Suffering, Veganism, Ants and Plants

In brief: Lessons learned from a conversation with a researcher in the fields of neuroscience and ecology, and connecting the lessons with concepts from fields like Neuroscience, Psychology, Zoology, Veganism, Effective Altruism, Moral Philosophy, and Ethics. The focus is on raising awareness about the potential suffering of non-human animals and plants, dispelling myths related to anthropocentrism, and explaining why it's important.

In this post, I describe some insightful and valuable lessons I learned from talking to an accomplished neuroscientist and ecologist, who is also a social activist, and connecting the lessons with some similar concepts from Neuroscience, Psychology, Zoology, Veganism, Effective Altruism, Moral Philosophy and Ethics with real-life examples from my person experiences. New to this blog? Start here.

This is a post with important and valuable ideas I wish everyone to understand and either adopt or critique, because as always I'm open to a productive debate and changing my mind in light of convincing logical reasons or empirical evidence, but unlike some of my other posts, (as I indicate in the beginning of every post) this one is comparatively lengthy and dense but also more important with some insights and ideas that I notice most people not being aware and hence falling for irrational behaviour inconsistent with their belief system that usually includes values such as kindness, compassion and love for all beings.

If that's not what you believe in, feel free to skip this post to save valuable time and send me a message explaining why you think so, not necessarily because I disagree, I probably don't, but it could be a fruitful discussion if you are open-minded and open to a productive debate. Same goes for everyone who reads it till the end; I'd like to know your comments.

The main focus is going to be on the spreading awareness about the potential suffering experienced by possibly sentient non-human animals and plants, and to dispel some common misconceptions and myths associated with anthropocentrism. I also discuss the problems that arise out of such misconceptions, and why you should even care.

At times, it might seem like I'm talking about unrelated topics, but I am going to tie them all together towards the end and they're going to come together like pieces of a puzzle to reveal a beautiful piece of artwork. I don't know if that's a good metaphor but I think you get the point. So let's start with a simple idea: We think that humans are better than all non-human organisms, or at least that we have something that is different and unique, and in some way better than non-humans.

We have this overly anthropocentric view which in our mind places humans at the center of the Earth as if we are the only sentient or truly intelligent beings, and even the people who don't think so might understandably harbour thoughts of human superiority, give preference to humans over other non-animals and other sentient beings, or at least think that there is something- they would never be able to say quite what- that makes humans different and unique from other species, and that's a bias; I said 'understandable' for this reason because people don't know enough and don't think deeply enough but it's not their fault because they are, well, humans, and it usually doesn't even occur to us to think about such beings, which is the reason I created this post in the first place.

And I was one of such people too, until very recently when I had an insightful discussion with an accomplished researcher who studies both human and non-human brains, and gave me a radical new perspective to think about the world that would very soon give me some interesting ideas budling upon that realization and make me realize something that we are doing very wrong; I know wrong is subjective and there are no objective morals as the more logical and philosophical people would tell me, but nonetheless you would agree with me if you have any trace of conscience and believe that torturing innocent people and making them go through traumatic experiences is wrong. If you don't, please contact me and don't bother with going any further, as you won't get it till we're clear on this.

This is my main idea that I shall attempt to explain and elaborate on in the rest of the post: we must hold all non-human animals and plants at the same level of moral and ethical standards as humans, and treat them the same way we would to humans, attributing to them the same feelings and ability to experience suffering.

We think that just because someone or something can not scream or signal distress in any way that is recognizable to humans, it is not sentient, perhaps not even conscious, hence incapable of going through any sort of feelings of pleasure or pain, anything resembling an internal subjective mental state (qualia) that we, as part of the social contract, believe all humans to possess, and even if we don't- which is very rarely the case- we still act, or rather have to act, as if we do, in the same way that we won't just embrace determinism and reject free-will in one day if it, hypothetically speaking, turns out that now the weight of evidence lies in favour of determinism and it's undeniably true. We just can not. Regardless of the fact that the evidence does already lie in it's favour, but that's not the topic of this post.

Some people- including me, till just a few weeks ago- believe that just because humans are so "successful", having created such a complex society, rockets, particle accelerators, computers and much more, are in some way superior to the "lower" and "inferior" life-forms. The second belief that usually goes hand-in-hand with the first one is that just because some organisms have such tiny brains that are not as complex as us, they probably aren't sentient, simple organisms responding to simple input-output stimuli reacting to a certain way very predictably, such that we can predict their behaviour, and so we don't have the same moral duty towards then as we do towards humans, and they're not capable of experiencing anything morally significant like humans.

Those are the common misconceptions that I'm going to analyze and break down piece by piece till none of the arguments in the main paragraph are left intact and try to help you understand how they are illogical and irrational, highly irrational, and why this is one of the most important topics that you not only should, but ought to care about, and if you have read my other blog posts, you would know I almost never endorse any beliefs of mine or say that anyone should or should not do something, so you would be correct in taking what I just said as a strong indicator that I'm not fooling around and just playing this time, and this is serious, one of the most pressing problems today on this planet, and perhaps one of the least-known and neglected; I have never ever come across a single person who has talked about this or holds similar beliefs, but I'd be more than happy to do so.

First of all attacking the biggest and most erroneous of all baseless assumptions: that humans are sentient and have free will so have moral responsibility and other animals don't because they are just simply responding to stimuli and behaving like robots without being capable of feeling anything significant whatsoever. You can not be further from truth if you believe so. Before explaining why, I would like to say that we are not certain, we don't know enough to say anything for sure, but there are still plenty of good logical reasons to believe in what I am going to propose, because the same lack of evidence and uncertainty applies to humans too, and in fact the current evidence in neuroscience literature actually supports my claim. Anyone who wishes me to provide them with sources and papers and books and a lot of other reliable information from reputed sources is most welcome to request me for it.

There are two ways to bust this myth, and both ways lead to the same logical conclusion, so for our present discussion at least, it doesn't matter which one seems more intuitive or 'right' to you. Choose whatever you happen to like or have a preference for, but if you have any logical reasons against it, then as usual I'm very interested in learning those reasons and changing my mind if you are able to convince me with logic and evidence, and encourage you to reach out if you happen to find any flaws with my reasons, which is very possible.

First solution is to consider the fact that current experiments and the latest scientific literature from neuroscience and behavioural science says that humans are more predictable in terms of both their thoughts and behaviour, regardless of what they happen to believe, because there have been experiments in the past where researchers have been able to predict a subject's thoughts milliseconds before it seems to occur to them, and the interesting part is that when it occurs they think that they themselves thought of it, even when it's predicted in advanced and they have evidence.

This makes sense if you think about it- both if you believe in physics and mathematics, and if you have ever paid the slightest attention to your thoughts and behaviour. Everything in the universe is a physical system following the universal principles and laws of physics, and so if you know every factors that influences a system, you could, in theory, make predictions about the future with a certain amount of accuracy, and in effect learn absolutely everything that has happened in the past and that's going to happen in the future, because after all everything is a continuous chain of cause-and-effect. Given that you have enough computational power and resources to pull off something like that. This is similar to the idea of Spinoza's god and Laplace's demon.

