ModVegan wrote:
These are ridiculous straw man arguments, sorry.
They aren't, though. You may believe they are, but do you really know what consciousness is? Do you know what sentience is? How about intelligence? In the technical sense, in terms of behavioral psychology and the most recent research in the relevant scientific fields?
You even mentioned bacteria. Do you understand how small these things are? Do you know about quantum mechanical limits? Thermodynamic limits?
We're talking about
information systems here. There's a certain amount of computation that has to go on to create a robust enough network to model the outside world and to learn in any meaningful way. There are minimum system requirements.
It's as if you said that's it's possible for Windows 10 to be installed on a digital watch from the 70's.
No, it just isn't. It's not any more likely that you'll be able to run it on that than you'd be able to run it on a jar of pickles. That's not a straw man. The probability in both cases is zero. Both contain silicon, but both are woefully lacking in basic system requirements. The distinction in terms of the probability of them being able to run windows is not meaningful; the only way they "run it" is if you tape a modern Windows phone to them or somehow make them part of a larger computer system.
If you had no idea what Windows was, or any idea of the capabilities of the first digital watches four decades ago, the idea that maybe a 1975 digital watch could run it could seem plausible. But it's an argument from ignorance.
You
assume it's possible because you don't know enough about it to understand
why it's impossible.
It's perfectly fine to not know and to be honest about that. But the problem comes when you say it in a way that implies that people who say they DO know are somehow closed minded or dismissing realistic possibilities. Or accuse them of fallacies.
Can you see how that's kind of insulting to people who have devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to studying the topic and trying to stay up to date on it?
(Despite feeling a bit insulted, I'm going to spend a lot of time explaining why you're wrong instead of saying it's "beneath contempt" and then running away.
)
ModVegan wrote:
I'm discussing the possibility that plants - biological organism
That they are biological is not relevant. There are arguably sentient computer simulations and Synthetic intelligence. Mineral and crystalline systems in rocks can be highly developed (may even be the origin of life), and the interplay of fields at the subatomic level can be astounding; we can't even simulate most of this stuff properly on supercomputers yet.
The first questions you should ask is whether they have the prerequisite information storage and processing capability to to run sentience 1.0, and in the case of plants, bacteria, rocks, and water molecules, the answer is "No" they do not.
If it's at least conceivable, as perhaps in the case of oysters where there are some nerve clusters, we then have to look to other indications like behavior, and even to usefulness: is it evolutionarily useful for oysters to be intelligent? Does sentience serve them in some way? Bear in mind that intelligence is extremely expensive, metabolically, so it has to be worth it; animals do not typically have brains larger than they need to get the minimum job of procreating (and providing for offspring to do similarly) done more often than dying first.
ModVegan wrote:
which have complex interconnected systems designed for communication, etc.,
First, this verges on circular reasoning; communication implies understanding. Plants are not really communicating (no more than is one rock "communicating" temperature information to another rock by conducting heat, or one domino communicates to the next one in a row that it's time to fall with a gentle tap), and they weren't designed to do it; it's an 'accident' of evolution that usually works better than it hinders the plants.
When we use language like that, the topic can get loaded really quickly with implications of intelligence, and that will lead you astray.
The systems are far from complex; it's just an interplay of hormones that trigger or repress gene expression, which is programmed in. The only thing that makes them opaque is that they're kind of hard to study. It's entirely mechanical, not intelligent; horticulturalists take advantage of them constantly. Like when you cut a higher stem it can trigger the lower buds to grow because you've removed the source of hormones preventing them from doing so. It's not that they've been told or decided to grow, it's that mechanically that hormone suppresses growth, and mechanically, it originated from another stem.
It's a very elegant emergent solution to the problem of regulating plant growth, but it's not intelligence. It's physical in nature, there is no information processing or understanding, it's just the push and pull of competing hormones. Compared to actual intelligence it's crude in a way, but it works and it's metabolically far cheaper than having intelligence thinking about and deciding things.
Understanding how these systems really work shouldn't take the magic out of them by making them less mysterious, it should be all the more beautiful. But we shouldn't mistake beauty for intelligence or sentience.
The problem with the transmission of information in a plant, as with a rock, is that it's not discriminating; it's more of a diffusion. You don't get a letter with a to and from, the cell (which is the only unit that really matters) just gets bathed in hormones which turn off or on genes and make it react in a predetermined way.
A leaf does not know that a chemical is coming from another plant or another leaf on the same plant, and it does not care or understand what it means. The response is reflex. And the sender, likewise, has no idea where that hormone is going and no way to direct it to any particular destination.
This kind of transmission makes any meaningful information processing very difficult because it makes elaborate structural systems impossible.
It's a little hard to explain unless you have some background in computer science. Do you know anything about logic gates?
Here's a site that explains a bit:
http://www.explainthatstuff.com/logicgates.html
(You really need to know the basics of computer science and digital electronics in order to deal with the concepts)
Computers are built from them, and the reason is works is that the input from one is fed directly into others in a particular controlled sequence. If you take that away, and try to build a computer by diffusing input and output, you make it basically impossible to build anything useful.
