We don’t know how consciousness works enough to say they don’t. Having a brain and/or nervous system might not be necessary.
Comment on Those poor plants
hellfire103@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
“Know” is a stretch. Plants respond to attack by releasing chemicals (e.g. nettles and grasses), curling or retracting their leaves (e.g. acacia), or by changing their morphology (e.g. holly); but they have no nervous system - let alone a brain - so it’s not like you’re killing an animal.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 2 weeks ago
strawberrysocial@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, plants aren’t stationary. All plants move, just very, very slowly compared to animals. Looking at time lapse videos of vines growing, reaching out for something to grab on to and stuff is pretty neat. They kind of whip around in circles until they feel they’ve hit something worth grabbing onto.
nifty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We don’t know how consciousness works enough to say they don’t. Having a brain and/or nervous system might not be necessary.
Hmm sorry but no, there are traits exhibited by conscious entities which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness. This is a nice explainer on consciousness, note that it’s not saying anything about needing a brain to exhibit those traits
plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#DesQueW…
correct me if I am misremembering sth
howrar@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
there are traits exhibited by conscious entities which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness.
Implying we have a way of determining whether an entity is conscious or not. That’s the entire point of contention here.
arken@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness.
See what you did there? You assume a priori which entities lack consciousness, and then motivate this by claiming they lack traits that can be observed in conscious entities. That is very neatly circular.
nifty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What you and other people who’re objecting my comment are saying is that there is no way to define consciousness because we don’t know all the different ways something can be conscious. But that doesn’t matter because these organisms lack the properties which we see in other conscious organisms.
Here’s what I am saying: consciousness is an emergent property of some discrete biological processes, and we have developed some idea of what consciousness looks like when exhibited by an organism.
So that means that all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties. You cannot pick and choose which properties to exhibit because then what you’re doing is something else, and not exhibiting consciousness.
Like, if you’re a heart of some sort, you have to exhibit the same activity as a heart in general across all different organisms to be classified as a heart.
It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious.
strawberrysocial@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How will we ever know for sure if plants have their own form of consciousness that doesn’t follow a list of requirements that’s based on animals, or can feel pain.
nifty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
But why do you think plants should have some own form of consciousness? All organism which have circulatory systems have generally similarly behaving circulatory systems. So why should consciousness be different?
No, if an organism does not exhibit all properties of consciousness that we see in all other organisms, then it’s not conscious
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Wait that’s cool as hell, which plants?
strawberrysocial@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Maybe tumbleweeds? I think…
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They have the knowledge and are doing something about it. If other plants can send out this chemical by observing it themselves, that sounds like a reaction from a communication. It may not be cognition like we expect but it is behaving like cognition would. Hard to argue that plants don’t know or care of their friends start dying.
kshade@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’d argue that knowledge is more than that, otherwise books or state machines could also be said to know things.
socsa@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
This is why I don't eat books
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The plants are acquiring information and making an independent change to their status with this information. Books do nothing with knowledge other than communicate it to others. Machines are unable to make independent changes to itself unless programmed to do so.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
epidemiologists agree: knowledge is a justified true belief.
hellfire103@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
[deleted]ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t care what a plant thinks of me; it won’t change the dynamic that I’m motivated and it’s prey.
My point is that plants “think” but do so differently than meat bags. Plant cognition is more like a series of low level chemical reactions that look like thinking, but so does brain chemical squirts if we look close enough. So plants may actually be thinking using mechanisms which don’t rely on complex brain architecture because it has another method of processing that thought. Probably across the whole structure but the process is really inefficient so it takes a long time to finish compute.
Like if a super computer made the judgement of a calculator - they are both crunching numbers but there is an order of magnitude difference in how fast the answer is found. Maybe a plant has low bus speeds and crappy compute limited to simple threaded operations.
Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
We can’t say that brains are required for a mind to exist; we have no way of knowing.
0x0@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Isn’t that how we justified boiling Crayfish alive though?
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Some misguided monsters, yes.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
by this logic do people even truly exist. Maybe you’re just the only real person in the world, maybe im the only real person in the world, we have no way of proving this.
VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Lobsters contain 15 nerve clusters called ganglia dispersed throughout their bodies, with a main ganglion located between their eyes. So, according to the logic here whyis it wrong to boil them alive if they don’t have a brain?
For the record, imo it is wrong to boil lobster, crabs, and other crustaceans alive. There is no reason you can’t kill them directly before boiling them.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Are vegans fine with fish? Seafood?
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
No, vegans aren’t eating fish or seafood.
hellfire103@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Some of them eat oysters, or so I’m told. They lack a brain and centralised nervous system.
ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
One of my exes is very strictly vegetarian and will eat oysters. Oysters lack the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves or the environment, effectively they’re a water pump made out of meat, and they’re one of the most sustainable foods we can make leading to less planetary harm than a lot of plant crops even. It’s definitely a controversial opinion though
x4740N@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
When talking about the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves (the oysters) how is that actually measured and what do they look for
How are we sure they are not actually self aware through some other unknown mechanism
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Oysters lack the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves
Most fish too btw, as far as we know. Lizard brain is an evolution of fish brain, they are basically biological automata.
Makes one think, live getting on land was it getting into hard mode.
one of the most sustainable foods we can make leading to less planetary harm than a lot of plant crops even
I did read about damaging effects of oyster farms though, their poop/piss(?), the ones with cages. But sure, because hundreds in one place.
jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Peak ambiguity.
prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Plants having no nervous system is being challenged with the idea that the plant itself is its central nervous system.
They react to stimulus, they emit sounds (different ones when in “pain”), and communicate with each other.
They don’t have consciousness in a way we understand
LordGimp@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
It’s always funny to me how people eat up the concept of a distrubuted neural network in tech but scoff at the same idea applying to something like a tree or a fungus.
Pando is the largest organism by mass, and the Humungous Fungus is the largest by area. The idea that those organisms don’t “think” in some way is laughable.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“In some way” is doing A LOT of heavy lifting there. … although in the general sense, agreed.
Especially given how many outright wrong or ofherwise assinine conclusions some “thinking” animals come to… Perhaps communicative consciousness is overrated on the intelligence scale.
x4740N@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
It always seems lime some excuse in a counter response by vеgаns
The number of times I’ve responded to them telling them that plants probably process pain in a different way to us has always been shot down by them
Tell them that brains extremely simplified are just on and off responses to certain stimuli / information just like plants have specific reponsonses to stimuli and computers having 1’s and 0’s that respond to information
A fungal network could be counted as a brain
BlackDragon@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
If you actually believe harming plants causes them pain and that that is bad, you should be vegan. Animal agriculture harms far, far more plants than any plant agriculture ever could.
VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You should read the book “entangled life” if you haven’t already. It’s fascinating.
LordGimp@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
I’ll trade you. I’ll read ur book if you check out the ender quintet, or at least speaker of the dead. The hierarchy of foreignness is a concept that has REALLY stuck with me. Also pequininos are bros.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
because humans invent things from scratch that nature has already created and optimzed, it’s why we’re seeing a lot of optimizations on current tech that comes from nature itself.
It’s a really weird problem to have.
LordGimp@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Go find that video of a slime mold optimizing Japan’s rail system by finding oats in a maze
hellfire103@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Huh, neat.
theyoyomaster@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3JodBR-vs
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
It’s truly shameful that disclaimers like these feel necessary in this age of shitting on everyone else online. Lemmy users suck too.
prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Yeah, but on the other hand I’m old enough to know that when I get excited about something I can talk about it in a way that “clobbers” so I like to disclaimer myself when I know I’m exhibiting that kind of behavior.