Now consider the fact that the brain, like every other organ in the body and machine in the world, is in essence a physical system, governed by laws of physics and some randomness that can still be accounted for by tools and techniques from Probability theory. The second thing is, if that doesn't make intuitive sense to you, just try to focus on your thoughts the next time you have to make a judgment, or when you listen to a new song or try something new or really just try to be mindful, sitting in silence and trying to have no thoughts at all. You would find that impossible to do, because your brain is continuously generating new thoughts, and unless you are an experienced meditator and presuming you are a human, you would experience the same.

When you have any preference, or have any thought, try to think where it came from, and you'd not be able to find it's origin. It just seems to intuitively occur out of nowhere. Just like me writing this post right now, everything that's coming to my mind, though I might organize it and structure it in a better way if I feel like it later. Same happens with the creative process and when you practice something too well, and it is a common occurrence that happens with every human. Sorry if I'm being too human-centric and you happen to be a non-human and find it offensive or discriminatory, but then also keep in mind that I created this post to generate awareness about being just like you, so bear with me.

So those were two reasons in support of my first solution to the myth we're talking about right now. Humans are probably not any better than "lower" and "simpler" life forms, at least in this regard, even thought it may appear that they are much simpler, and it may be true that our brains might be much more complicated, but that's no reason against what my claim. That tells us very little about our own brain, let alone the brains of other non-human animals, because their brains are paid even less attention to.

The second solution to the myth that, just in case you need a quick recap, says that humans are sentient and have free will so have moral responsibility and other animals don't because they are just simply responding to stimuli and behaving like robots without being capable of feeling anything significant whatsoever. The second way to think about it is essentially this: non-human animals might possess intelligence and levels of consciousness or sentience at par with, or possibly even greater to, human brings. Even if not equal to or greater than, existence of any amount of internal mental experience or subjective state that makes them capable of suffering is enough for the purpose of our present discussion, and the bar isn't too high, which just makes it all the more likely that they possess such mental states.

I'd suggest you check out my book review post of 'the biological mind' if you wish to learn more about how humans are more similar to other animals in terms of behaviour than you might think.

While talking to the professor, I learned that we have a very biased and inaccurate understanding of biological intelligence. Not even coming to Artificial intelligence, which seems to be all the hype nowadays, and for very good reason, though it has several problems and serious issues of it's own that I shall describe in another post, because for now I wish to focus just on biological intelligence. We don't have an accurate and reliable measure of human intelligence.

Not even IQ tests, not by far, because they are inherently biased and give much more value to logical and mathematical ability than the numerous other forms of intelligence that are no lesser but just happen to be less valued by the present society in the time we happen to live in, as people mistakenly think that scientific and technological progress is the only thing that is really worth focusing on, and so that is the only type of intelligence that must be the most superior, rather than, say, artistic, creative, linguistic, musical, or hundreds of other types we haven't even started discovering, and that's just in humans, not even coming to unique types of intelligence in non-human animals.

I'd like to confess that I was exactly like the category of people I just described, though now I realize how incorrect and further from truth and reality it is, and I don't believe that I'm absolutely correct now- we can never be- but I can definitely say with a certain amount of confidence that I'm probably closer to truth, more in line with reality (at least reality that we can perceive, not getting into metaphysics, though it is an important distinction to be aware of) and less wrong than before.

Bees and ant colonies, for instance, display types of intelligence that, in very narrow domains, greatly surpass those of average human beings. Bees and ants are just two examples, and I haven't even described in detail exactly how, but that's because I don't wish to make the post lengthier and more complicated than it already is, but I'd be happy to discuss it in more detail with anyone who is curious and wants to learn more.

Coming to the notion of "success" now: This one is something I believed in for a long time without scrutinizing it or challenging it because it seemed so right, a rookie mistake and very common trap that any good scientist or rationalist should be aware of; trying to analyze each and every single one of your beliefs and thoughts and asking yourself: why do you believe what you believe, is there any counter-evidence or logical reasons to believe in something else, something I have overlooked, what reasons are there for the other alternatives, what reasons are there for me to believe this, other than my intuition and emotions and person preferences etc.

I used to think that humans have invented AI and cars and rockets and brain-computer interfaces and nanotechnology and lots of cool stuff that ants or monkeys could never even possibly conceive of. And that's true, they prolly can not, but that is not because they are less intelligence or inferior in any way, but because ants and bees and monkey don't care about exploring space or doing science.

You'd say "oh then they're not curious to understand themselves and the universe, don't know about logic and science etc." But then once again you are projecting your own human preferences and being too anthropocentric. And consider the fact that even some humans refuse to accept science and play by the rules of logic, despite knowing very well that it makes sense, and delude themselves that makes them susceptible to irrational behaviour.

They care about different things. An extremely dramatic and obviously exaggerated and so highly improbable example just to demonstrate my point: they could know everything about you and themselves and the answer to the universe, life and everything (42?) and everything there is to know and remains to be known and the secret to a happy and fulfilling life, but they don't bother enough to try to communicate with us and find joy in their simple lives. Even if all of that were true, we could never know, because we have never used the scientific method and experimentation, only armchair philosophizing about what could be, which I think everyone reading this is probably smart enough to realize is not how it works in science.

So why do I care? I may have convinced you or at least made you seriously consider the possibility that whatever I said is true. But why and I doing this, what's the point I'm trying to make? Yes, humans could be just like other "simple" input-output organisms responding to stimuli in a predictable manner being governed by the laws of physics and other external factors like genetics and society, and "lower" life-forms such as bees and ants could be capable of experiencing suffering just in the way humans can. So what?

Here is the reason: I have noticed from my childhood days in school that kids feel no apprehension or stop to think for a second before hurting or torturing such insects or animals, even if they do feel somewhat uncomfortable doing the same thing to animals such as cats and dogs, or understand that it's wrong and unethical to do with humans. Leave kids, even most adults don't seem to care, then what reason do kids have! This is highly illogical, consistent and irrational, in my honest opinion.

In fact, my own mom just confessed that she and her friends liked sprinkling salt on earthworms, and I was horrified. She said that at that time kids just don't realize what they're doing, and I know that's true from my own experience, even though I myself have always been policing and trying to make students who torture insects and bugs understand why it's wrong and imagine what they would feel like if the same things were done to them. But then I also did weird stuff like the ant incident I shall describe very shortly, so I'm probably just an outlier or weirdo, a deviant or anomaly that is removed while analyzing data but might be studied later on to modify the existing scientific hypothesis. Anyway.

We must hold the same ethical standards for all possibly sentient beings, because as we just saw, it's equally likely that non-human animals are capable of suffering just like humans, and if there is even a tiny chance that is true, we are unknowingly dishing out huge amounts of suffering to beings that can not convey their mental agony. It'd be like you had no mouth or spoke a language that your torturer can not understand, and you are made to suffer and experience the worst kind of suffering that humans can experience- getting hit on the head or cut with sharp objects or crushed but not enough to die- death would have been very nice in this scenario, much better- and left to walk crippled and disoriented thinking what on Earth just happened and what you did to deserve something like that..

Of course, just to repeat a point I made earlier, we DO NOT know anything for certain. It could be possible that they really are incapable of suffering, but it is possible they are, and- I have explained this in much more detail in other blog posts- in brief, the worst case scenario is too frightening to take any risks, the opportunity costs are too high and I am unable to conceive of a situation or amount of pleasure you would have to be sadistic enough to derive from torturing innocent sentient beings who might be capable of experiencing levels of suffering you could never conceive of in your wildest of imagination, and that too for no good reason and just on a whim cause you're bored or something.

