this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Perry Bible Fellowship
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We know that our consciousness and capacity to suffer rely on our brains. Animals have brains with very similar structure, they avoid pain, they have long lasting and complex memories, there are clear signs of emotions (see: dogs), they have personalities, they play, some have emotional attachments to other animals or even humans, some animals show clear signs that they mourn the dead.
Plants don't have brains, and we haven't found any structures that are comparable. We haven't observed any "behavior" that comes close to the capabilities that brains enable either.
There's an enormous difference in the body of evidence. If this distinction is arbitrary to you, you might as well see a stone as your best friend, because they are surely just as conscious as we are.
So because plants don't have central nervous systems that you personally can get attached to, you consider them a lesser life-form?
Because if you don't, then everything you've just said is bullshit.
If something doesn't has a central nervous system and is therefore not sentient, it doesn't make sense to attribute intrinsic ethical value to it. So I guess yes?
Do you really think that turning the machines off when someone is unquestionably brain-dead is murder?
These are truly bizarre things to take issue with.
But I think we both know that it's unlikely that you're deeply concerned about the ethical treatment of grass and corpses...
About as much as I'm deeply concerned about the treatment of livestock:
I do not agree with the current state of Human industrialisation, because at every facet of Human industrialisation it is a destructive, disruptive process that damns the entire Earth in order to make profits for a small handful of individuals.
But the ethical dilemma of eating another life-form for sustenance? No, I deny there exists one.