this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
1159 points (88.3% liked)
vegan
2682 readers
306 users here now
Please also check out vegantheoryclub.org for a great set of well-run communities for vegan news, cooking, gardening, and art. It is not federated with LW, but it is a nice, cozy, all-in-one space for vegans.
We ask that the you have an understanding on what veganism is before engaging in this community.
If you think you have been banned erroneously, please get in contact with one of the other mods for appeals.
Moderator reports may not federate properly and may delay moderator action. Please DM an active mod if an abusive comment remains after reporting it.
Welcome
Welcome to c/[email protected]. Broadly, this community is a place to discuss veganism. Discussion on intersectional topics related to the animal rights movement are also encouraged.
What is Veganism?
'Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals ...'
— abridged definition from The Vegan Society
Rules
The rules are subject to change, especially upon community feedback.
- Discrimination is not tolerated. This includes speciesism.
- Topics not relating to veganism are subject to removal.
- Posts are to be as accessible as practicable:
- embedded images of text require alt-text
- posts with an image of text should have a transcription in the body or alt-text
- paywalled articles must have an accessible non-paywalled link;
- use the original source whenever possible for a news article.
- Content warnings are required for triggering content.
- Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future.
- before jumping into the community, we encourage you to read examples of common fallacies here.
- if you're asking questions about veganism, be mindful that the person on the other end is trying to be helpful by answering you and treat them with at least as much respect as they give you.
- Posts and comments whose contents – text, images, etc. – are largely created by a generative AI model are subject to removal. We want you to be a part of the vegan community, not a multi-head attention layer running on a server farm.
- No brigading, either off-site or on-site. An incitement to brigade includes two elements: a call to disruptive action and a specific direction outside of this community in which to take that action. Exceptions include:
- Calls to boycott.
- Calls to in-person protest of a government, high-profile individual, or company/organization.
- Votes provided they have a sufficiently broad target audience or provably effective controls against vote brigading.
- Petitions.
- All Lemmy.World Terms of Service also apply.
Resources on Veganism
A compilation of many vegan resources/sites in a Google spreadsheet:
Here are some documentaries that are recommended to watch if planning to or have recently become vegan:
- You Will Never Look at Your Life in the Same Way Again
- Dominion (2018) (CW: gore, animal abuse)
Vegan Fediverse
Lemmy:
Mastodon:
Other Vegan Communities
General Vegan Comms
Circlejerk Comms
Vegan Food / Cooking
Attribution
- Banner image credit: Jean Weber of INRA on Wikimedia Commons
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.