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