A plant has multiple hormones, but ultimately it only gets as many signal channels as it has hormones (which is a small number), or else those signals will interfere with each other. Think multiple radio stations trying to use the same frequency. It doesn't work, any useful signal gets lost in the noise. In different cities they can do it, but not locally.
In order to form an information processing system necessary for true intelligence, consciousness, and sentience, you need to be able to channel those outputs to a particular cell or cells which will reprocess them based on other inputs, then provides a different output, and so on and so forth to a certain minimum system size that it becomes capable of generating conscious experience by letting the reactions and structures change themselves.
This is why our nerves are connected as such with insulated transmission lines to prevent signal loss or noise creation for other nearby neurons. The structural capacity to do this is lacking in plants and bacterium.
There are SO many reasons they're not sentient. This is just scratching the surface.
ModVegan wrote:
have a form of sentience/awareness we may not be able to comprehend given our current knowledge.
I really hope after reading the above you see how silly (and insulting) this kind of claim is.
This is a textbook woo claim, I'm sure you've seen people say this kind of stuff about altmed or crystals or whatever too.
"Maybe homeopathy/reiki/whatever bullshit etc. just works in ways we may not be able to comprehend given our current knoweldge."
No. Even if we don't understand every detail of how everything works, the unknowns are not vast enough to drive that kind of megatanker through the gaps.
This is literally an argument from ignorance. You're insulting the state of our scientific knowledge, denigrating entire fields as ignorant and dismissing generations of work as having nothing to say on the matter, and on what basis?
Your assertion is that
we just don't know anything about it -- but you're speaking for everybody else too when you do this, you're speaking for all of science, and not just for yourself. If you said only that you didn't know, that would be fine. When you say that
I (right here on the other side of the internet from you) don't know, that's a problem, because you don't know what I do or don't know, and when you say that nobody knows, that's even worse.
The same can be witnessed in militant agnosticism.
Run of the mill agnosticism -- great, you don't know, I can respect that. Totally cool, maybe let me explain it to you so you can be more informed and catch up a bit of what you might have missed?
Militant agnosticism -- nobody knows? Really? In the whole world, you can't conceive of anybody possibly having access to information or some logical argument you haven't heard? And you're certain of that? That's a statement of faith every bit as profound as the Pope's.
In order to be honest, we have to temper our certainty, but we also have to temper our certainty about uncertainty. There are some things that are just so far beyond plausible that it is not reasonable to take them seriously.
As the saying goes: "keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out."
ModVegan wrote:
You jump to breatharianism? We have direct evidence organisms require fuel for survival.
We have direct evidence that organisms require fuel for intelligence; huge amounts of it. And we have direct evidence that information processing is a function of the cells doing the processing and the channels they can use to transmit input and output. This is pretty hard core physics and mathematics.
The best case you're likely to ever find are limited cases of plants that are highly invested in motor function, like the 20 second "memory" in the sensing hairs on a venus fly trap. This is not intelligence, and it's not capable of supporting intelligence. Maybe given a few more hundred million years of evolutionary pressure, but not in its current niche.
If you can casually dismiss information theory, thermodynamics, and evolutionary biology, then I can dismiss just one of those things with bretharianism. Both assertions are wrong, but the possibility of bretharianism violates fewer fundamental laws of physics and logic.
ModVegan wrote:We also know that plants exhibit signs of nociception. I fail to see the relevance of this argument.
We do? Are you sure about that?
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/nociception
Do we also know that plants are psychic, and possess ESP?
http://skepdic.com/plants.html
(Read the whole article and you'll see where a lot of this nonsense came from).
Plant cells automatically release a cascade of hormones in response to damage, and those affect gene expression locally and in the whole plant (and even in nearby plants). They do not
feel pain. They do not have animal nociception, although some hormones are similar, that's more coincidence; we see hormones with estrogen-like activity from plants too.
The problem is so bad with these poor comparisons to neuroscience that a few years ago a bunch of plant scientists had to get together to coauthor what amounts of a consensus paper against the bullshit claims in plant "neurobiology".
One of the authors posted it here:
http://blumwald.ucdavis.edu/papers/Alpi%202007.pdf
Plant neurobiology: no brain, no gain?
The past three years have witnessed the birth and propagation of a provocative idea in the plant sciences. Its proponents have suggested that higher plants have nerves, synapses, the equivalent of a brain localized somewhere in the roots, and an intelligence. The idea has attracted a number of adherents, to the extent that meetings have now been held in different host countries to address the topic, and an international society devoted to ‘plant neurobiology’ has been founded. We are concerned with the rationale behind this concept. We maintain that plant neurobiology does not add to our understanding of plant physiology, plant cell biology or signaling.