Before coming to another important point, here's an interesting anecdote from my personal experience that left a lasting impression on my memory and that I can still recall, if not vividly, more easily than anything else that might have happened around the same time. It's something I also have somewhere in another post, but it's very relevant to the present discussion so I'm reposting the relevant parts here:

I'd like to preface it with recounting very briefly an incident from my childhood when I mistakenly stepped on an ant, despite always trying my best to avoid stepping on them while walking. I consider myself a stoic person and don't get too emotional very easily, but tears started clouding my vision and I was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and shame, because it was uncertain whether it was unconscious, and the poor ant could have been deprived of a lot of pleasurable experiences- if it's capable of experiencing such emotions- I experienced intense guilt and negative emotions when I realized that I killed an ANT, a helpless and possibly sentient being that might have experienced large amounts of unbearable suffering in thee last moments of their life but didn't have any medium to express their anguish and mental agony and convey their predicament, and the loss of all net positive experiences and pleasure they could have had, while it was uncertain if the net positive would outweigh the potential net negative, because if the latter were true then I did them a favour, but regardless I know that I didn't know and now I can never know and my brain is just coming up with clever rationalizations to justify my heinous act (after all I wouldn't let it go so easily had I killed a human or stepped on a human-like tiny being), and so it was very foolish to step on the ant without knowing for some certainty if that were the case, but again it was by mistake, a costly one for the ant, and for me too had I been an unthinking automaton like the majority of my fellow humans with an overly anthropocentric view of the universe and no regard for the mental states of other possible sentient life forms coexisting with us; same for plants by the way. Now I know that the ant could be sentient, though I can't say for sure, but more importantly, I know that it is futile to obsess over something that I can not control now, an ant that is already dead, who probably can't be brought back to life, and even if it can, it might take resources and time not worth the effort, so the opportunity costs would be too high and the project unrealistic or infeasible, hence the rational thing to do is just learn from the experience and extract as many lessons as I can, and move on while keeping those lessons in mind so I never repeat such a mistake in the future, or connect those experiences with information I might acquire going forward that would help me generate some useful insights or discover more about myself and my true values. That's just one incident that left a lasting impression in my mind such that I still remember it, not as vividly but still much better than anything else that might have took place around that time, things I have mostly forgotten now. There have been several instances in my early childhood when I used to tell my peers that it's wrong to bother ants by trying to corner then or close off their movement on ground using their hands as sort of walls or borders, let alone squashing them for fun. And I actually cried when I first saw a video of chick culling, which I'd encourage you to not look up, or actually I should, because it's an issue that people need to be more aware about and a startling illustration of the cruelty some humans are capable of.

And that's given the fact that I actually like reading about true crime, serial killers and psychopaths. And much more stuff that I am not sure I would like to share on a public blog post, regardless of the fact that very few people would click on this post, and even fewer would read till this point.

No, that definitely does not include somethin ridiculous like satisfying my sociopathic urges by going out once in a while in my parent's unused car with a toolkit to hunt down some bad guys at 3 AM every weekend.. obviously not! Haha. (I hope that did not come off as oddly specific) sweating profusely, a hint of a twisted smirk giving off unsettling eerie vibes indicating something ominous and secret that the narrator is not revealing and flashbacks of a memory that the narrator is proud of and derives great pleasure from..

Coming back to the main topic. Getting serious once again. As if that's not already enough- and I think you would have guessed if you had paid attention to the title- I'd now come to something that is even more neglected.. plants. Yes, I know you might think I'm being ridiculous here and that you might have been willing to hear me out for ants and bees but plants, seriously? Well, read this: https://www.livescience.com/plants-squeal-when-stressed.html

Does that come as a shock to you? It did to me, because they could have been suffering all this time, and people are much much more careless than animals and veganism. If they suffer.. well that'd be bad, to say the least, putting it very mildly.

The question of whether plants experience suffering is a topic of ongoing debate in the scientific community. While plants lack a central nervous system and brain, which are thought to be necessary for the experience of pain in animals, some researchers have proposed that plants may have alternative mechanisms for sensing and responding to their environment that could be considered a form of suffering. However, there is currently no scientific consensus on whether or not plants experience suffering in the same way that animals do.

Though if everyone was to accept that plants do suffer, it might have some interesting implications and consequences, to say the least. It would be kind of like what I described earlier in this post with determinism.. it would be an absurd and hilarious- in a twisted, cynical and grim kind of way-

As one person commented when I talked to him about this idea: " if we were to accept that plants should be treated with just as much caution as people, that would have some… interesting consequences, right? Like, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to live life without ‘harming’ plants. The food you eat comes from plants. When you walk outside, you likely trample some plants. When you drive /are driven somewhere, you’re trampling plants. The stuff you purchase involves plants being killed. The average person is responsible for the deaths of innumerable plants every day. If we’re really to accept the premise that we should treat a plant as being as significant as a human, then are you not doing something akin to squashing hundreds of humans to death every single day of your life?"

Which is I won't go into much detail. I know it's a very unconventional idea and we need some time and more evidence cause it will be useless even if we gathered evidence in favour- this might be one of those very rare instances when ignorance really is bliss.

Because till we are uncertain we could just assume that plants are not conscious and keep doing what we're doing, because if we investigate it too deeply and discover that plants, after all, are sentient, then it would be a very absurd, in a certain sense of the word if you understand what I mean. In a way that would be like.. what the hell does the universe want, making such a universe with such absurd laws..

But if we can take it slow, just keep this idea in mind that yes it is possible, but wait till we are more prepared to face the solution- including knowing how to deal with the worst case scenario- something like lab-based meat or something that won't have plants suffer, or something that could make plants suffer less using something like anesthesia for plants or killing them painlessly if we have no choice and that's the only way to survive.. then we could try to find the real solution, but not before.

Won't get into that for now, and briefly talk about a few related topics. I have presented my main arguments, and I think that's adequate evidence and reason to convince you in case you had not made up your mind, and I'd like to know what you think about it or any comments you'd like to share. but now just very briefly going to explore some related areas, implications and real life applications: Veganism and Effective Altruism.

By the way, I wish to avoid coming off and being perceived as a sadistic being who derives pleasure from keeping people up at night, at least the rational people who believe that suffering is wrong and themselves won't prefer to suffer, values such as compassion, kindness and love for all beings on Earth for instance, and so I also won't tell you about the possibility of consciousness, sentience and suffering in machines. You're welcome.

A person I was talking to recently convinced me that Veganism is something you must, if not immediately adopt and start practicing in your life due to habit or other constraints, at least seriously consider and logically understand is the right thing to do if you believe in minimizing and eventually eradicating suffering for all sentient beings on Earth.

Before proceeding, a brief note on "unnecessary suffering": I have also covered this idea in detail in other posts, but I'll summarize because this distinction is important, even if just for the sake of accuracy and because as you might have already realized I just happen to derive pleasure from being a pedant like overthinking and analyzing the smallest details and exceptions and applying logic in areas people can't imagine.

