"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.” - Daniel Dennett
If you look carefully, it is very similar to the neural system in any bilateral https://www.britannica.com/science/nervous-system/Diffuse-ne... . It is twisted following the deformation of the body inside the shell. Compare it with https://entomology.unl.edu/charts/nervous.shtml
In our central nervous system one of the ganglia grow tooooooo much. Moreover, the olfactory part of it grow tooooooooooooooooooooooooo much.
Additionally, although oysters (and at least dozens of other species of animals) lack a CNS, they also react to external stimuli. In fact, oysters are used in some water systems as sophisticated water quality detectors, e.g. in San Diego https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJJz15N1KEY .
Hell, I can't even tell that you 'feel' anything. I only know that I 'feel' because I am able to subjectively experience it. I make the assumption that you feel because you appear to be very much like me in all other respects, however there is no objective measurement that can prove or disprove that assumption. Historically, not every culture even gave all human beings the benefit of the doubt on that, let alone animals (which contemporary western cultures at least often agree do 'feel').
Where you draw the line is seemingly arbitrary. Some might say that means there isn't one, that either we're all P-zombies (or at least everyone who isn't me is), or we live in a panpsychic universe. Of course, the universe has often resisted such black and white categorizations.
Consider this then: why do we care? I submit that the only reason we care whether or not something 'feels' is so we can exploit it without guilt, so we can shield our empathy from the consequences of our actions. I feel it is important to keep this in mind when making decisions which hinge on questions like whether or not something can truly 'feel'.
I get that your point is much broader; the meaning of "feeling" is going to keep staring you in the face when thinking about a question like this, but it's a sophomoric question to anyone who accepts the possibility of it's discovery without a metaphysical understanding of a sunflower's conscious experience.
Philosophically, yeah. But if you can't prove or disprove anything, then "proving" isn't a useful metric. Being the same species should give you confidence that the grandparent is capable of feeling. (I'm assuming in best faith the commenter isn't a bot)
Even in the most ideal circumstances we kill other beings simply due to resource consumption. Maybe not now, but in the future - what we consume isn't available to them. Even if you claim the resources we consume aren't food to the food species of your choice, due to the law of increasing entropy we definitely shorten the lifetime of whatever comes after us just by existing.
Hardcore buddhists for example consider all life equally worthy. No karma bonus for vegans, maybe less than for non-vegetarians who buy only from farms which provide a healthy, livable life to the livestock (or, obviously, for the plants)
Some have already abandoned that idea. I quote Joseph Campbell[1]:
"Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else."
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1771642483/
It suggests that trees may have some kind of hive intelligence in their roots and through the fungal networks they can communicate and share resources. It isn't something that I've investigated in a ton of detail but the ideas seem scientifically informed.
https://www.amazon.com/Thus-Spoke-Plant-Groundbreaking-Disco...
It describes some experiments which can be interpreted as plants "remembering" and "predicting" things.
Here's a recording of a (~1 hour) presentation I saw her give: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFKon7kook
I don't know what to make of this, but it's certainly made me think differently...
The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. Rather than viewing trees as a hive intelligence, I think it’s plausible that we’ve been missing the forest as a whole organism. Perhaps “ecosystem” just means “an organism that is bigger than any one of us.”
I don't know of any way to prove feeling. It seems like a solipsistic trap. I _believe_ that most animals "feel", and _believe_ that no plants/fungus do...but it is merely belief that I don't think to be testable.
We can start out with the assumption that humans can feel, since ourselves experience it, and can relatively safely transfer this to other humans (who exhibit all the subjective external signs of feeling, which seem similar to our own external signs when we are feeling things). We can also isolate the physiological properties which seem to play a role in this; say, a nervous system, or particular brain characteristics or region activations. This can be further evidenced by cases where individuals lack these, and lack the external signs of the feeling.
So if you then take a physiologically highly related and similar animal to a human, which also shows the external signs of feeling, I believe the argument that it is NOT feeling would be the option that is more absurd, and requires more proof than the argument that says it is feeling.
