole "KloraDerm" thing going from "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi.

I would LOVE to be able to do photosynthesis.

There’s a really good case for sentience, though. This isn’t a problem of infinite regression: no one is asking for you to become a Jain.

Sure - I won't argue that I emotionally understand and relate much more strongly to the pain and suffering of animals that are biologically similar to me.

I also agree that minimizing that pain is a reasonable goal, and worth taking steps to do at most every point we can afford to (and realistically - we are fairly rich as a species, we could be doing better).

I don't particularly agree that forgoing meat consumption entirely is the right call - although reducing it likely is (especially if you live in the US).

I also don't think that just because you happen to be eating a plant, you're off the hook - I think monoculture production and certain farming practices (see: palm oil) are causing suffering on similar scales.

In my opinion - we should be trusting large conglomerates less with our foods (whether they're plant or animal) and doing more production locally. Acknowledging and respecting where the food you eat comes from is a huge step up from where many folks are right now.

You’re right on all fronts. I’ll add that there’s a human element to both the plant and meat consumption story: in both cases, harvesting and slaughtering, the dirty work is often done by migrant workers with very little enforced legal protections. They work in terrible conditions, for low pay.

one law at a time

> At some point - we have to eat something that is alive

Alive and sentient aren't the same thing. You can eat non-sentient beings that are alive (like plants) and they won't suffer.

We can't even really define what it is to be a thinking mind, let alone determine what it means to suffer. We just relate more to (some) animals than plants and imagine empathy from their position. Its just another form of species-ism to protect the animals but not other life.

> You can eat non-sentient beings that are alive (like plants) and they won't suffer.

Define suffer?

How are you so confident plants aren't suffering? They have measureable responses to stress and harm

Stress and harm are loaded words for stimuli here. Parts of plants can be triggered by a stimulus to begin emitting chemical signals that govern growth, senescence, etc elsewhere in the plant. They do this in response to a wide range of stimuli, not just "harm". Which stimuli feel "bad" to the plant? How would you know?

It's all very stimulus-response for a plant. If things responding to inputs means they can feel or think, then I suppose single cell organisms and computer programs and doorbells count.

Your brain develops using an incredibly similar system of chemical signals (hormone distribution).

Also - almost every plant out there is capable of repairing damage to itself, which I would take as fairly strong evidence that it prefers to not die. That repair is a complicated and involved process as well, and often includes adaptations that attempt to prevent further damage (ex: Lots of plants signal neighbors when eaten, and those neighbors chemically adjust to change how they taste to the animal eating them).

I'm just saying...

I can vividly picture the alien farting out a cloud of pheromones that essentially say "It's all very stimulus-response for a human - they just begin emitting auditory response to a wide range of stimuli" before he eats them.

What part of the plant suggests that it "wants" anything instead of just being adapted by force of natural selection to respond in certain ways?

There is nothing in plants that should make us believe they can do anything like thinking, certainly short of sentience. They have no neurons, or anything resembling neurons, only cells locked into a grid that behave in deterministic ways. It's not impossible to imagine a system that thinks using chemical signaling alone, but what makes you think plants have this quality?

They respond, for example, to light. The cells can detect light, and this induces chemical signaling that directs the plant on internodal length and direction. We could make a robot or something that does this. Could we say such a thing "wants" light? Probably not, except as a convenience of explanation out of personification.

Or, to summarize, these simple stimulus-response effects are not sufficient to justify a belief that there is intelligence. I suppose it's argumentum ad absurdum.

> They respond, for example, to light. The cells can detect light, and this induces chemical signaling that directs the plant on internodal length and direction. We could make a robot or something that does this. Could we say such a thing "wants" light? Probably not, except as a convenience of explanation out of personification.

Let me counter: I do not believe you have sufficiently proven that we ourselves are anything more than chemical signaling mechanisms.

We happen to not understand the signals that the plants are making (we really are only just barely scratching that surface - but we KNOW plants use VOCs to communicate both among themselves as well as much more distinct species like insects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3405699/)

We just don't have nearly as much empathy available because that experience is so foreign to our understanding.

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To follow - I find it particularly interesting that people still cling so dearly to your argument as we watch machine learning tackle and overcome many behaviors we considered uniquely human. Those machines can talk just like us, their signals mirror the complexity of our own (and are much more complex than those we currently understand from plants). Does that signaling complexity now mean that it's alive?

I certainly don't think so - I would still call a plant more alive than that machine (at least right now, things are shifting fast here). Yet that machine is using a fairly simple system to process, internalize, and then create complexity that mirrors your own.

I guess I'm saying that I, personally, don't find your moral argument nearly so clear as you seem to be implying that it is. There is no easy out. We are dealing with shades of grey.

"You’re a vegetarian, but don’t you realize that plants have feelings? He said, Yes, I do, but they don’t scream so loudly." Alan Watts.

You can eat an animal without it suffering too, if that's your main worry.

but have you had snow crab legs? this also seems like it could quickly become a freedom of religion debate, if your religion tells you to have a BBQ, you have a BBQ

No, I only have two Human Legs. Too important to eat.

what are you doing :( don't kill the whataboutism in less than 5 minutes

Yes, but it's a lot easier to get a complete amino-acid profile in your proteins by eating things that were alive (e.g. animals), than to get it from even a balanced grain diet.

This is especially important in developing children.

It isn't at all evident that forcing kids onto a meat-free diet is the best path forward for society as a whole.

