h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just asking, but are flowers vegetables? What about trees? Don't fungi exhibit the same life-like characteristics of vegetables? Certainly animals are even more full of life than vegetables. What about wheats, and fruits? All food is alive. Humans would die without eating living things, and if humans were dead who would protect the vegetables from the animals? A lot of animals depend on vegetables and need to die so that we can protect the sacred vegetables.

I am left with one overwhelming feeling after reading about all the horrible things done to vegetables. Hunger. I guess I'll go eat some sand, or wait under a tree for last years dead leaves to fall, and eat those.

I see you've picked up on the spirit of it all very well, Kyle!
Essentially I was trying to make the point that if humans argue for animals having the same rights as humans, then other forms of life should also have those same rights.
Either that or a redefinition the qualia of life is in order, so that it's more of a scale of sentience, rather than the "either its alive or it isn't" system we currently have.

I have an idea for a scale of sentience, but it needs a lot of work. Basically, the more complex creatures (humans, etc) are considered "more alive", or at least "more sentient", than simple creatures (vegetables, etc), which would cause a bit of a paradigm shift in current scientific understanding, don't you think?

Hmm... I'm hungry too, now....

When you get down to the bacterial and even further to the viral level, the line between living things and inanimate things becomes blurred. They only thing that makes something alive is because we say it is. We have degrees of importantance for non-living things the same way we have degrees of living things. I think it should all be put into one big chart that isn't concerned with classifications but rather value. A chart where living humans should be on the top, then dead humans second, and so on all the way down to the smallest edible object of least importance, whatever that is I'm curious to hear your opinion. The point is that being sentient or even alive isn't what makes something valuable. I would rather eat the highest order of cow than my sister's favorite toy (even if it were a very tasty toy somehow).

Sorry for the slow reply - I'd lost this posting somewhere along the way.

I thought I agreed with you, but having re-read your post a couple of times I'm now just confused...
I agree with the 'value rather than classification' idea; it's similar to what I just expressed by needing a 'scale rather than a list of qualia' for life. However I get the impression that the table you're talking about is for importance to a human food chain? True?
If so, then I have a problem with it.
If not, then I have a problem with it.

If so; this table thus arranged would endorse the anthopocentricity that this society is trying so hard to purge. By placing humans at the top of the list, we would be implicitly stating that
humans are better than other forms of life, a typically human arrogance. We should expunge this human dominance for the sake of equality of species. We are coming to an age of sexual and racial equality; it's time to go one step further and also strive towards equality of species. We must speak up for those who have no voice of their own!

Um. Where was I? Oh yes.

If not; then I can only guess this is a scale of sentience? Similar to what I proposed? Correct me if I'm wrong here.
If that's the case, then why the hel are "dead humans" the second item on the list? How are dead humans more sentient than any other creature? They're dead! They're not sentient at all!!!
Correct me if I'm wrong on this point though; I'm still not sure what the point of the list you proposed is.

Incedentally, if the list does, in fact, have something to do with a food chain then I'd also like to point out that different societies consider different things "food" - koreans happily eat dogs, while most people in a western society would shun at the thought. Also consider other regional dishes; such as monkey's brains, roast tarantula, and that poisonous puffer-fish thingee. This makes it rather hard to objectively rate the food's "importance".

Just a thought.

I would say that since humans are the only ones smart enough to make lists in the first place that automatically puts us in the running for being on top of the list. And making a list for the eating allowances of any other thing besides humans wouldn't make any sense because we couldn't enforce it. The only list that would have any meaning would be one for humans. Dead humans used to be very sentient, that makes them more sacred than any other living creature that never had sentience to begin with, whether it's alive or dead. Anyway, the list would have to be as objective as possible, just because some Koreans are just as likely to eat dogs as cows doesn't make cows just as good as dogs. A dog can become a person's friend much more easily than an idiot cow, and so they would be higher on the list. And it would be more of a food web than a chain, which is an inaccurate word. It isn't hard to rate a food's objective importance at all. Most civilized countries don't eat monkey-anything because they feel on an instinctive level that monkeys are too much like humans. Humans of course being the ones making the list. Also, great works of art can have an effect on people far greater than, say, bobcats. So eating a somewhat cunning bobcat would be better than eating high art, but worse than eating mediocre art. Also, circumstances would have to be considered too. Being trapped on a desert isle under significantly dire circumstances would heighten the rightness of eating a recently become human corpse. But eating a person who was alive with the same relative will to live and health as you would never be right since you would both be at the same level of importance on the consumption web, and so the degree of circumstances would be negated no matter how high it is. Since animals can't choose what they are going to eat, because they have no advanced sentient reflection abilities, they can not be considered as subjects to the web, only humans. So if a bunch of rats eat a noble lion because he's sick, well that's just going to have to be okay, unless you know the lion personally, which you probably don't. Also, any creatures capable of cognitive reflection should never be eaten regardless of degree. So if any alien civilization was discovered on intellectual par with proto-humans, they should be treated as humans, just as any hyper-advanced civilization of aliens should be treated like humans also.

