Plants can definitely suffer. They have a stress response that can be interrupted by small molecules, which we could suggestively call “painkillers,” concepts like “suffering” do a good job of communicating important information to you about the state of a plant, etc.
Agreed that what to do about this is not fixed by that fact. Mostly I don’t care about either plants or fish.
Plant suffering depends on completely unverified theories of subjective experience (See https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness). Suffering is possibly unmeasurable. We only know that we can suffer and we assume others can suffer because they seem similar enough to us. Plants are different enough than animals with central nervous systems that assuming they can suffer seems a shaky proposition. One could write a microcontroller program that makes some signal if it’s circuit is damaged. Does that mean that program can suffer?
If you think that there’s a bright line somewhere—some fact of the matter about where to really draw a category boundary around suffering, which requires a “theory of subjective experience” without which we can’t usefully answer whether plants suffer—then I’m sort of disinterested in talking to you about plant suffering. Unless you want to change tacks and talk about the object level of plant cognition and plant stress responses? They’re cool.
One could write a microcontroller program that makes some signal if it’s circuit is damaged.
People are not fundamentally different from such a microcontroller. It’s signals all the way down.
One can try to do suffering calculus like in the original post, based on certain axioms, but these are unfalsifiable. Realistically, suffering calculus is based on a political and sociological consensus, e.g., the Overton window. Humans have political representation and Western civilization has human equality as a kind of axiom, at least nominally, so in the Western world there is a lot of incentive to reduce all human suffering (unlike in China, for example, where Uyghurs are marginalized). Animals have far less representation, so there is less incentive to reduce suffering. In my country, there is a Party for Animals with a few seats in Parliament, voted in by people (because axiomatically animals don’t have the right to vote) who do it to perhaps virtue signal, or because the human brain is wired to empathize more with similar beings, or for unfalsifiable philosophical considerations, or for some other reason which for other voting blocs is not in their Overton window. For plants the situation is far more dire. It is in principle possible that for large swaths of the public the Overton window shifts such that they will refuse to support the “slaughter” of plants. But what’s in the Overton window is separate from the facts and there are no facts of the matter about suffering.
Plants can definitely suffer. They have a stress response that can be interrupted by small molecules, which we could suggestively call “painkillers,” concepts like “suffering” do a good job of communicating important information to you about the state of a plant, etc.
Agreed that what to do about this is not fixed by that fact. Mostly I don’t care about either plants or fish.
Plant suffering depends on completely unverified theories of subjective experience (See https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness). Suffering is possibly unmeasurable. We only know that we can suffer and we assume others can suffer because they seem similar enough to us. Plants are different enough than animals with central nervous systems that assuming they can suffer seems a shaky proposition. One could write a microcontroller program that makes some signal if it’s circuit is damaged. Does that mean that program can suffer?
If you think that there’s a bright line somewhere—some fact of the matter about where to really draw a category boundary around suffering, which requires a “theory of subjective experience” without which we can’t usefully answer whether plants suffer—then I’m sort of disinterested in talking to you about plant suffering. Unless you want to change tacks and talk about the object level of plant cognition and plant stress responses? They’re cool.
People are not fundamentally different from such a microcontroller. It’s signals all the way down.
One can try to do suffering calculus like in the original post, based on certain axioms, but these are unfalsifiable. Realistically, suffering calculus is based on a political and sociological consensus, e.g., the Overton window. Humans have political representation and Western civilization has human equality as a kind of axiom, at least nominally, so in the Western world there is a lot of incentive to reduce all human suffering (unlike in China, for example, where Uyghurs are marginalized). Animals have far less representation, so there is less incentive to reduce suffering. In my country, there is a Party for Animals with a few seats in Parliament, voted in by people (because axiomatically animals don’t have the right to vote) who do it to perhaps virtue signal, or because the human brain is wired to empathize more with similar beings, or for unfalsifiable philosophical considerations, or for some other reason which for other voting blocs is not in their Overton window. For plants the situation is far more dire. It is in principle possible that for large swaths of the public the Overton window shifts such that they will refuse to support the “slaughter” of plants. But what’s in the Overton window is separate from the facts and there are no facts of the matter about suffering.