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arborholing (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 23 points 1 year ago (9 children)

That top sentence has a bunch of flavor text. Livestock implies they're intentionally being kept as livestock. Plants aren't sentient. That's like saying evolution is intentional.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean it's true... but there's a pretty reasonable case that humans aren't sentient. We think we're doing shit for a good reason but at the end of the day on a large scale we're just going through the motions of what our environment leads us to do.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    This is why I don't like determining an organism's value based on how "sentient" it is. I prefer to admit that I treat dogs and pigs better than carrots and fish because I empathize with them more, entirely of my own bias. I don't think I have any more or less value than a blade of grass; we're both products of happenstance just running our programming, and we won't be around long.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Plants aren’t sentient by our understanding of sentience there’s evidence that they communicate via the mycelium network and give their own offspring more nutrients than others. That‘s the two I can think of without googling

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    What other understanding of sentience would we fucking use?!
    The mycelium network thing is way overblown - it allows some crude, undetectedundirected signals to pass.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I see it as a problem to solve - we know that signals pass because of the results, but we have yet to detect them

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I typo'd "undirected" if that affects anything.

    My point is, people talk about this as if it's the plants having a nice chat and a cup of tea and talking about politics. It isn't - it's more like a dog being able to smell some dog piss and understand something about the dog that pissed there.

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