We begin by stating simply that there is no evidence for structures such as neurons, synapses or a brain in plants. The fact that the term ‘neuron’ is derived from a Greek word describing a ‘vegetable fiber’ is not a compelling argument to reclaim this term for plant biology. Let us consider the erroneous arguments that have been put forward to support the concept of plant ‘neurons’. By this logic, cells that contribute to auxin transport are equated to chains of neurons, and it is argued that auxin transport occurs via a concerted vesicle-based trafficking mechanism of ‘neurotransmitter-like cell–cell transport’ [1,2]. There are two immediate difficulties with this reasoning. [...]
The article goes into some detail.
ModVegan wrote:
Self-preservation is a natural instinct I don't expect any living thing (plants, animals, etc) to rise above.
Appeal to nature fallacy?
Plants are nothing but their programming; they have no intelligence or mind to override it.
Animals can override instincts, humans perhaps most of all. People regularly sacrifice themselves for things they believe in. Are you saying that a person who dies to save others has done something immoral, or morally worthless?
ModVegan wrote:
To call it a right may be excessive, but it is certainly a reality.
All kinds of things are a reality, rape, murder, anger, hate, etc. That doesn't make them good.
You were using the argument as a moral justification, but what usually just happens is not necessarily moral.
ModVegan wrote:
I'm not going to hold a survival instinct against any organism,
What about the instinct to have sex and procreate? Will you hold rape against a homely and unlucky man who had no other shot at procreation? Where do you draw the line if you're permissive of "instinct" to violate morality?
ModVegan wrote:But acknowledging self-preservation as an instinct is a far cry from saying we're required to keep breeding cows to preserve their species for them.
If your argument is that we're excused by instinct, rather than by right, then cows are off the hook, but you just opened a can of worms for people to justify actions as instinct.
ModVegan wrote:
Plant Neurobiologists like Stefano Mancuso are serious scientists.
No, they're dishonest press whores at best, clamoring for funding and book sales at the expense of the science, and maybe even quacks if they're drinking their own kool-aid.
Notice how he has a book he's selling? Yeah...
The arguments of this crowd amount to dishonest pseudoscience of Intelligent Design advocates, with "theories" like irreducible complexity. It's another literal appeal to ignorance.
They think it's too complicated to be explained away by traditional mechanisms, like the ID people think life is too complex to be reduced to evolutionary steps; no evidence for this, it's just an assertion. Then they cobble together a bunch of pseudoscience and weak speculation (already debunked in that article I linked) to justify themselves.
If you do not know the explanation for a particular behavior yet, that only means you don't know the explanation for that behavior, not that there's a secret brain (or a god, when you don't know how something evolved) controlling it all.
If we had even an iota of evidence for any of this, and it wasn't based on some loony unfalsifiable ad hoc hypothesis, then he might be a real scientist working in real theory. As it stands, he's a quack.
ModVegan wrote:
They aren't asking anyone to become fruitarians, they are simply interested in understanding plants better and answering questions like, "what's the best way to plant trees?"
No, they're simply interested in selling books, getting interviews, and funding in general. Plant science is hard to get money in unless you're a media whore willing to manipulate the yellow press. Follow the green, and I don't mean plants. They have a substantial motivation to lie, and they're not regarded well by their peers for doing it.
ModVegan wrote:I would venture to say that 99/100 times, this argument is not brought up with any sincerity, but I have no problem discussing it with non-vegans if they are asking genuine questions.
If you want to try that line about eating animals killing more plants and it works, that's fine temporarily.
BUT you do realize that these people consider plants to be "upside down" animals, and that the roots are the actual organism's brain, right? The thing I said about grass fed cows is going to be VERY hard for you to address once you've given into this pseudoscience.
Vegans need to be willing and able to appeal to science to overcome nonsense like this, because if you let the argument drift from reality and hand the till over to your opponent you will always lose. They will steer the course into something you will have no logical argument against, and you'll be stuck on that ride.
ModVegan wrote:Plants clearly have some experience of the world,
No, they don't. It's this kind of assertion that's a problem. You're feeding this stuff. Why?
I don't understand how smart people buy into any of this. Is one TED talk really that convincing?
What did you see or read that has you sold on plant sentience?
ModVegan wrote:though the absence of a central nervous system means it would be on a level completely unintelligible to us (at least at this point). I fail to see the value in belittling that.
That's like saying pocket watches, or crystals, or anything else is intelligent, but since they don't have brains it's just beyond our understanding. It's meaningless.
I fail to see the value in encouraging that kind of anti-science (and anti-logic) thinking. It's harmful to accept the claim that something is beyond human comprehension and therefore (maybe/probably/etc.) it's true; it's harmful to promote and accept that kind of rationalization, and doing so commits you to accepting the same kind of reasoning in other areas as well, basically setting you at odds with science.
You can believe whatever you want, and if you don't feel like you understand the relevant subjects well enough to
personally conclude that plant sentience is absurd that's fine and perfectly honest of your, but please don't make supportive assertions for this pseudoscience or suggest that people who find plant sentience (or plant "neurobiology") absurd are being closed minded or ignorant about it. There's no reason to lend more credibility and positive attention to this nonsense.