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I don't care what or how people eat. I'm a bit concerned when people want to tell me what I or anyone can eat.
Is it ok to eat people?
Sure, if everyone involved consents.
Do animals consent?
Do plants?
No, I'm not a vegan because I don't know where the line for life I care about begins, but saying you don't care at all what others kill to eat is clearly not true unless you're just a pure egoist.
Am not an egoist, it's just the nature of things. Food is food. Having guilt about eating some foods is fine, but you can't change who you are and certainly can't undo 100k+ years of evolution over night. Luckily we understand our bodies enough and food is bountiful so we can pick and chose to compensate for plant only diet, but not everyone has the same luxury nor desire to do so. If you kill to eat, that's fine, that's how world works.
If you are in a situation where you must live exclusively off the land then you probably aren't the person vegans are addressing. If you're any random human, and especially if you are any random Lemmy user that is probably not the case though. Vegan staples are not a luxury. I've gone weeks on end eating for less than 5 USD a day in areas where food was expensive many times when I was tight on money. Beans, lentils, rice, potatoes, and other dense plant foods are some of the cheapest foods available.
As for desire, that's simple. Desire very rarely trumps more serious moral considerations. It's never right to murder someone simply because I desire to do so, and personally I don't desire murdering others. Saying that's how the world works is even worse than the naturalistic fallacy. You're essentially saying morality and conditions cannot improve, that the world is immutably (un)just. You're also saying we can't change who we are, do you just not believe in self improvement? This isn't just a depressing outlook but it is just historically inaccurate. It's clear to me that there are many times in history where conditions got better or worse for people, and often do to the choices of humans.
You can believe in whatever you want... the thing is reality doesn't care. Not believing in gravity doesn't make you float. Humans are omnivores and have been for a very very long time. The fact you can survive only on plant based diet doesn't change that fact.
And just calling something fallacy doesn't make it so either. You people are ready to preach how it's not okay to murder something for your own gain but go on left and right using plastic, leather, fuel and all kinds of other materials derived from animals. It has nothing to do with luxury. If you don't wish to eat something, don't. But don't go on preaching as if your choice is morally superior or better for the environment and similar, because guess what... it's not.
leather
materials derived from animals
Why are you even debating veganism when you don't know what veganism is. Veganism isn't a diet, and it includes avoiding all animal products whenever possible.
And just calling something a fallacy doesn't make it so either.
But you are posting legit historical and ethical fallacies. Your stance is the natural is the good and that the world is impermeable anyway so why bother, honestly I'm not sure why you'd have to make both of these arguments as either would suffice if they were valid to begin with. And they are more than fallacies, they are bad faith arguments as nobody seriously believes these things.
Am not even going to bother continuing this argument since you make assumptions I don't know what am talking about while at the same time keep talking about fallacies. Enjoy living inside your own bubble.
Consciousness is a product of self-referential data gathering. Data that looks upon itself, that is sapience. Data that looks upon data, that is consciousness. Animals have this. Plants don't.
Why should that be my line for life I care about though? How far is a chicken from a fish, from a worm? There is some line for animate life in which you can't really argue any form of consciousness. And, again, my discriminator isn't even necessarily consciousness.
Mine is suffering. A thing needs a neural network to suffer.
The issue with that is distinguishing how humans interpret suffering from "emulated" suffering. Like maybe a lobster has instinctual or chemical reactions to things, but does it actually interpret the suffering or just react to the nerves firing. We can't really know entirely without communication. And even if we do communicate, what if it just mimicks human suffering like a deep learning NN could. ChatGPT cannot suffer, but it can convince some inexperienced people that it can.
But it is also entirely fair to say- even if we don't entirely understand if a dog is actually suffering, it looks like it is and acts like it is, so I will just be cautious and assume it is to not cause undue harm.
I think suffering and pleasure are intimately tied to Skinner's discovery of operant conditioning. Skinner discovered that living creatures increase their behaviour when it leads to a reward, and decrease their behaviour when it leads to a punishment. I don't think it's a coincidence that Skinner's identification of rewards and punishments aligns perfectly with our notions of what causes us pleasure and suffering. I think they're the same thing. We have built artificial neurons and used a computer process to emulate operant conditioning in them. I think artificial neural networks must experience suffering and pleasure as we do. All of this is explained quite elegantly by property dualism - our qualia and thoughts are composed of information, instead of matter or energy, and information is a truly extant part of the universe. Suffering and pleasure are simply patterns of information structure. Neural networks have a design that creates these patterns as a matter of course.
If we were to look at the information structures in a rock, and if we could access them as readily as we access the information structures in our hand through our sensory neurons, we would see that a rock has experiences of its own. But it does not have a unified consciousness tying these experiences into a whole, and indeed the information in a rock is so fantastically simple that we could not recognise it instinctually as experience. To us it is just "being". As creatures of great informational complexity, we regard only the most profound information structures as notable. But I believe these information structures which we place importance on - also known as emotions - exist in every living thing with a brain, and in creatures like jellyfish with their own unique neural networks.
If everyone involved consents, then human meat is vegan.
definition of vegan is:
a person who does not eat any food derived from animals and who typically does not use other animal products
So no, you are not correct.
Well alright. No need to be so snarky.
sorry. i do know what you were trying to say though.
As a human, I think it is okay to eat people. Humans are currently overpopulating our planet and have completely taken over. We don't need that many humans. As a human, I may be very silly and cute, but when my species gets together to do something, we tend to make a big mess of it and just ruin everything. So we must reduce our population one way or another. Additionally, imagine how much meat one of us might have on our bones? Perhaps not as much as a cow, but when there are billions of us then that's like, billions of pounds of meat! Wow! You like meat right? I know I do. That's a lot of meat and it's just right there. I know that personally if any small dinosaurs came up to me and started chewing on my legs I'd let them do it. I don't need all my meat, you know?
