I don't miss meat anymore because for many categories, alternatives have gotten good enough that eating them instead of real meat isn't really a sacrifice for me, just a different version and maybe a brief period of getting used to it. I'm quite content with vegan chicken stuff and burgers and sausages for example, if the product is well made. Even some cheaper ones have improved a lot. Guess I'm lucky that I never was much into steaks and cheese.

The thing I do miss is being able to go into any restaurant without worrying if they even have vegan options. This might be a big reason why people don't go vegan. But trying to eat plant-based if practical while making some exceptions would already be awesome. Even just asking for vegan options if there are none would help a lot if enough people did it.

I know vegans who dont hide that they do really miss meat. I imagine even those that don’t would appreciate having alternatives that turn more people away from the real thing.

After 10 years I'm not sure anymore if I'll eat cell culture meat, because eating real meat is just kinda strange/disgusting to me by now. But I'd be really happy if it became available for the people who do want to eat real meat.

That was the case a few years ago. The industry has developed and already uses alternatives. The fetal serum would have been too expensive for commercial use either way.

We still don't know how expensive the whole process will be though, it will certainly be a luxury item for quite some time, while the current plant-based meat is slowly becoming cheaper than real meat.

There might be a relevant difference in the fact that most animals can run/move away from something that hurt them, and pain might be the necessary evolutionary adaptation to facilitate that. A plant or fungus just has chemical responses, which probably don't rely on being sentient. Our skin most likely produces melanin without being sentient, after all.

I guess the interesting question is whether there are any processes in plants that somehow imply sentience. Afaik science hasn't found a decisive example yet.

I'd say it's wrong to harm other humans because it's extremely likely that they feel pain and emotions in a similar way as I do. Roughly the same applies to chimps, and dogs, and pigs too. Maybe the emotions aren't as complex, but they clearly behave according to the basic ones like joy and fear. The response to pain is basically the same as ours. So harming them without a necessity to do so seems cruel to me.

Even if plants were more conscious than animals, the animals have to be fed with tons of plants to begin with. Eating plants directly minimizes plant and animal deaths.

It's weird. My first thought was this looks like a video game cutscene character.

For climate activists it's very unlikely, but there are people who believe Africans are the issue because of high birth rates, conveniently ignoring that richer countries do the most damage by far.

Billions of ordinary humans still consume much more fossil fuels and meat than the super rich. And that consumption is giving unsustainable industries even more money for lobbying and to stay profitable.

This sense of futility is whats keeping their business model alive as long as possible. It's what's giving them the largest benefit they could possibly hope for. Don't do their lobbying work for them.

If there were no billionaires, our unsustainable consumption would still drive climate change, just a bit slower. Just pointing at them isn't sufficient. We need political and individual action.

The argument also kinda sounds like "well if there are people that literally kill thousands of people, then me hurting a few people in my life doesn't make much of a difference." Which is a quite silly.

Sustainable technologies like public transport, EVs and meat alternatives also need demand to grow, to become normalized, widely accessible and cheaper through scaling. Early adopters have a much larger effect on the overall trajectory than late adopters.

If progressive people just do what's practicable to have a positive impact where they can, that has a large effect. And many already do. We need more of that.

It's surprising that they seemingly haven't managed to turn grok into a full far right propaganda machine yet, after billions of investment.

When you use the /init command in claude code, it'll scan your whole project and write a CLAUDE.md, which is basically an overview of the project contents and architecture that it uses as context when responding to queries.

My personal position(belief) is that we are in consciousness.. 'submerged' as it were. Or even a radio wave for it to connect to. along with everything forming this reality. Like interconnected.

I certainly had this feeling too when I had an ego death experience. Though I attribute that more to my mind being formed by evolution around an ego/actor, and when this ego is missing, the subconscious might have to come up with a plausible alternative to keep the brain circuits working/comprehend reality. I even thought in terms of "he" instead of "I" about "myself" (the person), but my consciousness felt like a separate universal "they" in this moment. Neat experience for sure.

