Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked • Hacker News Board

Re: Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked

#51

Post by mirko22 » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 6:03 AM UTC

Thiez wrote: post #45

mirko22 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view, what’s futile about it is the fact that for many veganism has to do with moral choice against animal suffering but gets conflated with “living healthy”. Skin of an apple that you buy in standard shop is anything but healthy due to the amount of chemicals applied to it. Even the home grown plants can be treated in a way that is unhealthy. And thirdly, things like avocado plantations are anything but enviro…

Are you seriously suggesting that (all else being equal) a mixed diet is healthier than a vegetarian diet because in a mixed diet you consume less chemicals through fruit and vegetables?

No, I am saying eating plants != healthy per se.

I have seen people suggesting all meat diet is healthier then all plant diet, and to those people i also say depends how the meat was produced, treated and kept before selling.

You give antibiotics to animals, take animal manure for you bio plants which take up some of those antibiotics and now you have plant that also has it...

I have seen people put pesticides on fruits which usually takes 15 days to degrade and sell them in couple of days. That fruit is technically poisonous.

So what I am suggesting that unless you know how you food was grown and treated you don’t know it is healthy.

So moral choices does not mean healthy choices just cos.

Re: Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked

#52

Post by mirko22 » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 6:05 AM UTC

jllaneras wrote: post #28

mirko22 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it’s awful that so much of human activity results in life’s death and extinction What you mean is nature not just humans. Life death cycle is natural thing. World is full of beauty, but it is also full of suffering and pain, large portion of it not having to do anything with humans. Animals can starve in nature, get mutilated etc. Nature is both sides of the coin, not just the pretty one. As for what you eat, i…

It's so easy to convince ourselves that eating meat is completely fine. Maybe it wouldn't be that easy if every time you wanted to eat meat you had to go yourself to the slaughterhouse and see the horrors caused by those you pay to. Second, is proven that growing vegetables is more sustainable that growing meat.

I slaughtered my own chicken when i was a kid cos i grew up partially in a village.

Re: Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked

#53

Post by groestl » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 8:18 AM UTC

justtopost wrote: post #43

groestl wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As our testing procedures improve, we find out more and more about the cognitive abilities of animals, and have since found self-awareness in chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, magpies, and recently, through sniff tests, dogs. I find it not far fetched that at some point, we start to recognize (some) plants as sentinent beings, maybe on a different timescale than us. Would be interesting to know why you think they are…

Dogs are not self aware, otherwise I would love a source. That just sounds like some feelgood popsci.

I'm referring to the "Sniff test of self-recognition" (STSR), which has been proposed by Gatti in [Gat16] and run on a very small sample of dogs. Horowitz has proposed another testing method, derived from STSR, in [Hor17]. [Hor17] has been criticized by Gallup et al. in [Gal18] for lacking evidence according to their framework of self-awareness (dogs need to sniff on themselves after exposure to their own scent). But the authors agree that the "olfactory mirror" test is a valid extension of the "mirror test", a self-awareness test based on visual clues. Gatti has shared some of the criticism recently [Gat18], but attributes the lack of evidence to formal problems, namely [Hor17] failing to cite important aspects of his original work in [Gat16]. And indeed, while [Gal18] cites [Hor17], and [Hor17] cites [Gat16], [Gal18] makes no mention of results by Gatti in [Gat16], which would support their framework: "[...] when released together inside the enclosure and left free to move and interact with each other and with the five samples, the four dogs repetitively sniffed the excretory organs of the others and the containers, sometimes stopping to sniff themselves."

I'm no expert, so I don't want to make any strong assertions here. But it seems that only recently, alternative self-awareness testing procedures (to the "mirror test") have become acceptable by researchers. Now new tests will be designed, and there is a body of evidence to be gathered for each of those tests. I personally believe that, given that the defense of human exclusivity for cognitive features has been a running fight, self-awareness will eventually suffer a similar fate.

[Gat16] Cazzolla Gatti, Roberto. Self-consciousness: beyond the looking-glass and what dogs found there. Ethology Ecology & Evolution, 2016

[Hor17] Alexandra Horowitz. Smelling themselves: Dogs investigate their own odours longer when modified in an "olfactory mirror" test. Behavioural Processes, 2017

[Gal18] Gordon G. Gallup Jr. & James R. Anderson. The "olfactory mirror" and other recent attempts to demonstrate self-recognition in non-primate species. Behavioural Processes, 2018

[Gat18] https://robertocazzollagatti.com/2018/06/07/self-awareness-i... - 2018

Re: Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked

#54

Post by thraxil » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

cko wrote: post #19

spraak wrote: post #2

Some people love to use this information as a fallacious argument of futility against veganism, i.e. that suffering cannot be avoided because "plants suffer too!". But this misses the point. Plants can respond to stimuli, but it doesn't mean that they feel pain, suffer and have a consciousness and emotions like animals do. > Plants have no eyes, no ears, no mouth and no hands. They do not have a brain or a nervous sy…

Ok. What about: sea sponges, starfish, jellyfish, and octopi? (If you’re drawing a seemingly arbitrary line at “has brain / nervous system => able to feel suffering”) Which signalling molecules would qualify?

FWIW, among vegans, there is a bit of controversy over certain bivalves. Oysters and Mussels both lack a sophisticated central nervous system and likely are closer to plants than even higher invertebrates in terms of anything like pain perception. There's a reasonable case to be made that ethical vegans should be able to eat them, especially considering that oyster and mussel farming actually removes pollution from the water and has a positive environmental impact (unsurprisingly, there is plenty of disagreement though).

I don't know much about sea sponges, starfish, or jellyfish so I won't comment on those. Octopuses though are actually very intelligent compared to most other invertebrates. There are examples of complex problem solving, observational learning, and even tool use. Their intelligence is very "different" than what we are used to and hard to compare apples to apples, but is probably closer to the level of mice/rats/dogs than to insects or fish.

Re: Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked

#55

Post by jllaneras » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

cannonedhamster wrote: post #48

jllaneras wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so easy to convince ourselves that eating meat is completely fine. Maybe it wouldn't be that easy if every time you wanted to eat meat you had to go yourself to the slaughterhouse and see the horrors caused by those you pay to. Second, is proven that growing vegetables is more sustainable that growing meat.

Without making a claim against veganism/vegetarianism, you do realize that people have been killing their own animals and eating them for many years. I'd wager most of the people who work in factory farms still eat meat. You don't find a huge proportion of butchers going vegetarian/vegan. I don't think that evidence supports that seeing how your food is killed has any impact on most adults, although it can be traumat…

Personally, I'm not directly against the small farmer nor the local butchery. But I'm shocked by what the big meat industry is doing. And I didn't have a clue until when I woke up recently.

The bigger problem is that eating meat, even if from small butchers, helps promoting meat consumption which, in turns, helps big industry continue making big money out of animal abuse and at the expense of everybody's natural environment.

Here you have what some former butchers have to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDg7tlEJD64&t=4213