Do “people who care about plants” really think they have feelings and are intelligent? I consider myself a person who cares about plants and I think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
It’s used to discourage effort and to minimize the suffering of non-human animals by trivializing it: “even plants feel pain, pain is everywhere, there is no point thinking about reducing pain and suffering, it’s futile.”
Such people usually have some other criteria of “who matters”, which ignores suffering. Usually, it’s a hierarchy.
The same hierarchy extends, at upper levels, to human intraspecies hierarchies, which is how you realize that the AI bro TESCREALists are fascists, racists, eugenicists and so on. They mention sentience in passing, and then skip to “intelligence”, a much more vague concept, but something that they love to track … as in the tradition of IQ and race science.
My take on life is that to live is to kill, so I’m obviously fine with it, but I also think I don’t really have the right to claim that something isn’t capable of pain.
Plus we’re finding out more and more that pretty much every living thing feels pain. Even bacteria have stress and pain responses.
think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
Just to play devil’s advocate… The more we understand about consciousness and the more we study animals like invertebrates, the more we keep finding out our previous assumptions keep getting proven wrong.
Terms like feelings, emotions, and intelligence are all open to interpretation and debate.
Do “people who care about plants” really think they have feelings and are intelligent? I consider myself a person who cares about plants and I think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
It’s used to discourage effort and to minimize the suffering of non-human animals by trivializing it: “even plants feel pain, pain is everywhere, there is no point thinking about reducing pain and suffering, it’s futile.”
Such people usually have some other criteria of “who matters”, which ignores suffering. Usually, it’s a hierarchy.
The same hierarchy extends, at upper levels, to human intraspecies hierarchies, which is how you realize that the AI bro TESCREALists are fascists, racists, eugenicists and so on. They mention sentience in passing, and then skip to “intelligence”, a much more vague concept, but something that they love to track … as in the tradition of IQ and race science.
My take on life is that to live is to kill, so I’m obviously fine with it, but I also think I don’t really have the right to claim that something isn’t capable of pain.
Plus we’re finding out more and more that pretty much every living thing feels pain. Even bacteria have stress and pain responses.
Just to play devil’s advocate… The more we understand about consciousness and the more we study animals like invertebrates, the more we keep finding out our previous assumptions keep getting proven wrong.
Terms like feelings, emotions, and intelligence are all open to interpretation and debate.