With US beef prices soaring to record highs, you might think that South Dakota cattle rancher Eric Gropper would be celebrating.
Yet while the cost of the meat in US supermarkets is now 12% higher than it was a year ago, a rise more than three times the rate of general inflation, Gropper says that he and all the other beef farmers aren’t making any more profit than usual.
It literally dawned on my dumb ass that you were talking about plants like a half hour later. It’s one of the reasons why I think trees might be the highest form of existence before nirvana. They don’t have to inflict harm or pain to survive (they live off the rain, sun and soil).
My only response to the difference between eating something like, say, lettuce is that I can cut it down to eat off it and it grows back, where I can’t cut down a beef to the hooves and have a cow grow back. But yeah, I have to eat to survive, so vegan at least would free me of doing some of the harm I must cause in the world.
Are there any Buddhist monks out there that can weigh in with an official position on all of this to help a new practitioner (me) out?
But muscle grows back depending on how much energy it consumes. The only difference is we’re fully aware that that happens. If we cut down a tree to its roots its no different to eating a cow to its hooves. Plants are aware because they also need to consume organic matter to live and evolve to do so. If you burry a human corpse under a tree they leech the nutrients that make up the human body to grow stronger and pass on its genes. Parasitic or symbiotic plants and fungi consume live organisms to survive. Is that not an indication of a willingness to survive and therefore a form of consciousness?
You’re assigning human values and desires simply because it’s what you experience. By that same logic, you should be claiming LLMs and even the most basic old-school AI in videogames is conscious.
Physics mandates that the universe move towards its lowest energy state possible. This causes the formation of molecules that allow a release of energy. Some of these have a structure that tends them towards a shape, granting an interior and exterior. Some of these molecules are self-replicating, like proteins.
Now we have proto-life, with self replicating proteins inside the hydrophobic/philic sphere.
Lil tiny skip forward a billion years or so, and we have basic cells with no interiority, but chemical and molecular systems that are 100% reactionary. They actively move towards survival and away from death. Not because they are aware, because those lineages survived when the ones that sat idle and did nothing did not.
It’s easy to see motion as a sign of intelligence, even organization. But crystals are not alive. A cell is alive. Neither is conscious.
Unless you believe in magic, then no amount of science, logic, or conversation, matters.
I have had trees grow back from being cut down to their roots, to a flat stump on the ground. New shoots can come up around the perimeter of the stump.
Most of the mass of a tree is dead anyway, like our hair or fingernails or outer skin layers. The living part of the tree is like a skin on the outside of a massive, dead wooden structure, with another layer of dead tissue (bark) protecting it.
Could be, might be, yeah. 🤷
Because I cause harm/pain in one place doesn’t mean I should cause harm in places where I can choose to avoid doing so.
Sounds like veganism isn’t for you, homie. I still want good things for you anyway.