💾 Archived View for inconsistentuniverse.space › gemlog › 2024-07-25-give-and-take.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:39:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Hey, so I'm back and trying to actually update my gemini capsule again. I could just have made my first post a note about that but that's a recipe for the never-updating-deathspiral. So, no, I'm back with actually a thing I wanted to share.
I'm also phlogging more personal journal thoughts at
My rawtext phlog, which is operational again (and locally backed up)
So I'm vegan. I'm not saying that for no reason, I'm very mindful of not becoming the "How do you know if someone is vegan? Don't worry they'll tell you" joke embodied. I bring it up because any vegetarian or vegan can tell you that if an omnicore feels guilty or judged about their diet they *will* make a joke about how you're killing plants or say something like "how do you know plants don't feel pain?"
And, okay, it's meant as a stupid "gotcha". It absolutely is. But I also think that we're doing a disservice to not take the question seriously: do plants feel pain? When we harvest them is that also taking a life?
Before we get to that I want to talk about a book.
So I first read Ark of the Possible, god, maybe five years ago
Ark of The Possible by Devi Dillard-Wright
It's fundamentally a philosophy text about intersubjectivity, riffing off of some of the later work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. One of her big points is that Descartes sent philosophy as a field down the wrong path right from the meditations on first philosophy. Descartes starts from the assumption that the ability to separate "thinking" from "body" is even a sensible thing to do. I'm really sympathetic to Descartes's need to rule out the senses as something that can't be trusted from first principles but M-P and by extension, Devi, take more of the perspective that you have never experienced cognition as a thing separate from your body!
You have never experienced time as an instant but always as a thing thick with retension and protension (protension being the fluid ability to anticipate what will happen in the immediate future). So there's something inherently artificial about the thought experiment of "well what if I am a bodyless mind dreaming the existence of a body". And in Descartes's defense he *does*, by the sixth meditation, come to a point of "well, okay, so the senses aren't 100% reliable but they're mostly fine and you don't really need to doubt that you have a body or are experiencing things" but really the issue is that it was even conceivable to imagine separating body from cognition in the first place.
Why is this such a problem? Because it forces the identification of cognition with internal narrative of language, with the act of reflecting on an object. The cogito-ergo-sum of meditation 2 is about the monologue of thought-in-language. This inherently separates the cognition expressed as language from the non-verbal cognition of perception in the body.
Okay, fine, why is *that* a problem? Because it leads to separation of the human and non-human animals as having entirely different *kinds* of mind. We assume that the non-human animal, because it doesn't use a language with syntax (at least not one that we recognize as such), does not "think" in a way comparable to ourselves.
After establishing this argument much of the book is about trying to take a body-centered approach to describing cognition and a kind of intersubjectivity she calls interanimality, emphasizing that the same way we can share common ground with another human to understand the world as they perceive it and come to agree with each other, we should be capable of understanding the non-human animal as well---even if the distance between kinds of thinking is larger than between you reading this and me.
Plants, though, have bodies too. We know that they perceive and react to the world around them. We know that some trees will react to the presence of others of the same species and share resources. So even if it is a cognition incredibly alien to us it's hard not to imagine that there isn't something we could call cognition happening there.
So can we rule out the idea that a plant feels pain or distress? I don't know if we can. I'm loathe to make an argument based on the lack of centralized nervous system or a lack of complexity. This is perhaps my bias as a mathematician and computer scientist but we know the lambda calculus and brainfuck have the same expressive capacity as the current ANSI standard of C++. I don't dare make assumptions about the limits of interiority of a thing that demonstrates life and perception based on the simplicity of mechanism.
Okay, what's the point of veganism? I can't speak for everyone but I can speak for myself: my veganism is like my anarchism, less a set of rigid rules and more of a committment to liberty and the reduction of suffering.
This commitment runs directly into the fact that to live is, in some sense, to take from the world. You can't avoid using resources. You can't even really avoid things dying so that you live. Even if you are certain that plants cannot suffer it is still true that to eat plants is to kill something that was alive and now it is not. But further we cannot avoid the death of insects when we grow our crops because even if you do not use pesticides to kill them then their larvae will be inside so many of our fruits and vegetables we can't eat them without killing either.
So at that point you're left with either "stop living" or accept that some things die that you may live and, if you accept that all living things might have cognition and a capacity for suffering, we again find ourselves back at the question of how do we reduce suffering/exploitation/pain in the world but without any easy answers.
I know what *isn't* an answer, though, and that's any kind of variant of "I guess this means everything is equally bad so I might as well do whatever".
I also know that capitalism isn't compatible with reducing suffering: it inherently optimizes for production, innovating in cruelty and violence. If we want to minimize the suffering of all life we certainly can't rely on a mode of production that is violent towards all life---the plants, the insects, the livestock animals, and the human workers. Debate over whether there can be an ethical role of animal products in our diet can't even start as long as these animals are raised and killed in horrifying conditions. If we consider the suffering of plants then the way we raise animals for milk, meat, or egg costs far more plant life than we would eat for ourselves.
But what if we've gotten past the era of capital and factory farming, what then?
I don't know. I think at that point we need to start evaluating not just how we take, how we consume, but how we give to the rest of the world. There is no us vs. nature. We are always in the world not a thing apart from it and the ways we change the world are as "natural" as the work of a beaver changing rivers or even a bird building a nest. This becomes more complicated than just "eat plants".
We have to start thinking about how give other living things good lives. We have to actually think about the conditions in which crops are raised and trees are planted, what it means to try and take as non-destructively as we can and, when death is unavoidable, treat it with the seriousness it deserves. We have to rethink our relationship with non-human animals entirely.
I want us to exist in a constructive symbiosis with the world around us, not just replace one kind of factory farming violence with another.