Go green, eat human. Mother nature will thank you!
Sincerely,
- a human
Edit: oh no! I have made the human mistake of accidently saying I like meat on a vegan community post. This was a mistake because vegans do not like meat. I do not understand this because humans eat meat like all superior species. I do not understand why a human would want to eat only plants like human prey animals. I am a human and I like human meat, as it should be.
Edit 2: you know what, fuck this, y'all are way too dense. In what reality do people talk the way I was? Congrats, y'all ruined it.
Edit 3: since you only want very serious answers here's a serious answer: the problem with human meat has less to do with morals or ethics and more to do with health and safety. Because you are a human, eating human meat, you can contract whatever diseases the human had before death if the meat is undercooked.
Additionally, there are a lot of parasites, like the lowly tapeworm, which are """safe""" when a human consumes tainted animal meat; because the tapeworm thinks it's in a human and is content to hangout in your intestines. However, if you consume tapeworm eggs that were laid by a "human" tapeworm, the tapeworms that hatch will think they're in a pig and will have no issues burrowing through your muscles, internal organs and brain.
Another factor is that you are what you eat. There is a reason why humans typically don't eat other predators like lions or tigers, and that's because toxins like heavy metals tend to bioaccumulate in them.
Finally, most importantly, for reasons beyond my weak understanding of medical science, humans carry a high risk of prion diseases. Unlike the issues of parasites and diseases, you can not cook a human well enough to eliminate prions and still eat it. The human would be nothing more than ash because you'd have to cook the meat at thousands of degrees to destroy any potential prions the human might have been carrying. These are not something you fuck with. You cannot cure a prion disease. If you have the misfortune of eating something that has been contaminated with a prion, and one of your cells decided to do something with said prion, the only solution is to put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye. You are now a dead man walking. You cannot be cured. A prion is not a virus. It is not a parasite, bacteria, or any form of fungus. It is simply a misfolded protein that your body thinks it can do something with. You will die. Your brain will look like swiss cheese. You will forget everyone you know and love, and there will be nothing you can do about it. Not only that, but again, for reasons beyond my understanding of medical science, your body will use that misfolded protein as a blueprint and will misfold other proteins to make them look like the prion. Your body will become a 3d printer for prions. Anyone who consumes your body will die.
I'm not a vegan but saying "humans eat meat like all superior species" is so weird bro like superior in what way?
Yes, yes! Humans are superior because they eat meat! Just like small dinosaurs do! But I eat more meat than they do. It is not fair. So I should share my meat with them! I do not need all of my human meat. I sit at my human computer all day, I do not need my human legs. If any small dinosaurs hid under my desk and ate my legs, I would not mind. They are hungry and need my meat, so I will let them have it.
!wow y'all are dense.!<
Does this mean you are more "superior" than me because I do not eat meat?
You are arguing with someone who is roleplaying.
They are, as far as I can tell, pretending to be some small dinosaur which is in turn pretending to be a human on the internet. It is a bit character.
Too late, the mood's ruined. At least you recognized what I was doing I guess.
Sorry I had to just deadpan describe what you were doing. Normally it would be a mood killer, and I would avoid doing that, but the mood in here is already rancid.
Yeah, it's okay, it wasn't your fault. I honestly should have checked the community before posting because I just showed up here from the all communities feed and thought I was in /c/196 or something. It's why I made the original edit to my post. The, "you'd be okay with eating humans then, right?" is such a played-out meme anyway. There are a lot of reasons why eating humans is an extremely bad idea; anyone posing that question unironically probably isn't going to have a sense of humor anyway.
I think they're satirising carnists, who think that eating animals is okay because of biological supremacy but won't admit it.
Eh, kinda. It more has to do with the fact that there are a lot of problems with eating human meat from a health and safety standpoint and it kinda blows my mind that people still use, "so it's okay to eat humans then, right?" unironically. It's a little bit of column A (making fun of carnists), a little bit of column B (making fun of the, "human meat" argument), and a little bit of a hidden column C (I like smol raptors and I firmly believe that they'd be on the same level as cats and dogs when it comes to pet popularity if they were still around). I was actually considering making a shitty drawing of a bunch of raptors at a computer or in a trench coat with a human mask or something, but the joke's kinda ruined at this point.
humans are superior because we have tamed out environment to a degree that no other animal has been able to do. we are the top of the food chain and are in control.
We are controlled by our pets. We have laws that force us to take care of our pets and enforcement called the police to ensure these laws are followed and the best part is the entire species is so dumb and inferior that it doesn't realise it.
not sure what point you are trying to make. I hope you aren't implying that because we have laws preventing people from abusing their pets that somehow pets are at the top of the food chain
The point I'm trying to make is humans aren't superior. I don't genuinely believe pets are at the top of the food chain but I also don't believe humans are superior. Superior has connotations of looking down on the rest to me that maybe it doesn't have to you.
What's wrong with humans taking over? How is it your place to decide how many humans we need? Why must we reduce the population? Who is we? And how do humans mess things up?
I'm extremely disappointed. I was playing a character but y'all seem to be completely unable to grasp this, so nevermind.
When you cover yourself in shit ironically you're still covered in shit.
Check my original message. I've edited it to give you the very srs business answer you so desperately crave.
Why is that concerning lmao??
"We have to find a new doctor, he started telling me that I have to start eating healthier. Very concerning and problematic behavior"
fat activists unironically hold that position