But to me it still seems most likely that as life is entirely formed by evolution, and things like instincts, pain, memories, agency, emotions, reasoning, model of the world, personalities etc. have advantages for survival, they are selected for in their most basic forms, get more sophisticated over time and eventually coalesce into what we experience as consciousness.

So to me it seems very very likely that most animals have consciousness, with varying degrees of sophistication regarding those abilities. Some animals might even surpass the sophistication of humans on some of these abilities, if the evolutionary pressure for that was stronger for them than for us.

On plants I'm more sceptical because their behavior doesn't need to be nearly as complex as that of moving animals for survival I believe, it can probably rely much more on "hardcoded" behavior. Although reality loves it's exceptions and complications so who knows.

Vehicle wise we might offer a different experience for a consciousness to know itself.

Yeah that is another view on that I guess.

To live is to consume. And anything we consume has consciousness. We're all 'guilty' of consuming in order to live as a flesh body regardless of what it is we consume.

To me theres still a big difference between harvesting a carrot and cutting the throat of a pig. But all aspects of living have an impact on the environment and animals and humans, to different degrees, of course. So I agree that we're all guilty and that nobody is perfect, and that vegans aren't automatically good people and meat eaters aren't automatically bad people. Some vegans kinda forget that they also ate meat for many years without considering the harms and that they might still do other problematic things too so they really don't have an excuse to look down on people.

of course they loose their shit if you challenge it to any depth like this.

That's a shame, I think it's an interesting argument that opens some questions, so let's challenge it a bit (somewhat ironic given the post, I know, but its just too intriguing).

Your position is basically that humans are the only species that has consciousness, correct? That means if you take a dog or chimpanzee or whatever and burn it alive, they wouldn't feel a thing in your view because they're not conscious? Just to make sure we are on the same page.

they speak about consiousness and it's location like it has all been proven. They provide no papers. no proof. just how they feel about consciousness when talking about it.

How do you actually know that humans are definitely the only species that has consciousness and that other species are fundamentally incapable of it? I'd be very interested in the papers and proof or even just arguments for that.

As I see it, we even have the same fundamental issue with human consciousness. Where are the papers, what is the proof that all humans are conscious, or even just one human? I'm not aware of any hard proof.

You just know you're conscious, and you assume from that that all other humans are too. But you can't actually prove anyone else is conscious.

By your argumentation and standard of evidence, putting humans on factory farms would actually be fine too, as long as we don't have hard proof that they are actually conscious.

But I don't think it works for the following reason:

The argument "other animals are not conscious, therefore their treatment isn't an ethical issue" relies on that definitely being the case. If there's still a chance that they are conscious, it remains an ethical issue. You actually need hard proof.

The counter position "other animals might be conscious, so we must not (potentially) torture them by the millions/billions in case they are" doesn't have that requirement.

The burden of proof lies where do don't give the benefit of the doubt, not where you do.

if they can say consiousness exists with animals: i can say consiousness exists in plants too.

You could say that they might be conscious, sure. But raising animals takes a lot more animal feed than just eating plants directly, so industrially farmed meat would still be the most unethical choice either way.

We have to eat something, eating plants directly minimizes both animal deaths and plant deaths.

Even if only plants had consciousness and animals didn't, factory farming would be still be the most unethical source of food.

Ah yes, the finnish police fined someone for disturbing a political event and this is of course comparable to systematic human rights abuses and massacres like tiananmen square.

Like there are enough troubling developments in the west we could discuss, but instead we get highly misleading RT propaganda stories to whitewash authoritarianism.

Yeah...fuck those people. Some cultures are just worse than others.

Factory farms are still way worse, because of the permanent confinement in cramped cages full of shit, the cruel treatment for their whole lives, and the insane scale. It's like this event happening every second.

Just look at the Dominion documentary and compare it to this. We're the worse culture.