I hear what you're saying, but what is this a list /of/?

You people and your need for unnecessary specifics. It's an importance web. Anything more specific and you lose some of its meaning. For instance, it would be okay to be cruel to vegetables because they can be replaced by almost exactly the same vegetable while dogs have unique personalities and are more important. It's one step away from being cruel to a rock, which isn't even alive.

Gah. I think you're missing my point here.
Importance is a relative term, and by nature is entirely subjective. The questions are 'Important to whom?', and 'Important in what way?'
Is this a web of importance to the food chain, from the point of view of humans? Am I getting that part right at least?

"Anything more specific and you lose some of its meaning." - I would say if you're too general then you can also lose its meaning, and that's what seems to be happening here.

"...it would be okay to be cruel to vegetables because they can be replaced by almost exactly the same vegetable while dogs have unique personalities and are more important." - That's from the point of view of humans, and is an example of the type of anthopocentricity I'm trying to avoid. A dog would probably prefer to watch a random human die so that it may live, while that same human would prefer the reverse - the random dog dies so that the human would live. You could say the same about a carrot, or a mosquito, or any other entity for that matter. It's all about perspective, and from the perspective of any given entity it's entirely reasonable to assume that it considers its existence more important than the existence of any other entity. You see?

I hope you're not getting frustrated with this debate. I'm just trying to express my perspective of the nature of reality... I hope you're getting something out of this.

By the way, I'm not convinced that a rock isn't alive. Can you prove it isn't? Admittedly if a "scale of sentience" (or whatever the scale would be called) was used to classify it, it would be pretty darn low on the scale. But rocks do evolve and change over time, so it may be on there somewhere.

And even more nit-picky.... I disagree with vegetables being "one step away from ... a rock" - vegetables exhibit Movement, Reproduction, Senses, Cells, Growth, Respiration, Excretion, and Nutrition; which make them officially alive and thus afforded the same rights as other living creatures. Rocks are currently classed as 'non-living', and therefore have no rights at all. That's a lot more than one step.

I wait with baited breath to see what your next post will be.
Take care dude!

*wanders in*

*Donates some Bio Grow and a packet of seeds to this noble cause*

Unlike other, lesser, people, I have no problem believing that rocks are alive. Or any other object made of atoms for that matter. Afterall, atoms twirl around, dance, confuse us, explode, pretty much every quality that an ordinary person would attribute to lifeforms inorganic objects can also do.

This becomes obvious when you consider that life must have evolved out of non-living material. When you smash a rock it will adapt and become even harder to smash in much the same way that a cats genes will be harder to destroy once it reproduces. The problem is that rocks move very slowly, so they may even communicate for all we know. Clearly the Earth is made of different composites of rock, and anyone who says the Earth isn't alive hasn't taken Geology.

What makes a human better than a rock? Nothing. Humans kill rocks all the time for their benefit and rocks kill humans all the time for their, for a lack of a better term we'll call benefit, too. The point is that it's the nature of the universe that anything is allowed to kill anything else as long as it has the power. If you try to prevent the killing of something you must only take away enough of the power or desire of anything trying to kill it. But why protect rocks or plants when we know they don't have the capacity to feel cruelty or even pain? Plants aren't important to themselves are they? They show no signs of it. While we know humans feel that they are important. Plants can't decide to survive, they can only react to stimuli in the way that they were made to, they have no cognition. In a simliar way that A.I. can only react to stimuli in the way that it is made to. Whereas humans can choose from a multitude of options, plants and programs can only react to something in the one way they were created to react.

Perspective has nothing to do with this. Plants protect themselves from humans and humans protect themselves from plants. Plants can show no mercy, humans can, but they will only give as much mercy to a thing as it is related to them. No one expects a person not to hit his pillow when they're angry, no expects a person not to eat a vegetable when they're hungry. It wouldn't be mercy then, it would be more like a metaphor if you were to call it mercy in a sentence. Trying to decide whether vegetables are more important than humans in an objective sense would be impossible, we can only look at them in their relation to ourselves, and we expect no more from any other thing. We don't find it wrong for an animal to eat a vegetable, because it thinks it deserves to and it can. If we don't think a human should be allowed to kill another human it's because we don't think they deserve to. That's the only reasoning you need. If vegetables should be protected it would only be because other humans would be hurt if they weren't, and not because vegetables actually deserved saving.

Ohh, and nice to meet you too, I live in Texas. It's not as pretty as New Zealand, but it has way more rocks. Not in the sense of mass, but in the sense of quantity, i.e. sand and dirt.