The summary is that some levels of suffering are optimal to flourishing of any being, at least humans, but we don't know what those levels are and the cost-benefit analysis doesn't check out even after taking into account the amount of time and resources that would go into implementing such a project, so it's best and the rational thing, at least in my opinion according to my preferences and values, to try to eradicate all forms of suffering for all sentient beings on the planet, and that's one of the goals higher on my priority list and that features in several of my research questions.

Coming back to Veganism: After talking to the person I realized that it is a philosophy, not just a diet, that I already practice it as I believe that suffering is bad, both philosophically and diet-wise, and now I'll present it's main points to you, as explained by the same person who introduced me to Veganism.

A vegan is someone who 'avoids harming and exploiting animals as far as is practicable'. The biggest thing the average person can do to this effect is to adopt a plant-based diet, but being a vegan is a philosophical commitment to avoiding all exploitations and harm to animals. If someone eats plant-based 95% of the time, but enjoys a bit of meat once a month, they cannot be a vegan, they're just someone who mostly eats plant based

Just keep in mind that I'm not saying you must adopt it, even if you agree with it but you happen to be a non-vegetarian or huge consumer of dairy products, at least you will be aware of this philosophy and be able to make more informed decisions, so even if you decide to not change your ways, at least you would be aware for the consequences of your actions and the suffering you're directly responsible for. Not trying to make it sound bad, just putting it the way it is, clearly and directly.

If you are still reading this post, you are also likely to be smart enough to understand why it is unwise to act on your selfish desires and impulses with scrutinizing them with logic and reason, and why it would be a horrible idea to rely on and act upon your intuitive thoughts and impulses without thinking about them rationally.

And so it logically follows that you also must believe in overriding selfish and irrational thoughts if you logically and rationally believe that something is ethical and the correct thing to do even if it happens to be against your biological desires, and that you must practice enough self-control and restraint to act consistently and rationally according to your values and beliefs to avoid cognitive dissonance and do what, according to you, is right, rather than what is easy.

A small but significant clarification: I'm not even saying that you should not kill ants or insects or bugs. I am just saying that you ought to apply the same ethical standards to all possibly sentient beings, meaning that if you believe that killing humans, torturing them and making them suffer is unethical and wrong, then you must apply the same standards to ants too, because they could have the same capacity to suffer as most humans. On the other hand, if you think that ethics and morality are invented concepts and don't apply to you and you don't really care if humans suffer or die, well, then you're doing nothing inconsistent or irrational going against your values or beliefs by doing the same for bugs or insects.

Someone might say ants are small and mistakes happen. Yes, that is true, but that is not relevant to this discussion, and a different thing. If you make mistakes, it's not deliberate and conscious, you are not using your logical system-2 mind (see post 'thinking fast and slow') and it's fine if such incidents occur, but you should consciously and logically acknowledge that if you have mistakenly killed an ant, you should care- if you would care had it been a human, that is- and you should make sure that you don't repeat such mistakes in the future and are more careful.

That's it- you should logically know that what you did was wrong, regardless of anything that you did by mistake, a mistake that you must learn from, because all mistakes and failures are opportunities to learn and grow; not just mistakes, it applies to all your personal experiences, which is why it helps to be mindful of your actions and behaviour and scrutinize them with logic whenever you can, at least when something like the life and well-being of sentient organisms is at stake. This way you would be a little more well-informed and rational than the average mindless automaton who never thinks or cares what they do or even try to learn about themselves and discover what their values and beliefs are.

As Socrates apparently said, "The unexamined life is not worth living". And this is a theme that is going to repeat throughout my posts, always present in the background even if not explicitly stated, because it's a part of living a fulfilling life aligned with your values, and gaining as much freedom as humanly possible from all external factors that make you act irrationally and more likely to make irrational decisions that are bad- or less than optimal- for you, and taking it as far as possible, testing how far we're able to control and manipulate it according to our best self-interests, while also somehow maintaining your sense of 'self'; don't worry if that doesn't make sense; it's not supposed to, and I'll explain in other posts.

I'll now very briefly touch upon Effective Altruism, or EA, and talk about some theories I built by taking inspiration from Dr. Peter Singer's ideas, but I won't go into too many details here because the post is already too lengthy and dense, and the idea if crazy enough to push your beyond the limit of sanity if you're not already there after getting exposed to the ideas I talked about in this post, or maybe you're just numb and it would take time to internalize and your brain would soon click as your subconscious tries to make sense of it. I'm not exaggerating, that's how it happened with me, and that's how I believe learning takes place and the mysterious but somewhat understood and fascinating creative and novel insight-generation process works.

In brief, it's about extending the analogy of the main ideas of EA to one of our most valuable resources in life that we constantly overlook, and that is an unconventional way to think yet concerning one of the most important issues- the same issue we just discussed- that is eradicating unnecessary suffering, but this one just specific to humans and related to topics like poverty and the income-disparity.

And connecting this idea with how society has conditioned us to overlook important social issues and maintain the status-quo of those in power, who get to make important decisions in ways that we are not even aware of, something I earlier felt is just a preference to be respected, which it kind of is but it's much more complicated.

That also reminds me to also create the post about applying social egalitarianism as applied to external factors- especially biological but also sociological- that we completely disregard yet that play a central role in making us who we are determining everything we value in life, including our cognitive abilities and personality traits, and is also related to suffering. It's something similar to the topics I talk about in my post 'This spoke Zarathustra'.

It could be a three part- or possibly more- series of blog posts exclusively focusing on the topic of suffering, because no one shall unnecessary suffer; and I just had my fourth idea, a project I'm working on related to using AI and neurofeedback to cure a mental illness, childhood trauma, and some exciting stuff related to anger, cognition and rationality. I'm writing all this just as a reminder for myself and also so you could keep checking the blog every few weeks or so in case you or anyone you know happens to be interested in the topics or problems I just mentioned, or you just like learning about new ideas and ways to help people and create a better society.

Just in case you're curious how I came up with these ideas and made the connections, it's a useful technique you might find useful in your own research or startup ideation activities, and very simply involves nothing more than just writing down your thoughts and experiences and consciously connecting them with previously-acquired information and topics that might seem unrelated at first but analogically similar in structure. I might explain this and other such thinking, ideation and brainstorming tools and techniques in another blog post.

And then there was this article that motivated me to create a post about something I was already planning to write about: https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musks-medical-firm-neuralink-accused-of-welfare-violations-after-killing-1-500-animals-in-four-years-report-12762508

To make my stance clear, it's wrong, though I myself realize how inadequate and silly that might sound to a certain category of people who don't already agree with me, believe it or intuitively understand it, cause "wrong" is subjective and that morality and ethics, good and evil right and wrong are all psychological and social constructs and the universe doesn't care what you do and nothing matters in the long term; there are no absolute objective morals or ethics free of human perception and it's all subjective.

And it doesn't matter whether or not you believe that because the people who are capable of doing such stuff usually do believe and unlike us happen to lack any conscience or internal moral compass, so they are the ones we need to convince because all the rest won't do- more like can't do- such stuff anyway; something I discuss in great detail in my post 'Logical reasons to be ethical' and 'Thus spoke Zarathustra'.

