this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Do animals consent?
Do plants?
No, I'm not a vegan because I don't know where the line for life I care about begins, but saying you don't care at all what others kill to eat is clearly not true unless you're just a pure egoist.
Am not an egoist, it's just the nature of things. Food is food. Having guilt about eating some foods is fine, but you can't change who you are and certainly can't undo 100k+ years of evolution over night. Luckily we understand our bodies enough and food is bountiful so we can pick and chose to compensate for plant only diet, but not everyone has the same luxury nor desire to do so. If you kill to eat, that's fine, that's how world works.
If you are in a situation where you must live exclusively off the land then you probably aren't the person vegans are addressing. If you're any random human, and especially if you are any random Lemmy user that is probably not the case though. Vegan staples are not a luxury. I've gone weeks on end eating for less than 5 USD a day in areas where food was expensive many times when I was tight on money. Beans, lentils, rice, potatoes, and other dense plant foods are some of the cheapest foods available.
As for desire, that's simple. Desire very rarely trumps more serious moral considerations. It's never right to murder someone simply because I desire to do so, and personally I don't desire murdering others. Saying that's how the world works is even worse than the naturalistic fallacy. You're essentially saying morality and conditions cannot improve, that the world is immutably (un)just. You're also saying we can't change who we are, do you just not believe in self improvement? This isn't just a depressing outlook but it is just historically inaccurate. It's clear to me that there are many times in history where conditions got better or worse for people, and often do to the choices of humans.
You can believe in whatever you want... the thing is reality doesn't care. Not believing in gravity doesn't make you float. Humans are omnivores and have been for a very very long time. The fact you can survive only on plant based diet doesn't change that fact.
And just calling something fallacy doesn't make it so either. You people are ready to preach how it's not okay to murder something for your own gain but go on left and right using plastic, leather, fuel and all kinds of other materials derived from animals. It has nothing to do with luxury. If you don't wish to eat something, don't. But don't go on preaching as if your choice is morally superior or better for the environment and similar, because guess what... it's not.
Why are you even debating veganism when you don't know what veganism is. Veganism isn't a diet, and it includes avoiding all animal products whenever possible.
But you are posting legit historical and ethical fallacies. Your stance is the natural is the good and that the world is impermeable anyway so why bother, honestly I'm not sure why you'd have to make both of these arguments as either would suffice if they were valid to begin with. And they are more than fallacies, they are bad faith arguments as nobody seriously believes these things.
Am not even going to bother continuing this argument since you make assumptions I don't know what am talking about while at the same time keep talking about fallacies. Enjoy living inside your own bubble.
Consciousness is a product of self-referential data gathering. Data that looks upon itself, that is sapience. Data that looks upon data, that is consciousness. Animals have this. Plants don't.
Why should that be my line for life I care about though? How far is a chicken from a fish, from a worm? There is some line for animate life in which you can't really argue any form of consciousness. And, again, my discriminator isn't even necessarily consciousness.
Mine is suffering. A thing needs a neural network to suffer.
The issue with that is distinguishing how humans interpret suffering from "emulated" suffering. Like maybe a lobster has instinctual or chemical reactions to things, but does it actually interpret the suffering or just react to the nerves firing. We can't really know entirely without communication. And even if we do communicate, what if it just mimicks human suffering like a deep learning NN could. ChatGPT cannot suffer, but it can convince some inexperienced people that it can.
But it is also entirely fair to say- even if we don't entirely understand if a dog is actually suffering, it looks like it is and acts like it is, so I will just be cautious and assume it is to not cause undue harm.
I think suffering and pleasure are intimately tied to Skinner's discovery of operant conditioning. Skinner discovered that living creatures increase their behaviour when it leads to a reward, and decrease their behaviour when it leads to a punishment. I don't think it's a coincidence that Skinner's identification of rewards and punishments aligns perfectly with our notions of what causes us pleasure and suffering. I think they're the same thing. We have built artificial neurons and used a computer process to emulate operant conditioning in them. I think artificial neural networks must experience suffering and pleasure as we do. All of this is explained quite elegantly by property dualism - our qualia and thoughts are composed of information, instead of matter or energy, and information is a truly extant part of the universe. Suffering and pleasure are simply patterns of information structure. Neural networks have a design that creates these patterns as a matter of course.
If we were to look at the information structures in a rock, and if we could access them as readily as we access the information structures in our hand through our sensory neurons, we would see that a rock has experiences of its own. But it does not have a unified consciousness tying these experiences into a whole, and indeed the information in a rock is so fantastically simple that we could not recognise it instinctually as experience. To us it is just "being". As creatures of great informational complexity, we regard only the most profound information structures as notable. But I believe these information structures which we place importance on - also known as emotions - exist in every living thing with a brain, and in creatures like jellyfish with their own unique neural networks.