Of course, this rapidly falls away when we argue about very different types of creatures (say, fungi), or when theorising about types of feeling that might be possible, but we do not have, but nevertheless the entire topic is not worthless, IMHO.
>
> Even this gets complicated as we learn more. Some plants like Venus fly traps obviously feel. The fresh-cut grass smell is a signal to other plants that the grass is in distress, and people are theorizing trees communicate through roots.
This quote, as noted in the beginning of the article, is attributed to Carl Linnaeus, and subsequently invalidated. As far as I can tell, the author was not attempting to defend this point-of-view, as it's been superseded by modern taxonomic classifications.
This is really interesting. Signalling to other plants for what purpose? I'd like to read more about it.
“acacias nibbled by antelope produce leaf tannin in quantities lethal to the browsers, and emit ethylene into the air which can travel up to 50 yards. The ethylene warns other trees of the impending danger, which then step up their own production of leaf tannin within just five to ten minutes”
If it walks and quacks like a sentient being, why not call it a sentient being? One argument is the lack of complexity in reactions. That may be valid, but if so, where do you put the border between simple mechanical response and pain/warns others/…?
If that’s a gradual border, you can’t say the least complex of them aren’t feeling/having emotions/….
I think the distinction is gradual, with no clear border. That’s why I’m fine with calling this kind of responses ‘feeling’. On the other hand, I also don’t think cutting of a branch of an acacia is torture, but maybe I should call it torture on the extreme end of the scale of torture.
Discussion of plant feelings strikes me as a dumbed down Chinese room. I'd say plants are just stimulus response machines with no option for debate of sentience or awareness. That's not to say they're not intricate, amazing, or beautiful. But "feelings" imply processing of the feelings at some sort of subjective level, and I don't see any reason to believe plants have this.
Rather than basing on loosely defined observed traits like if something 'feels', we now have the context of evolution to guide our taxa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_onion
They grow bulbs where other onions have flowers: these fall over and root, and send up stalks, and it does it all over again.
That's locomotion, just, not on the time scale we're accustomed to considering. We also have a whole category for animals which don't practice locomotion, sessile.
I would say the most central distinction between animals and (plants|fungi) is that animals have a definite body shape, while the other two have indefinite body shapes.
That isn't a perfect distinction (the occasional gecko will regenerate two tails where it had one before), but it's very good, in addition to being striking / obvious.
The word "feel" is nebulous, but at least one meaning would include that.
I've had flytraps and they are fascinating, though I've found them to be very fragile, at least in the conditions I can provide in my balcony. Their traps often turn black and rot after trying to digest a single fly, and I had one Venus flytrap die after flowering (the advice I found online was: don't let it flower, under most less than ideal conditions, the effort of producing the flower will spend the plant's energy reserves and kill it, and the single flower it can produce is not pretty anyway. I should have followed this advice, but curiosity got the better of me).
Are you able to prove that your behavior is qualitatively different? That you are not merely a sufficiently complex chain of reactions to stimuli?
That, however, is besides the point in my opinion. All taxonomy is arbitrary; there aren't "races" or "species" or even distinctions between "mineral" and "organic". All that matters is that those artificial distinctions are meaningful to us, humans.
In that sense, we consider we humans are qualitatively different than plants, and a Venus flytrap is closer to a plant than to an animal.
I can't rule out the possibility that there are some qualia associated specifically with the neuronal activity corresponding to your mental simulation, but I can say that the leap to the "someone actually being tortured" interpretation isn't warranted. It's clearly not a "someone" in the sense of a human person, and so all bets are off when it comes to interpreting what it's like to be that thing.
> Crazy implications if true!
Well, the implications are most likely delayed until someone invents a qualia detector.
> Crazy implications if true!
Well, the implications are most likely delayed until someone invents a qualia detector
if (yourCondition) {
crazyImplications()
}
Even this gets complicated as we learn more. Some plants like Venus fly traps obviously feel. The fresh-cut grass smell is a signal to other plants that the grass is in distress, and people are theorizing trees communicate through roots.
Meanwhile, oysters don't have a central nervous system.