With that said, I do believe that there are some circumstances under which we could be more logical if a minimum amount of suffering or no suffering at all- and we have ways to do that- that would outweigh the costs by preventing large amounts of greater future suffering to be an overall net-positive, as Utilitarians like to put it.

https://dhruved2004.wixsite.com/arcturus/post/scrutinizing-the-current-ethical-standards-in-science-from-a-long-term-perspective

And coming back to the type of people I mentioned- who don't have an internal moral compass and might think killing people is not unethical in an absolute way- which it is not, because it's a social contract, which is not any less important- but more importantly, which we all intuitively understand but they don't. For a real life example of such a people, a psychopath, who I once upon a time not too long ago talked to, check out my post 'Courage, Call for compassion, Thinking Fast and Slow..'.

And if you think that I have been overanalyzing stuff and being too unrealistic, well, first of all I enjoy overanalyzing, second, this is important stuff with suffering at stake (even if it was just painless death I would not have put in this much effort to explain the idea but there is suffering and in my opinion, suffering is much worse than death.)

Third, I didn't even take into account the Panpsychism stuff, that says everything could be conscious, which is one extreme, and the other end which says every human could a p-zombie meaning they don't have any subjective mental states, just pretend as if they do, or perhaps Solipsism, because that would get too abstract and even though I like abstraction I don't wanna get into metaphysics now.

Before ending, another quote from one of my all-time favourite books written by Eleizer Yudkowsky, with the protagonist being one of the most relatable characters I have ever come across in fiction, and this time Harry had it exactly right, and it was so hilarious when I first read it, and somewhat relatable, if you remember my personal experience with that ant, but I never thought that had I investigated and analyzed this earlier, I could have realized what I have now realized much sooner. Here's the excerpt, out of context, yet enough for you to find it interesting and get the point, though I could be mistaken:

You've got to eat something, said his inner Slytherin. And it's not all that much more likely that anyone sneezed self-awareness onto poultry than onto plants, so as long as you're eating food of questionable sentience either way, why not eat the delicious deep-fried Diracawl slices?

I'm not quite sure that's valid utilitarian logic, there -

Oh, you want utilitarian logic? One serving of utilitarian logic coming up: Even in the unlikely chance that some moron did manage to confer sentience on chickens, it's your research that stands the best chance of discovering the fact and doing something about it. If you can complete your work even slightly faster by not messing around with your diet, then, counterintuitive as it may seem, the best thing you can do to save the greatest number of possibly-sentient who-knows-whats is not wasting time on wild guesses about what might be intelligent. It's not like the house elves haven't prepared the food already, regardless of what you take onto your plate.

Harry considered this for a moment. It was a rather seductive line of reasoning -

Good! said Slytherin. I'm glad you see now that the most moral thing to do is to sacrifice the lives of sentient beings for your own convenience, to feed your dreadful appetites, for the sick pleasure of ripping them apart with your teeth -

What? Harry thought indignantly. Which side are you on here?

His inner Slytherin's mental voice was grim. You too will someday embrace the doctrine... that the end justifies the meats. This was followed by some mental snickering.

Ever since Harry had started worrying that plants might also be sentient, his non-Ravenclaw components had been having trouble taking his moral caution seriously. Hufflepuff was shouting Cannibalism! every time Harry tried to think about any food item whatsoever, and Gryffindor would visualize it screaming while he ate it, even if it was, say, a sandwich -

Cannibalism!

AIIIEEEE DON'T EAT ME -

Ignore the screams, eat it anyway! It's a safe place to compromise your ethics in the service of higher goals, everyone else thinks it's okay to eat sandwiches so you can't use your usual rationalization about a small probability of a large downside if you get caught -

Harry gave a mental sigh, and thought, Just so long as you're okay with us being eaten by giant monsters that didn't do enough research into whether we were sentient.

I'm okay with that, said Slytherin. Is everyone else okay with that? (Internal mental nods.) Great, can we go back to deep-fried Diracawl slices now?

Not until I've done some more research into what's sentient and what isn't. Now shut up. And Harry turned firmly away from his plate full of oh-so-tempting vegetables to head toward the library -

Just eat the students, said Hufflepuff. There's no doubt about whether they're sentient.

You know you want to, said Gryffindor. I bet the young ones are the tastiest.

Harry was starting to wonder if the Dementor had somehow damaged their imaginary personalities.

"Honestly," said Hermione. The young girl's voice sounded a little acerbic as her gaze scanned the bookshelves of the Herbology stacks in the Hogwarts library. Harry had left her a message asking if she could come to the library after she'd finished breakfast, which Harry had skipped; but then when Harry had introduced the day's topic she'd seemed a bit nonplussed. "You know your problem, Harry? You've got no sense of priorities. An idea gets into your head and you just go running straight off after it."

"I've got a great sense of priorities," said Harry. His hand reached out and grabbed Vegetable Cunning by Casey McNamara, and began to flip through the starting pages, searching for the table of contents. "That's why I want to find out whether plants can talk before I eat my carrots."

"Don't you think that maybe the two of us have more important things to worry about?"

You sound just like Draco, Harry thought, but of course didn't say out loud. Out loud he said, "What could possibly be more important than plants turning out to be sentient?"

There was a pregnant silence from beside him, as Harry's eyes went down the table of contents. There was indeed a chapter on Plant Language, causing Harry's heart to skip a beat; and then his hands began to rapidly turn the pages, heading for the appropriate page number.

"There are days," said Hermione Granger, "when I really, truly, have absolutely no idea what goes on inside that head of yours."

"Look, it's a question of multiplication, okay? There's a lot of plants in the world, if they're not sentient then they're not important, but if plants are people then they've got more moral weight than all the human beings in the world put together. Now, of course your brain doesn't realize that on an intuitive level, but that's because the brain can't multiply. Like if you ask three separate groups of Canadian households how much they'll pay to save two thousand, twenty thousand, or two hundred thousand birds from dying in oil ponds, the three groups will respectively state that they're willing to pay seventy-eight, eighty-eight, and eighty dollars. No difference, in other words. It's called scope insensitivity. Your brain imagines a single bird struggling in an oil pond, and that image creates some amount of emotion that determines your willingness to pay. But no one can visualize even two thousand of anything, so the quantity just gets thrown straight out the window. Now try to correct that bias with respect to a hundred trillion sentient blades of grass, and you'll realize that this could be thousands of times more important than we used to think the whole human species was... oh thank Azathoth, this says it's just mandrakes that can talk and they speak regular human language out loud, not that there's a spell you can use to talk with any plant -"

Harry's hands had stopped turning pages. It seemed that Harry's brain, for all its abstract knowledge, was still incapable of appreciating scope on any real emotional level, because it had just forcibly redirected his attention away from trillions of possibly-sentient blades of grass who might be suffering or dying even as they spoke, and toward the life of a single human being who happened to be nearer and dearer.

Edit: Just to clarify in case anyone has the wrong ideas about my association with the rationalism community, I like separating the art from the artist, and whatever you might think about Yudkowsky, this book remains my favourite because it's a work of fiction and the character is relatable, and you don't judge a fictional character's beliefs and ideas by relating it to the author, at least I don't, even something like HPMOR that teaches the methods of rationality and has mostly legit science, I'm aware of controversies that might make some people think that I've fallen prey to ideology, but the truth is that the rationality I'm attracted to is built upon my core-values of curiosity, scientific skepticism, critical thinking and logic.

