aren't plants also sentient?

Isn't all life sentient?

If not, where do you draw the line? "It has eyes and bilateral symmetry and an endoskeleton looks vaguely human-like so I can anthropomorphize it"? "Only members of the animal kingdom are conscious"?

Do you think plants achieve the same degree of sentience as say, a pig? Or would drawing even that line be too arbitrary for you?

honestly, I don't know.

Sentience is consciousness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a plant, the plants existence is too different from mine for me to imagine it.

It would be like trying to imagine life in a 12-dimensional space - I'm a human, with a human consciousness, living in 3-dimensional space, that makes sense to me.

I can empathize, and to a certain degree imagine what it must be like to be a dog or a cat or a cow, because they're very similar to me in how they work. They move, they eat, they poop, they reproduce sexually. They have similar mammalian feelings and similar DNA (well, more similar than the plant).

But for all I know a plant, say the spinach I had a few days ago, could be just as conscious, albeit in a way that I absolutely cannot comprehend, and my ripping off the plant's leaves to eat them may be, to the plant, every bit as painful as someone ripping out my lungs to eat them.

So you acknowledge the former but can't get past the latter. Got it. I wonder how the judges will score.

sorry for the stupid question, but what is "the former" and what is "the latter"?

Did you mean I acknowledge the sentience of plants but not animals?

I believe that all life might be conscious, but life that is "very different" from me I have a hard time imagining what that consciousness might be like. For animals, especially mammals, I can easily imagine what they must be feeling and empathize with them. I can understand that a cow feels pain when hurt, because the cow is very similar to me. A plant might also feel pain when hurt (even the grass I step on might not appreciate me walking on it), but I'd have a harder time empathizing with that.

It's never stupid to clarify what someone means if they communicate in a way that's unclear to you.

'Former' and 'latter' were in reference to the two questions I posed to you.

I think that for vegans, "sentience" is a meaningless woo-woo word, like when a Christian talks about immortal souls. They use it because its origin in science fiction gives it the veneer of empiricism, but its all hollow with subjectivity.

Though it's been 10 or 15 years, Wikipedia used to have a page that listed 6 criteria for biological life (but it became politically inconvenient). The same ones we all used to learn in school. One of them was "responds to stimuli"...

If there is an objective definition of "sentience", then the only one I've ever heard is "responds to stimuli". Which plants (and even the most primitive unicellular organisms) meet. And if "sentience" doesn't mean this, then I challenge anyone to come up with another better one.

So, to make a long story short, I like eating sentient things, and I'm not ever going to stop. And it tastes even better when it seems to cause distress to vegans.

> And it tastes even better when it seems to cause distress to vegans.

Odd flex. Try not to worry so much about what other people think of you. It'll make you a better human.

No, plants, bacteria, mushrooms are obviously not sentient as they lack a brain.

I always wonder what vegans think is going to happen to all the pigs, cows, and chickens if people stop eating meat?

Demand would go down, so meat companies would reduce breeding to reduce output. Or start an ad & lobbying campaign to increase demand again.

Billions of pigs cows and chickens will stop being massacred in grizzly ways? Yours is an extremely common and unfortunately ill-informed argument that I see a lot. If I was given the choice between end all suffering by killing all factory farmed animals right now vs perpetuate it, im choosing kill all animals right now

It sounds like you don't have a problem with killing animals. Is it just the living conditions? If we replaced factory farms with more ethical practices, would that solve the problem for you?

> would that solve the problem for you?

not the person you replied to, but it mostly would for me. Factory farms are among the closest things to hell on earth.

Maybe we need a certification for ethical animal raising. I know we can buy free range eggs and chicken, and grass fed beef, but I know know if that really means anything.

Somewhat. I think we are still quite a long way from ethical practices even in the "good" cases.

I eat meat, but try to limit it to once a week and have replaced milk with oat and soy in a lot of places. I still love cheese but it does give me conflict when I spend even a second thinking about what it takes to actually get cheese. (Cows dont lactate without pregnancy). That said, my own personal philosophy is that we have likely evolved to consume animal products so I cant dismiss it fully, just reduce my own consumption. ~75% of all agricultural land is used to feed livestock, yet livestock produces only 18% of the world's calories and 37% of its protein, which just seems insanity to me.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

> I always wonder what vegans think is going to happen to all the pigs, cows, and chickens if people stop eating meat?

factory farms would stop breeding animals to kill them? Did you think you had an argument here?

I can imagine this poster's chortle thinking to themself, 'they thought I meant the animals!'