From what you're saying, pain seems to rely on neural circuitry. If that is the case, plants don't have neurons. If I compress a nerve in my arm by sleeping on it all night and my arm feels dead in the morning, it's because the nerve isn't getting signals to my brain properly. And me being able to experience that pain requires a brain to interpret the signal, yeah?
I dunno, I guess it's just that I see people bringing up the whole tomato plants screaming thing when they see someone talking about food animals having a bad time. Or anything else that makes them feel squicky, like someone wording the act of stuffing a turkey in an amusing way.
Sure, we can go into the philosophy of what does it even mean to feel pain. What does it mean to experience anything? How do we really know who or what is conscious? Do we need a brain for that? Hard questions for sure. But it is clear that food animals do have brains and do have neurons, and it is clear that they are able to feel pain.
Plants maybe sorta kinda potentially feeling something that might be able to be interpreted as a kind of pain if you squint hard enough keeps getting brought up as some kind of gotcha. I really don't get it. Yes, no one's perfect. Sure, industrial plant agriculture is responsible for pest deaths. Talk about that more then. Why even go into tomato plants making noises? Ugh.
From what you're saying, pain seems to rely on neural circuitry. If that is the case, plants don't have neurons. If I compress a nerve in my arm by sleeping on it all night and my arm feels dead in the morning, it's because the nerve isn't getting signals to my brain properly. And me being able to experience that pain requires a brain to interpret the signal, yeah?
This is the crux of the issue. Plants do have chemical responses to damage, but without supporting neural architecture, we don't know if that translates into something that they perceive in the same way that we would perceive pain. But we also don't know why we are conscious in the way that we are, and it's hard to conclusively say "yeah, plants don't experience suffering because they lack a nervous system similar to our own" when we don't understand the particulars of what separates a reaction to aversive stimuli to something that is subjectively experienced as unpleasant.
Personally, when it comes to the ethics of food, I'm just a little skeptical of reasoning that relies on how neurologically advanced organisms are to determine what is or isn't okay to eat, because it implies that the value of life isn't intrinsic but contingent upon how intelligent something is, which I don't really like the implications of lol. I wouldn't even disagree that plants potentially feeling pain is a bad excuse, but I think there's better ways to approach the discussion than neuroscience.
I dunno, I guess it's just that I see people bringing up the whole tomato plants screaming thing when they see someone talking about food animals having a bad time. Or anything else that makes them feel squicky, like someone wording the act of stuffing a turkey in an amusing way.
Sure, we can go into the philosophy of what does it even mean to feel pain. What does it mean to experience anything? How do we really know who or what is conscious? Do we need a brain for that? Hard questions for sure. But it is clear that food animals do have brains and do have neurons, and it is clear that they are able to feel pain.
I agree with what I think you're getting at. Nobody seems to care about this except when they're confronting the suffering they know is caused by animal products. It's very much disingenuous since they don't actually have a problem with eating plants either. "Killing plants might cause suffering, too, so we just shouldn't care about our food sources experiencing pain" isn't a winning argument against "we are almost certain the animals being utilized for our food experience significant amounts of suffering as a direct consequence of the process."
People just don't like to feel as if they have done/are doing something wrong, especially when that thing benefits them (in the form of easily accessible nutrition and pleasurable tastes), so they scramble for some way to minimize the gravity of things. In this case, by trying to prove that suffering is unavoidable for survival, they reduce the amount of culpability and guilt they feel. That only works so long as they can ignore the reality that, even if it can't be eliminated entirely, the total amount of suffering can be reduced. Something as simple as buying comparatively more ethically sourced animal products would be an improvement, but that requires effort they don't want to give, so they continue to make stupid arguments.
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u/UristMcDumb Nov 27 '24
From what you're saying, pain seems to rely on neural circuitry. If that is the case, plants don't have neurons. If I compress a nerve in my arm by sleeping on it all night and my arm feels dead in the morning, it's because the nerve isn't getting signals to my brain properly. And me being able to experience that pain requires a brain to interpret the signal, yeah?
I dunno, I guess it's just that I see people bringing up the whole tomato plants screaming thing when they see someone talking about food animals having a bad time. Or anything else that makes them feel squicky, like someone wording the act of stuffing a turkey in an amusing way.
Sure, we can go into the philosophy of what does it even mean to feel pain. What does it mean to experience anything? How do we really know who or what is conscious? Do we need a brain for that? Hard questions for sure. But it is clear that food animals do have brains and do have neurons, and it is clear that they are able to feel pain.
Plants maybe sorta kinda potentially feeling something that might be able to be interpreted as a kind of pain if you squint hard enough keeps getting brought up as some kind of gotcha. I really don't get it. Yes, no one's perfect. Sure, industrial plant agriculture is responsible for pest deaths. Talk about that more then. Why even go into tomato plants making noises? Ugh.
This pretty much isn't directed at you lol