I'm not necessarily saying that Eleizer is wrong, (he has some great posts that I have enjoyed reading and that have been insightful for me, aligned with my own values) I'm just saying that even though his rationality seems a lot like my own idea of it, I haven't gone through all his sequences and posts to say anything for sure at this point of time, and so I won't comment on my thoughts related to it, but I just had an interesting idea, something I've not done with my other posts but that I could try doing more. Here's a link in case you wish to dive deeper into what I think about the rationalism and LessWrong community: https://www.reddit.com/r/aspergers/comments/11dipg6/comment/ja93rwi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Today I went out, breaking my social isolation of almost two months, to meet up with some of my buddies, socialize and hang out with my cool gang, flaunt my killer dance moves in a party, chill with homies and hook up with my girlfriend. Okay, that's too ridiculous, not even funny. Yes, it was a joke yet came off as a very obvious lie. I did go out, but the purpose was something much more important than the aforementioned time-wasting activities which I have no interest in. I attended a talk by an European Animal Ethics professor who visited India this week to give a talk about his research interests in some of the major insitutions of my city. Before coming to the lessons I learned and how they connect with my post, a little about my experience with the event.

You could skip but I can assure you it's interesting and I won't bore you with details that arne't worth sharing, and I'm definitely not sharing my experience in my post because I don't have anyone else to share it with, nope, of course not. To start with, I walked into the meeting two minutes late, and I'm still feeling bad for not being punctual because first impression matters- not that I care about such superficial stuff or that I think the professor was stupid enough to fall for such biases, but I do care what the professor thinks because he works in a field related to my research interests (and other reasons I explain in my post The World's Most Selective University) and because being aware of a bias doesn't necessarily mean you won't fall for it and I know the professor wasprobably smart enough to know even that, but we can never be sure because even someone who doesn't would think that they do.

So, it would have been rational to arrive two minutes earlier, even though he was still at the introduction slides of the talk, and I was late because of traffic, which maybe I could have taken into account and planned accordingly but I was busy with projects and so didn't think of it and foresight and forecasting are two of the important skills that I still haven't intrnalized by the process of deliberate conscious learning for it to have occurred to my brain automatically in a novel real-life situation like this, not have I indirectly trained any neural processes responsible for such higher-order executive functions related to planning that could have enhanced my skills transferable to real-world situations.

But again I might just be rationalizing to justify my mistake posteriori, but I admit it was a mistake and as you see I've not only learned my lesson but writing it down as clearly as possible to not just myself internalize and embed it into my memory so as to not repeat any similar mistake in the future by increasing the probability or likelihood of me retaining such a memory (if not by re-reading my notes; though that's how learning takes place even in non-human animals, and the animal keeps repeating a mistake till they are conditioned to avoid repeating it again, or until they simply just don't have another chance to repeat that mistake due to nonexistence.

But I, as a human, have abilities that allow me to learn faster, even compared to AI- more specifically artificial neural networks- which I admit does learn much faster, but require much more input of test cases to learn from compared to humans, who take much longer to learn but need fewer instances than AI, which is why I should probably learn from few instances rather than repeat a mistake large enough that is more costly and won't be fixed or overlooked so easilty.) but also sharing my experience with others so they can learn the lessons from my personal experiences and failures and also learn how to extract abstract general lessons from personal experiences so as to detect such prinicples in novel situations which belong to the set or category of all such situations all connected at an abstract level, as everything seems to be (I'm not sure, it's a hypothesis of mine) connected if we look at the right level of abstraction just like everything is connected by a chain of cause-and-effect. (I also have an idea in which all people could write about their experiences with the help of a language assistant, AI, BCIs and- let's not go too off-tangent here. More thoughts on mistakes: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhruve-dahiya-045327234_rejections-coping-acceptance-activity-7039130511088234496-anaC?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop)

I arrived, and the first impression has been made, but very soon I make it worse in a much more apparent and clear manner, but for this I have no regrets at all. I ask questions, of course. I have been to only one such event before where an accomplished and reputed journalist and the vice president of a large national newpaper were giving a speech and talked about several ideas similar to what I described in my post 'Heated Arguments' and I had so much to say that I was acting restless and my mind was exploding and stupid me didn't realize I already have a notepad in my bad and I took it out and started writing everything and it took several pages to write short notes. But it was a large gathering and I was not so confident at that time speaking out so I didn't speak up or even approach them later.

But this time, not just the crowd was smaller, but I was also much more confident and expressive, less anxious or afraid of judgment. I started asking questions related to what he said, questioning him to seek calrification on what he talked about or ask tangentially related questions (sometimes a bit too much; twice he told me the questions are beyond the scope of this event and I was reminded of how the psychology teacher used to say the same thing when I interrupted her to ask questions every few minutes.) His reply to most of my questions was simply we don't know. As expected from something that's the cutting-edge in philosophy, and animal ethics, of all topics, I was not too surprised with the response and I don't know what I was even expecting. But I did get to learn some great stuff I was previously unaware of and that I'll share with you.

The thing is, as I write in the very beginning of the meta-post, I have been trying to now stop writing- or at least expanding upon my posts- and focus on my other projects (and get some sleep) and so I'm not going to talk about all the lessons I learned there, because now I have realized that I go off-tangents more wildly than before and maybe it's good but there's a limit after which writing more is not worth the expected utility even taking into account the best-case scenario becasue the opportunity costs are too high; in simple words, the time and effort I devote to writing a post and explaining stuff in greater detail would now be better spent on my other projects.

And so, I will focus on a few topics according to my mood- yes, if I'm deciding to rely on my mood, you can rest assured that it's rational and the potential consequences are all acceptable and taken into account and the situation isn't too high-stakes and hence it's okay to do so. I keep trying to explain the same thing in different ways, and connect it with others stuff I somehow learn even though I'm not learning anything new these days and not even going out of house- my brain is acting weird, even by my own standards. So, if you are interested in this topic, feel free to send me a message and I'd be happy to discuss the points in greater detail and also share more lessons and insights I gained from that even so the stuff I learned by annoying the professor with my questions can be useful to others too.

I will also just paste a message I will share later that I posted in a discussion with a physicist about the philosophy of science, and if you're interested in just the most important lesson- or rather question- I learned- trying to solve- then skip ahead by searching for the next occurrence of the world 'falsifiable' on this page. Here's a brief version of all lessons: we know how to vaccinate animals and insects against certain diseases but we do so for our selfish needs (cause and effect, butterfly effect, dialectical materialism, whatever you wish to call it: another logical reason to be ethical, or rather another logical reason to follow my own idea of morality which is not just do no harm but also help those who suffer).

We apply different moral standards to different animals depending on your selfish needs and emotions they produce in us. If we believe sentient beings should not suffer- if we believe we would not like to be tortured, and so torturing humans is bad, then hurting fish ought to be as bad as hurting chickens or cats or cows or shrimps or crabs or birds or even plants. I realize the implications of the last one, and for a deeper discussion of that topic, you could check out my post 'Veganism'. We should also keep in mind that how our actions are harming other animals, and even if we continue doing so, just be aware that it doesn't exceed a certain limit or that at least we know we're responsible; the limit and responsibility all being unclear and uncertain not just because more academic research is required on this topic but also because it involves subjective value judgments.