Could we make sugars or fats straight from CO2 and Water? Just wondering could you theoretically make either from some process that does not involve plants, bacteria, protist or fungi? Enzymes are probably fair game.

Sure - I think there's a possible long game here where we're able to technologically engineer our way back to producer status.

Bio-engineering is one route (KloraDerm), but I could see alternative routes that are essentially just chemical/material sciences.

I think it's probably an incredibly complicated supply chain we'd have to really work through to make sure you can synthesize all the required components without going through something living, but we know that producers exist - so there's hope.

Also now that I think about it. Basically anything at all can contaminate the process and include living things...

Probably not realistic on industrial scale. And then how do you get to the clean starting point...

Sure... CO2 capture => Fischer-Tropsch => wax => fatty acid => food. The CO2 capture part is new, and presumably one would use solar now, but the rest was attempted during WW2.

E-fuel plants do this for synthetic aviation fuel.

You can also do it slightly more indirectly via acetate: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00530-x.pdf

For one, it's incredibly hard to believe that anyone genuinely believes that "killing" a carrot and killing a dog are in anyway morally similar.

Secondly, this is utterly IRRELEVANT IN PRACTICE! Your consumption of animals causes far, far, far more plant "deaths" than if you actually just ate plants. BY YOUR OWN LOGIC you should be vegan. Of course, you can also use your logic to go the other way. If it's all the same morally, might as well start eating humans. Us white people have got some experience with that.

> I am in favor of reducing the harm I am able to

Wonderful, that makes you vegan. As in, that is the actual (common) definition of veganism: Reduce suffering and death as far as practicable and possible.

> At some point - we have to eat something that is alive.

Not necessarily as we could wait for living things to die naturally and then consume them (maybe becoming fungus-like in the process). For livestock, that could possibly create a loophole of farms having conditions that cause a premature death.

With plants, there's the option of following fruitarianism and just eating plant material that falls off such as fruit. (Fruit is unusual when it comes to being consumed as it arguably "wants" to be eaten so that the parent plant can better distribute its seeds). There's problems with following such a fruit heavy diet though and I don't think it's a good idea by itself.

Alternatively, we could go the Soylent Green route?

> With plants, there's the option of following fruitarianism and just eating plant material that falls off such as fruit. (Fruit is unusual when it comes to being consumed as it arguably "wants" to be eaten so that the parent plant can better distribute its seeds). There's problems with following such a fruit heavy diet though and I don't think it's a good idea by itself.

I guess this is why it's so complicated (and you can't get off the scale). From the perspective of the fruiting plant - I agree with you, it doesn't mind if you eat some fruit. From the perspective of each seed, they'd probably rather you didn't.

And interestingly - if we're willing to go multi-body (since we're admitting that eating fruit is bad for some seeds, but possible advantageous to the species as a whole) I think you'd have to make the same argument for herd animals: It might be bad for a single deer to be eaten, but it's pretty good for the herd if someone happens to remove the weakest single member every now and then.

Anyways... I'm rambling at this point. Not sure why you're getting downvoted but long story short: I hope people acknowledge and respect the things they eat (plants, animals, or other), I'd love to see us move back a step from the automated and industrial production methods we're using right now (Both animals and plants - monoculture crops are a real ecosystem killer) and work to make food something that is local and folks can connect with.

> From the perspective of each seed, they'd probably rather you didn't.

I recall that some seeds are designed to pass through the mammalian digestive system and thus get deposited with some fresh manure in which to grow. Maybe they enjoy the experience.

> you'd have to make the same argument for herd animals: It might be bad for a single deer to be eaten, but it's pretty good for the herd if someone happens to remove the weakest single member every now and then.

That's a good argument for free ranging or wild animals, but it's more complicated with farmed animals. If we breed animals just to eat them and select for the traits we desire, then it could be considered bad for that species although it certainly increases their numbers.

I don't particularly disagree with you.

I just think attempting to apply a moral imperative to how species happen to have adapted to their niche is hard.

Rabbits work around their prey status by rote production - which means if nothing eats them, eventually they go through a large starvation event once they hit the carrying capacity of their habitat.

Chickens are arguably one of the most successful species on the planet right now.

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I am in favor of free ranging animals, I agree that breeding animals moves them more into a niche that requires humans to exist - but I'm not convinced that's bad for them as a species (at least not as long as humans exist, and as a human that's my current preference with some admitted bias).

I think globally - monoculture crops are often also a huge risk, and find that they are destroying other animals indirectly (decimating the population of insects, small mammals, and birds in the area).

So I think the problem is hard, and that responsible stewardship likely means less industrialization in agriculture across the board (both plant and animal) and more local production of food. Intentional hunting grounds reserved for wild populations like turkey and deer (at least in my area) are very much a part of that, so I'm also with you on wild animals when it makes sense.

> Chickens are arguably one of the most successful species on the planet right now.

The dinosaurs didn't die out, they just got a lot smaller.

The plant matter of a fruit is still alive, though. At some point you're drawing an arbitrary line that separates the living things that are okay to eat from those that are not.

That depends on the definition of "alive". Fruits don't respire which a lot of definitions include. And yes, it's going to be an arbitrary line.

Perhaps not the fruit as a whole, but the individual cells certainly do.

Going to the cellular complicates matters. That'd probably mean that you'd have to wait for fruit and veg to go mouldy before eating it and then do we consider fungus to be alive?

Like I said, arbitrary lines. The only way to sidestep it completely would be if you could directly synthesize sugars, lipids, and proteins. Then you could sustain people killing-free.

It's not whether they're alive but if they can suffer.

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