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Why bring in the plant thing? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about that. The ai death cult thing sure, but the plant thing I haven’t even seen before. Seems weird.
I have, unfortunately. It’s an argument made to trivialize the suffering of animals (i.e. under human control) by making pain and suffering an unavoidable and universal constant (appealing to the futility and foolishness of trying to reduce it or think about it.)
I have, as a rebuttal to vegetarianism. It’s really dumb.
Hey, let’s not insult plants like that
LLMs will tell you themselves they’re not having any internal experiences.
This is that mythology… Where the inventor falls in love with his creation. That’s all that’s going on when people mistake it as intelligent.
Learning ≠ intelligence. Intelligence is the presence of parameters in a system that can change and send a signal back to itself.
Plants are NOT intelligent; they simply learn and follow a program, just like a robot vacuum cleaner. They do NOT self-modify.
But AI can be intelligent; this has been possible for a long time.
if you rank “care about plants” people way up there with AI worshippers, you’re lost to propaganda.
There’s a nice Venn diagram that would require me to write a paper in some journal to hash out.
Do “people who care about plants” really think they have feelings and are intelligent? I consider myself a person who cares about plants and I think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
It’s used to discourage effort and to minimize the suffering of non-human animals by trivializing it: “even plants feel pain, pain is everywhere, there is no point thinking about reducing pain and suffering, it’s futile.”
Such people usually have some other criteria of “who matters”, which ignores suffering. Usually, it’s a hierarchy.
The same hierarchy extends, at upper levels, to human intraspecies hierarchies, which is how you realize that the AI bro TESCREALists are fascists, racists, eugenicists and so on. They mention sentience in passing, and then skip to “intelligence”, a much more vague concept, but something that they love to track … as in the tradition of IQ and race science.
My take on life is that to live is to kill, so I’m obviously fine with it, but I also think I don’t really have the right to claim that something isn’t capable of pain.
Plus we’re finding out more and more that pretty much every living thing feels pain. Even bacteria have stress and pain responses.
think they even have rudimentary ways of chemical signaling one another that could be seen as communication but I don’t think they have feelings as we use the word and I don’t think they’re intelligent on any level.
Just to play devil’s advocate… The more we understand about consciousness and the more we study animals like invertebrates, the more we keep finding out our previous assumptions keep getting proven wrong.
Terms like feelings, emotions, and intelligence are all open to interpretation and debate.
Fun fact there are theories that the Sun may have a sort of consciousness
There are also theories that corporations are sentient.
There are theories that managers are sentient.
-maxxing
Downvote for spelling.
it’s a meme suffix.
Spoken like someone who peaked in the 3rd grade spelling bee
Huh?
Everything has feelings and intelligence. Even you, dumbass ;)
is my table or phone capable of enjoying a movie and thinking about its themes
The way hollywood is going these days it just might be! :D
But why would a table think about those things? I sure don’t. It’d probably be more into like, bearing loads. I bet it likes when lots of people put full plates around its edge and doesn’t when you stand on the middle to change a light bulb
Me I’m more into alternative energy schemes
Panpychism in a nutshell
Plants do communicate and experience sensations. I would not call that comparable to human intelligence or full on sentience, but dismissing a fact as a destruction because it might be inconvenient is a bit reductive. Scientific facts help us understand the world better and ideally, make our lives better off. Discarding inconvenient information is not going to help us.
It’s not like plants being able to feel things is going to stop us from eating or using them. We know for a fact that animals think and feel, even if not on our level, and we still have no qualms about eating them.
The only inconvenient part is that you get absolute morons that hear words like “communicate”, “warn”, “react”, etc, given to chemical reactions, and believe it’s sentience and shit.
Fr. Plants are as sentient as my phone. Right now it’s sending pain signals because it’s at 8% battery. Am I torturing it by not plugging it in?
Exactly this
I mean there are arguments to make for sentience…
Not any sound ones
What?
There’s a difference between sentience and consciousness. There’s also the fact that there is no actual way to measure these concepts and say for a fact if something experienced one or not.
Plants have goal oriented behavior, plants have chemicals that respond to stimuli. Sentience is simply the basic ability to feel and experience. There are absolutely arguments to be made around that.
Most arguments against things being sentient or not is a lack of a neural structure. But that’s like saying things without mouths cannot eat. The limited human experience makes one both arrogant in assumptions and ignorant of other’s experiences because they can’t relate.
“Sentience” is just chemical reactions all the way down. There’s no reason to fully assert plants are not sentient. Especially when we can’t even define what makes something conscious or not.
Ok then. Tell me why you think a chatbot could be sentient then.
First, read and try to understand the definition of sentient:
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Capable of sensing or feeling, conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling
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Aware
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Finely sensitive in perception or feeling
(Clue: look up the definition for “inanimate”, and also for any words that you don’t understand from the previous definitions. Do this in the dictionary, not with an LLM)
I’m talking about plants.