I believe that I should attend more such events, and more importantly have a university where such all lectures are so stimulating and thought-provoking, and no one stops me from asking questions because of any time-limit or any other number of reasons that prevents a visiting professor from engaging in a detailed discussion and debate about such ideas. In the past when I reached out to professors and researchers from all over the world to discuss their research interests and ask them questions, (see my post Reflection on Insights) kids used to ask me how I do this and thought that it's hard and didn't seem to know that's even possible, reaching out to professionals working in a field you wish to work in the future, related to your dream career.

I used to tell them that anyone can do it. You just need to know what your interests are, have some background knowledge to have a decent conversation with the researchers, and even if not add to their points and ask additional questions in real-time, at least understand what they're saying and have some good questions in mind. Almost every researcher I contacted was very helpful and commended me on my motivation and passion for the topics we discussed, which made me more confident in my abilities which helped to counter the feeling of not being good enough, self-doubt and inferiority complex that I'm training myself to not let such things influence my confidence.

In the event, I didn't ask any questions that I had prepared in advance. I did use some previously acquired knowledge in that domain, but the vast majority of the questions and the information and knowledge required to understand the topics and ask the questions was on-the-spot because the event was an introductory one and no prior knowledge was required, so it also helps to have the ability to understand a topic deeply enough to be able to come up with good questions on the spot, definitely not to sound clever or smart in front of the students or professor- that's foolish had irrational and I see no good reason to do so- but to gain clarity on your doubts and topics that you wish to learn more about. You need to be genuinely curious to learn the answer about the questions, and not waste the professor's previous time and your own time and mental energy for something you don't actually care about and are just doing for the sake of some superficial social construct that is not benefitting anyone in any way. The professor would also probably be smart enough to know when someone is doing that.

I personally believe that not just non-human animals, but even plants are sentient and conscious, even though the professor in the event gave me some references and readings that show how plants probably aren't sentient, yet I presented him with some good logical arguments that he admitted complicated this matter and made it very unclear, and that they don't know and can't say..

Pasting this discussion from the community I mention in my post Roko's Basilisk. You don't need knowledge of that post for the following question, and in fact you'd have more context having read this post than the people in the community I posted this in who haven't read it.

Mathematician-Physicist: "Whilst experiment is incredibly important to investigate our observations and validate/disprove our theories, is it necessary for all theories to be falsifiable? For example some theories such as inflation, which is mathematically sound and could resolve deep philosophical questions about the universe, are very difficult to definitively prove wrong (at least for the time being as far as I'm aware). Perhaps we could adopt a more 'innocent until proven guilty' approach; although non-falsifiable theories certainly shouldn't just be accepted as true, we should keep our minds open to the possibility that they could be and the potential consequences of this to our current understanding. Categorising theories based on how well supported they are by experiment could help keep a record of these more hypothetical ideas and their predictions and separate them from established models. Let me know if you disagree with this or if anything I've said is inaccurate"

Me: "Thank you for starting this discussion, as it's something I've been thinking because of a recent event I attended by Dr. Oscar Horta who has come to my city to give some introductory lectures in animal ethics, and there's a lot of interesting stuff but I'll try to stick to the topics relevant to this discussion. I'll start from what I have been thinking about falsifiability and move on to why I think we need to come up with some sort of absolute reliable criteria to know how to act when something isn't falsifiable but important and concerns real-world possibly sentient beings suffering.

On falsifiability, please correct me if I'm wrong as this is my current best belief and I haven't read too much about philosophy of science but I'd like to learn more and updated by beliefs if there are better ways of doing it or any flaws in the logic: If a theory is not falsifiable, it's not scientific. Because if a theory is not falsifiable, you can interpret it to mean literally anything. Until just a few weeks ago, I used to suspect this is true, but my belief has grown stronger now after I invented some concrete algorithms or techniques involving philosophical logic, language and psychology, and with them you can convince anyone of anything if you have the right credentials, power, know the right words and how to say it, and also be perfectly logical while doing so.

At least the general public, you can convince them very easily, because the more intelligent people might detect some flaws but I'm confident that they can only come up with rationalizations for another perspective and not prove you wrong unless they somehow 1) find the nature of reality, or 2) develop AGI. I think even 2 would be insufficient. I came up with the tools on my own but I strongly suspect that like always some ancient philosopher would probably have something similar only if I tried to find, haven't got the time to do so yet. I won't talk about them here but will try to post them in the articles section once I publish them on my blog.

The important point is that if something is not falsifiable, intelligent people with evil intentions could influence large groups of people to act irrationally, skew their sense of morality- probably why it's so hard to change old established outdated traditions that cause harm. If a theory is not falsifiable, you would never have any logical criteria- the scientific method, the current best criterion we have- to test it, and so you can, with the right logical and language skills, interpret it to mean anything, and people will be convinced- if not all, then still a significant amount.

And that's the stuff that cults and pseudoscientific salesmen do to get what they want, which is also supported by current psychological and neuroscientific evidence on psychopaths and sociopaths. I have some book and research papers recs and logical reasons for not just this, but everything I say, in case anyone is interested in learning more. Won't make this longer than it is. And so people would fall for ideology, dogmatic beliefs that they won't change because it's impossible- I can't conceive of a situation in which- you also adopt a 'scientific' theory that is non-falsifiable, but then also not rely on your intuition and emotions and blind faith and when you do that you get closed-minded rigid and not open to changing your mind and it gets harder which is why you don't adopt any non-falsifiable theories.

Now I will connect this with Dr. Horta's talk (which I will describe later in an article but I got to learn a lot by annoying him with questions till I had to be told to stop; when I asked for his email he warned me to not bombard him with more questions when that was exactly what I had in mind LOL I'm trying my best not to let my subconscious desires influence my behaviour, still not sent that mail..) and then have a question, a very important question because this involves beings suffering, and anyone who thinks that suffering is bad should try to understand and solve this problem. Everything I said before is going to be relevant for the next part, as it won't make any sense otherwise.

In a very brief and very simplified- I hope not oversimplified because I've tried to prevent any significant info loss- Dr. Horta said that sentient non-human animals suffer and it's our moral duty to help them. I asked him, why just non-human animals, why not plants and bugs and insects? (I have good reasons and evidence to believe that's true, and I still do, but won't go into details here) He said that it's about brain structure, but we can't say anything for sure- we don't know. Then he said that we should still try our best to prevent suffering for all sentient beings, but not plants, just because he thinks plants don't seem to be sentient but he doesn't know, and here I disagree but I'll stick to the main topic.

That was basically his answer to all my important questions- don't know. But then he said we need more academic research. And I asked him this- this is the important question I alluded to, and due to which all the context was necessary in my opinion- He said that we need academic research to be sure. He also said that he talked to some physicists and realized we can never be absolutely certain. And I knew that it's impossible to prove anything, be 100% sure, which is why we need falsifiable theories and open-mindedness is one of the pillars of the scientific method, and why probabilistic thinking is so useful, so it made sense. So this is my question- what level of academic research is required before we take action, keeping in mind that we can never be certain, what's the limit of certainty above which we should act, keeping in mind the opportunity costs of the sentient non-human and other beings suffering, or in other words, taking into account the possibly sentient beings experiencing preventable suffering that could have been prevented had we taken action earlier?

