The thing is, you can't prove being a vegan causes less suffering, whatever proof you come up with will be based on some untestable belief. — leo

Neuroscience is untestable? Nope.

All the science, all the evidence, all the actual tested research points to the ability to suffer in mammals, reptiles, and birds. And it does not point to plants suffering.

I'm sorry you don't want to believe it, but your refusal to believe the facts according to our best current understanding of the world is about as rational as questioning that the earth is a sphere, or that Ancient Egypt existed.

And here we see your inability to think clearly about the issue. — NKBJ

Look, what is convincing on Instagram is not necessarily convincing on a philosophy forum populated with (mostly) thoughtful adults.

Good luck with your post hoc rationalisation of your chosen dogma. You've clearly convinced
yourself. Unfortunately, you haven't convinced anyone else, which suggests two things:

• Firstly, you're easily convinced.
• Secondly, you're arguments are feeble.

Maybe you should stick to venting on social media.

Nice attempt to save face on your way out, but it's pretty obvious you just don't know how to defend your position in light of the facts.

I enjoyed this conversation very much until a statement with a negative intention was used to make a point....
Anyways as days have gone on I've been thinking plants are grown from a stem that branches into roots and extend looking for resources like nutrients and water. Any living thing that pulls on the plant to release it from the soil is ripping fibers and thus the plant species is separated from its source to live. I now compare this idea to a mammals brain stem being damaged in which we will eventually die from being unable to breathe and maintain blood flow to organs leading to your body to not feel any pain, and release hormones to numb and stay alive.
Another example is when I buy flowers they will only stay healthy for a short amount of time in water, so plants are dying when gathered or used as food. They will not feel pain. I dont believe it is immoral anymore.

You do realize you are arguing against morality or ethics existing as anything other than mere feelings and preferences? That you are a human and deserve certain rights is based on an "untestable belief", namely that you are in fact like me. If I feel that this isn't the case, I should not worry about the consequences my actions have for you.

This is a self defeating attitude in practice because you have an interest in being treated like a human by others. You do not, yourself, want to be subject to random whims of preference. If, hypothetically, an alien race catalogued life on earth and categorized which species can be freely consumed and which cannot, you would have an interest that this is done according to the best evidence available to those aliens. You would not want them to choose at random.

you are in fact like me. If I feel that this isn't the case, I should not worry about the consequences my actions have for you. — Echarmion

The problem is not the supposition that similar beings have similar experiences, but rather the supposition that the more dissimilar to me the lesser the ability to suffer. Why should the human be at the acme of a hierarchy of suffering?

You are oversimplifying the argument if you reduce it to a pyramid of suffering with humans at the top.

If you want to make moral judgements, the first step is to figure out what organisms or enties in general should be considered as moral subjects. You can only do that by making a decision based on the immanent, that is observable, attributes of the entities around you.

Whether or not you hold that there is more than one type of moral subject or whether moral considerations can apply to entities that are not subjects, you are going to have to base your categories on available evidence. This is necessarily anthropocentric, since the human perspective is all we are privy to. That doesn't make it arbitrary though.

If you argue that empirical evidence is an insufficient basis for moral judgments, moral judgements are impossible. To use an example: we assume, based on available evidence, that humans can be rendered unconscious by injecting certain substances, and in that state don't feel pain. It would be absurd to argue that because we don't have access to their internal perspective while the drugs are in effect, they might feel terrible pain and therefore such procedures are immoral.

You are oversimplifying the argument if you reduce it to a pyramid of suffering with humans at the top. — Echarmion

I'm not doing this, vegans are.

If you have to kill 100 innocent people or 50 innocent people, but you have to kill some, it's obvious to anyone with a brain that killing 50 is better. — NKBJ

Well, killing 100 people would lower the population more, and we would have to kill less animals AND plants because of less mouths to feed overall. So killing the greater number of people is, in this situation, the "correct" choice. Through this logic, we should start killing loads of people, as it would inhibit the amount of animals and plants killed overall, and would create more space for both of these to procreate. Perhaps only brainless fools would choose to kill 50 people?

I don't think that's an apt comparison. In one scenario you're being forced to choose between two active actions. In the other, you'd be choosing mass killing instead of a countless number of other possible solutions, all in order to potentially avoid potential further deaths that would not directly be caused by your inaction.

Also, I will say that traits like human intellect and potential can be tie-breakers in extreme situations. Like, if you have to choose between killing a criminal nazi and a law-abiding peacenik, you should choose the former. But that doesn't mean you should go out and kill criminal nazis under normal conditions.

Touchè.

'Mimosa is a plant, which looks something like a fern, that collapses its leaves temporarily when it is disturbed. So Gagliano set up a contraption that would drop the mimosa plant, without hurting it. When the plant dropped, as expected, its leaves collapsed. She kept dropping the plants every five to six seconds.

"After five or six drops, the plants would stop responding, as if they'd learned to tune out the stimulus as irrelevent," Pollan says. "This is a very important part of learning — to learn what you can safely ignore in your environment."'

https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-01-09/new-research-plant-intelligence-may-forever-change-how-you-think-about-plants

I'm a veggie so I was quite shocked reading this. Guess we humans need inbuilt solar panels for an ethical energy source.

That's interesting, but really not the same as learning.