Oh, well in that case I agree with you actually, my apologies.
I guess I’ve just gotten used to having to argue with people on here about whether or not their shitty software is sentient.
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We know for a fact that animals think and feel, even if not on our level, and we still have no qualms about eating them.
Who’s ‘we’ here, because I have plenty of qualms with eating animals.
We know for a fact that humans think and feel, even if not on our level, and we still have no qualms about eating them.
That noise the human makes when you put them in boiling water is just air escaping.
Some people do have qualms about eating them, though.
Tbf, it’s pretty hard to eat a gpu, and they’re really expensive to boot. I’d have qualms too in their position
Death metal works better, but for an interesting reason: it makes the dust vibrate off of the leaves.
Eh, consciousness is just an elaborate Markov Chain on life that didn’t go the botany route hundreds of millions years ago.
Intelligence is just a word we came up with very recently to try explain stuff.
LLMs are literally just us hearing ourselves for once.
Consciousness is just an elaborate markov chain… I cant even…
The earth is just a rock… there im smart
A living organism is a strange loop. Computer software isn’t. Just because you can describe both in probabilistic terms doesn’t mean they’re the same phenomenon.
We might not understand intelligence. Plants might be “intelligent”. At minimum we know that plants communicate within their cells and with each other and that they can learn.
I like to fantasize that a large oak is a huge mass of neural tissue and that alder stand that is the largest organism or something is a super brain.
In that case Pando might tickle your fancy.
how do you know YOU aren’t an LLM??? Hmmm???
Sam Altman hasn’t tried to flip me over and steal ram from me.
Give him time.
Because my water usage is very low.
If I am the dipshit running me should just pull the damn plug already and never put it back in.
Plants probably do have their own version of feelings, like any living organism. Just not human ones.
Plants probably do have their own version of feelings,
Just like LLMs?
No.
I’d definitely put LLMs beneath plants.
Because plants actually serve a purpose
I mean, I think plants have more complex feelings and inner lives than LLMs.
Trees and Mushrooms are known to communicate. If you fell a tree, the whole forest will know within minutes. Whether they have feelings or not I can’t tell.
Also the reason Giraffes eat from down-wind, so that nearby plants do not deploy (evolved over a long timescale) self-defense mechanisms
C’mon, plants can’t be intelligent! Our top scientists and science fiction writers have proven it!
(Now will anyone actually get the reference)
You can’t just be spouting off crazy shit like this online and not citing your sources!
Is it worth worrying about though? Is it bad to make a plant sad?
I mean, it’s not good right?
Sure. But I don’t think it’s relevant either. I’d consider it something like worrying about how a chair feels that I’m sitting on it.
Does hydrogen care when it’s separated from its oxygen buddies?
The smell of grass cutting is a warning to other grass.
I too love the smell of suffering.
A warning to do what? Run?
A lot of plants put out those smells as a way of saying ‘something’s eating me!’ to the local predators.
Alternatively it can be to store more energy in the roots.
Spring forth, loyal protector, and save me!
To get their affairs in order
From what I understand it’s a pheromone(?) reaction that causes the grass to send water and nutrients lower down into the plant, so they can more easily survive being grazed on / lawnmowered.
There are a bunch of people who’ve bought into the enchanting myth that plants feel things and “scream in pain”.
It’s not really surprising since most people don’t know botany or plant psychology, but love a nice TED talk.
Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness: Trends in Plant Science
I think people liken it to human consciousness because that’s what they know, but I think most people understand that’s an abstraction and the reality is much more sciencey and nuanced
Paywall so I can’t actually read the whole article but from the abstract:
Based on a survey of the brain anatomy, functional complexity, and behaviors of a broad spectrum of animals, criteria were established for the emergence of consciousness.
“We’ve drawn an arbitrary line around ‘consciousness’ and have decided what’s on either side” isn’t exactly the concrete dismissal they seem to think it is.
While you can just make shit up in definitions, you don’t get to claim that others use your definition. All you’re actually doing here is destroying words.
Not arbitrary: consciousness is a defined word with historical meaning. “Consciousness comes from the Latin word conscious, which means “knowing with” or “having joint knowledge.” The term evolved in English during the 17th century, with its modern meaning relating to awareness of one’s own mind first appearing in the late 1600s.”
You have arbitrarily redefined consciousness, implicitly by context to include any response to the environment. What good is epistemology if a plant’s hormonal action implies self awareness?
Edit: Imagine, if you will, that the stream of consciousness using language to tie a plant’s hormonal action to self awareness, e.g., words like “plants know when” is just as much of a cognitive and emotional hallucination as the most sublime sounding gibberish produced by an LLM.
consciousness is a defined word with historical meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Problem_of_definition
Yeah, none of those issues contradict anything I said.
Plant psychology 🤣
