315
Just a negative vegan?
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
315 points (97.6% liked)
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Maybe they did it intentionally to further annoy vegetarians/vegans.
Also, despite any form of consciousness they might have is alien to us, plants very likely experience pain. They also communicate and engage in nutrition transactions with fungi through root systems.
It's great that people try to be nicer to other living things but reality is no matter what we do to survive as human beings, we will cause some suffering and death, like it or not.
Plants don't "feel pain". The entire concept of "pain" is alien to everything without a central nervous system.
Plants DO however react to stressful external stimuli. They do that in a way, that we will never be able to relate to.
Some publications use words as "pain" and "suffering" in that context in order to go give non-academic folks something to relate. But on a scientific level, these terms are irrelevant at best.
There is nothing to be said with any certainty about the subjective experience of any of consciousness other than our own. You (and philosophers and scientists) can keep guessing as much as you want, though, and keep pretending to be sure.
Read my second sentence again.
The thing I am SURE about is, that using words and concepts from one area and postulating that they are applying in the same sense in another area, just because we found some loose similarity or similar trait, is logically not sound. See False-Equivalence
Our understanding of "pain" only makes sense when applying it to beings with a nervous system, because this word describes just THAT.
It's like talking about hair and hairstyles and then applying the derived insights to birds, because their feathers "remind" us of hair.
It just doesn't apply. Other contexts require dedicated concepts that are not "loaded" by using termina from irrelevant concepts.
Emotive language does not help your argument. It weakens any validity it might have otherwise.
Good for you. Have a a nice day.
Have a nice day too! 👋
my god.... it's screaming..... minerals feel pain.....
You joke, but I have more respect for panpsychism than assuming the phenomenon of consciousness is only in ourselves and things that think / have nervous systems similar to our own exclusively.
But what’s the point (in a manner of speaking, I know natural selection isn’t guided by intent) of pain? It’s there to provide negative feedback and train you to avoid the painful thing. What purpose would pain serve in a sedentary organism?
I’m aware that evolution doesn’t only preserve positive traits, but where in the history of plant development would using the calories to perceive and process pain have helped an ancestor survive?
ugh, I inadvertently deleted the edits, but things came up on my end and I’m not as motivated anymore
purpose is a made up thing that only exists within subjectivity.
people would literally rather turn into blitzed out new age panspiritualists than agree with a vegan that killing a cow isn't equivalent to peeling a potato
Have you considered how delicious cows are though?
yea fortunately there are plenty of other delicious things that don't have a physiology that guarantees they have pretty much the same conscious experience as me
Idk I woudn't resent something if it ate me, especially if I was delicious and they were grateful for my sacrifice.
have you considered going for a long walk in the savannah, you could test that pretty quick
There's a difference between not resenting and desiring. This is gonna sound crazy but I have actually taken a walk in the Savannah and was arguably close to being eaten by cheetahs.
More relevantly to your point though, I don't really resent, for example, the people that inflicted trauma upon me in my youth. I don't know what their life experience was and for all I know I could have done the same in their shoes. I don't want to see these people and want nothing to do with them but resent them? Not really. Was them harming me but in a different world who knows, you know?
I think the same applies to any kind of infliction of suffering. Like, you don't have to want or enjoy the suffering or even like the perpetrators one bit to be able to understand / forgive them for what they did.
I don't expect you to agree. Just wanted to share my perspective. If you'd like to share yours I'd be more than happy to read you.
which... makes you feel justified in perpetuating suffering too? what? i sympathise for any trauma people might have inflicted on you in the past but i don't know what this has to do with meat eating or plant sentience or any of the metaphysics of harm reduction or whatever else
It makes me feel justified to perpetrate the Inevitable suffering that is a side product of my existence, yes. Everything (that has a consciousness like our own if you want) causes something else to suffer by merely existing. The money you have in your wallet right now is money that other people don't have. Biology works the same way.
we don't choose to be born, but pretending that we don't have the choice to minimise the suffering we cause (whether we have a duty to is another question entirely) is just cynical nihilist sophistry
going for a walk is not the same as going for a walk and kicking everyone you see along the way in the shins, this is basically absolving yourself (and everyone) of any heinous things they do because, well, life sucks anyway, right? thousands of years of social contract and moral philosophy deboonked with this one weird trick
I'm not pretending we don't have a choice and not equating less harm = more harm. I'm just saying a lot of it is inevitable. Anything we gain, someone else didn't, so we have to make decisions based on how much we want stuff vs how much getting it harms others.
Anyway, sorry if i offended you. Take care.
Yeah, but spending a bunch of calories on something that doesn’t bring you a benefit.
I actively struggled with trying to describe this without ascribing intent to either natural selection or plants, but I’m just making my point badly. I independently conceived of it, though assume it’s not an original thought, so maybe if I get the time I’ll try to look for it.
maybe you're not considering collective benefit / kin selection.
No, that was the one example that I had considered and that was the rest of my original comment, but the production of defensive chemicals to the smell of damage in neighbors isn’t (afaik) universal among plants, and I’d be interested in whether the plants that we eat have that ability.
idk if universal but afaik it's very common.
clearly, especially since it's rhetorically convenient for you
an animal with a nervous system entirely analogous to ours and a plant that has crackly bubbles in its cells when it's low on water or damaged? the same thing, actually. identical. there is no difference between things, and if you think there are then clearly you're just a hypocritical vegan
I'm not sure what you mean by "crackly bubbles". Many plants (possibly most of them) use electrochemical signaling, which at the very least resembles the hormonal system in animals. The simplest animals are definitely less complex, neural processing wise, than the most complex plants -- consider for example sponges (literally no nervous system of any kind) vs. the venus flytrap (capable of rudimentary counting; the trap only closes when the hairs are triggered a certain number of times within a certain timeframe).
There's also tons of animals whose nervous systems aren't at all similar to that of humans. Insects and arthropods for example don't really have a brain, just lumps of ganglia that do some rudimentary processing, and unsurprisingly most people don't really consider insects to be capable of having any kind of meaningful sentient internal experience.
the article they posted to back up plants "feeling pain" anthropomorphises bubbles popping in the fibres of damaged plants as "crying", which is apparently proof for plant sentience
Not proof, just interesting to think about.
I mean not necessarily hypocritical or even wrong. Just possibly irreflexive or vain.
don't you think that's a funny thing to say when you're building your entire metaphysical conception of the world around not having to change or question your lifestyle
Coming from you, extremely.
How do you know that the minerals don't enjoy being smelted?
I don't.
The vegan philosophy isn't an all-or-nothing never wanting to cause any pain philosophy. It's a philosophy of reducing suffering as much as reasonably possible while being able to still live your own life.
But any argument about plants feeling pain is completely sideways to that whole issue anyways, because farm animals eat more plants per calorie than when humans eat plants directly. Those farm animals need to use some of the plant calories for sustaining their own life, which will not make it into the meat, egg or milk. Even if you hate animals and love plants, you have to snack on plants to cause as little harm to plants as possible.
No. They have a response to stress, which is wildly different from experiencing pain. And that's what your source is about.
Your source refers neither to the word "pain" nor to the word "experience". Please don't mislead people with your own misinterpretations.
I'll try but no promises.
It's really easy. If you don't know, don't make claims. You got this.
Please don't mislead me by depositing hope in me, my ability to follow basic instructions and/or my mental faculties, even if joking. Now you're just being cruel.