How much are we willing to trade-off the risk that on the planet billions of sentient beings are experiencing intense negative emotions and undesirable subjective mental states, and when would the cost to take action be worth it- at what level of research and certainty, and what level of suffering would we be unwilling to risk, considering that we would never ourselves want to suffer like that (this question also has implications for neurolaw and human criminals but I won't get into that here) so when would the costs of interventions with their expected utility or benefits outweigh the possible downsides or the worst-case scenario? We need to figure it out soon not just because bioethics happens to be one of my primary research interests, closely related to neuroscience and real-world societal problems, but also because we can't afford to not take action when possibly sentient beings could be in pain. (I think I've already written a little about this in my blog post already shared in the articles section title 'Veganism')

Edit: I had to edit the edit because I realized it exceeded the word limit but then I posted a new message and realized it still has the word edit and so I had to actually write edit to avoid confusion or misunderstanding, never mind. I realized I didn't explain how the beginning paragraphs connect to it and the question and assumed that the reader to have made the connection but it might not be so clear so just a few lines more: Consciousness, sentience, or any internal subjective mental state is impossible to be read by current neuroscientific tools and techniques, and it's unclear whether or not we'll even be able to develop such tools soon, so all the theories regarding such topics are non-falsifiable. Assume possibly sentient beings suffer, and I have good reasons and evidence in case anyone is wondering why. But if we just rely on intuition or whatever criteria other than scientific method to adopt a view and form a belief, we might unintentionally cause a lot of unintended preventable suffering to beings like animals and plants that cannot convey their emotions and so we have this anthropocentric view that we don't need to care about them.

Such scientific untestable theories we just cannot afford to adopt without using every tools available to us to arrive at a well-informed decision because we can't risk the worst-case scenario and opportunity costs are too high. BUT we also can't wait for too long because inaction is also one of the worldviews and might be one of the worse worldviews to adopt when we know that possible sentient beings could be suffering, and so we need to decide ASAP what criteria would be the best to decide in such a case of judgment under uncertainty, some mental heuristic or decision science tool or whatever, I think I could come up with a solution given enough time but currently I haven't.

And for the more selfish-minded people in society who might think they don't have any duty towards sentient animals and plants, well, bad news for them because even though I myself believe in moral antirealism and that values and morals don't exist objectively, I still believe that it's their duty to help them and it's not an opinion because it's about beings suffering and I'll not stop till someone is able to either changes my mind or I solve this problem. And for such people, if they are open-minded and believe in science and logic, I have a lot of of theories that I'd love to see them prove wrong if they can, including the Categorical imperative, dialectical materialism, Veil of Ignorance and others I won't explain here and how they connect with my idea but I'm just writing this in case there's any such person in this community reading this open to discussion; DM me, as it's understandable if you don't wish to admit here that you don't care about fellow humans suffering and dying; you can be honest with me.

I'd like to know what you think.

PS: I tried my best to keep it short, but I see I did it again :sob:

Anyway, I think that such a question deserves all the time and effort humans can give to it. It's in my opinion one of the most important questions, arguably even perhaps the most important question we need to solve, as it involves alleviating unnecessary preventable suffering for not just humans but non-humans too."

Update: One of my friends replied:

I’m still not convinced that plants have moral worth, btw. There’s no reason to believe they do. All the ‘evidence’ (e.g., plants squeal, plants communicate, plants have responses to external stimuli) are not sufficient evidence that they have qualia.

A good rule of thumb is ‘if a computer that exists right now could be programmed to do it, it’s not indicative of moral significance’. There isn’t a single thing that a plant does that can’t be trivially explained away like that.

We haven’t ‘solved’ the mind-body problem, so we don’t have a complete explanation for the precise physical mechanisms that cause qualia. But, with modern neuroscience, we at least know the physical structures in the brain and nervous system that are involved.

Until the mind-body problem has been solved, humans are the only animal we know for a fact have qualia. But, knowing what we know about which nervous and brain structures are implicated, it is overwhelmingly likely that nonhuman animals who share those biological structures also have qualia, so should be afforded moral consideration.

Conversely, we can say that it is overwhelmingly unlikely that anything that lacks these biological structures has qualia, and as such, does not need to be treated with moral consideration. It is as likely that plants have qualia as it is that rocks do, or the chair you’re sitting on, or the brick wall across the street. There’s no reason to act as if we need to be careful around plants, nor is there any utility in doing so.

Don’t mind me, I’m just gonna go gleefully rip up some grass while carefully avoiding anything derived from animal products

Finally, there are some ‘interesting’ ideas that are obvious garbage and can be dismissed as obvious garbage, e.g. panpsychism or solipsism. Fun as thought experiments, but not worth giving any serious consideration to. Open-mindedness does not mean wasting time on things any reasonable person knows to be asinine.

Me: I agree with the first sentence, but do you realize the implications of that "good rule of thumb"? You do realize that when we get human-level AI and human-like robots that are in essence indistinguishable from humans, you "good rule of thumb" would mean that suffering, torture and murder is morally acceptable because human-like computers can be programmed?

We don't even know if all humans have qualia, and even though I completely agree with you on the point that we have a lot of evidence that points towards this fact, you sound a bit too confident in this theory that has not been proven with sufficient evidence yet, as we don't know if all humans except me or you are p-zombies who just behave responding to stimuli, input-output organisms, or if they really have internal subjective experiences or mental states or qualia.

I do think that bricks probably don't have it, but as I partly disagree with the point that you use to explain your idea, I also partly disagree with it's converse. "Partly" because you might be correct, it might be true, but then it might not, we don't have enough evidence or tech tools to determine and say anything for certain, so it comes down to what we feel is right, which depends on our values and inclinations.

So we just do armchair philosophy and theorizing and I guess I have somewhat understood your worldview in this regard, but as I said, it's currently all values and philosophy because science isn't that advanced yet, so can't say who is right and who's wrong. I'm not saying I'm right, but then I'm also not saying you are. We do what we feel like doing until we get sufficient evidence in favour of either of these worldviews or something completely different that both of us didn't even think of, unable to conceive due to our cognitive limitations or that of science. We could play the game of rationalizing based on our feelings and emotions towards this debate and defend any side with the convincing logical sounding arguments, but we need to test stuff to know anything for sure, with science. LOL yeah okay rip some grass, it doesn't bother me as much as other much more problematic stuff happening right now. I completely agree with the last sentence, those are interesting ideas, but I think I do need to be more selective and not be so open minded that my brains fall out. But I mean, I am already not spending too much time on them, just a mention, one sentence, and I believe that they deserve at least that much space, to be aware of them and not give them serious consideration and waste time on such ridiculous ideas until we have evidence, but for now I agree with you.

Him: The burden of proof is on the claim that plants can have qualia. All the supposed 'evidence' is trivially debunkable, so should be entirely disregarded. As such, the claim should be treated with as much seriousness as 'brick walls might have feelings'. The fact that you can't 'disprove' the notion of plants having qualia is as meaningful as the notion that you can't 'disprove' the existence of an invisible unicorn in outer space. The burden of proof is on the positive claim. In the absence of meaningful evidence, the claim holds no weight.

yeah that sounds better, makes more sense to me now. I agree, which is the reason I'm not really going into it as much as the other more pressing problems that almost certainly exist and have more evidence, but just giving it serious consideration and keeping it in mind just for future research- research is needed and it's urgent because it might be true, but then it might not, but until proven- more like have sufficient irrefutable evidence- then is the time to go about it as we go about veganism.