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For the record, I agree with you. BUT, as a biologist, I often find it amusing that people discount plants completely. It's easy to forget that they are alive
by polyfractal 14y ago
For the record, I agree with you.
BUT, as a biologist, I often find it amusing that people discount plants completely. It's easy to forget that they are alive too. Fundamentally, they aren't so different from you or a turtle or a fruit fly. Different cellular structure, sure. Not easily recognizable "consciousness", absolutely. Non-motile, check.
However, plants are very much alive. They react to stimuli, survive in hostile environments, procreate. They are more alien to our sensibilities, but they are arguably not very much different in the grand scale of things.
- a_bonobo 14y agoAs another biologist, I like to troll vegetarians by insisting that plants have pain, because what else do you call a signalling system which starts a damage-response-system?
- thundara 14y agoThat's just playing off the terrible definition we have of "pain"
- eru 14y agoAlso, plants are autotrophs. Cows are heterotrophs. By some inverse of the categorical imperative, you should not do to beings what they are not doing to others. I.e. don't eat the autotrophs. Eat the heterotrophs.
- colanderman 14y agoUsually the line is not drawn around "ability to feel pain", it's drawn around "has a central nervous system", which is used as a rough proxy for "is sentient". Otherwise it would be OK for a vegan to kill and eat a person who has lost the ability to feel pain, but otherwise functions normally. Edit: came along this interesting link about the measure of sentience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_quotient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_quotient
- a_bonobo 14y agoCool link! And I heard that argument before in my trolling attempts - usually I answer like this: A central nervous system is defined as "the complex of nerve tissues that controls the activities of the body". Plants don't have "proper" animal nerve tissues, but they do have a complex system that controls activities of the plant, by sending mRNA/proteins through the phloem to the parts of the plant that need regulation (a lot of it is local regulation but psssst, this kills the trolling) Nice link! Never heard of that before. But if (non-conscious) IBM Watson has a quotient of +12, and humans have one of +13, what good is it for?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]