[NayamAmarshe]

Inference can bring some compassion.

One doesn't need to think too much to know the only difference between us and other species is the ability to philosophize and as such, it should bring even more harmony and compassion, instead of beliefs that justify exploitation of nature.

I don't know why we assign ourselves so much importance, some of our thoughts allow us to bring harm to others but we don't want to be treated the same way we treat them.

All we really need is education, the education of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes (or hooves).

[prometheus76]

I don't entirely agree that all it takes is education. Many people have grown up on farms, have lived with animals all their lives, and yet have no problem eating animals.

[rickydroll]

They also have a different relationship to eating animals than people who think meat comes on a plastic tray wrapped in shrinkwrap. From what I've seen, the attitude is more mindful of the animal you raised and interacted with. You don't want to waste any part of their sacrifice in becoming food for you.

I take it a step further and say that if you're going to eat animals, make the best possible, best-tasting meal out of them.

[Terr_]

I lean heavily into the "I don't want to feel existentially guilty, so anonymous cubes please" camp.

The flip side is that I also have no quasi-romantic attachment to it being "real" meat.

[NayamAmarshe]

I suppose there are many factors involved but education is the key component. Knowledge, and a culture of knowledge can cause a massive shift in thinking and actions.

[prometheus76]

Essentially, what I hear in your statement is "if I can just teach people how I see the world, then they will see the world the same way." I firmly disagree with that assessment. Someone can be educated and yet see things differently from you.

[dbingham]

I think part of the issue is disagreement about what "harmony and compassion" actually looks like.

One of the sibling comments immediately jumped to the assumption you're referring to veganism and the use of animals in the food system. I'm not going to assume that's what you're referring to, but I will use it as a case study.

The problem with veganism's approach to this is that it's a limited extension of empathy. If you've been following along with the advances in plant behavior, it's pretty mind blowing. There is a growing body of evidence that plants have cognition (using a different system than animal's nervous system), memory, environmental awareness, the ability to learn, and communicate. In other words, it seems increasingly likely that plants are _also_ conscious.

In fact, there are hints of evidence that microbes are aware and making decisions. It may well be that environmental awareness and consciousness are just the defaults of life.

So then, for autotrophs like us, what does harmony and compassion look like? How do we feed ourselves at scale without causing harm or exploiting nature?

[adrian_b]

I do not believe that veganism can be criticized for a lack of empathy versus plants.

Even if we value identically plants and animals, plants are exploited in a much more benign way than animals.

In the past, there were many domestic animals which could be said to have lived quite a happy life for their kind, until the moment when they were slaughtered.

Nowadays, the vast majority of the domestic animals live in conditions that can be hardly named other than torture.

On the other hand, the cultivated plants do not really live in any worse way than in their wild state. The majority of the cultivated plants are either annual plants, which are killed a very short time before the moment when they would have died anyway, or they are perennial plants from which we take only their fruits, which have been developed by the plants especially for being taken by animals, as a payment for being aided in reproduction.

So without giving any preference to cultivated plants or domestic animals, the more ethical choice is to continue to exploit in the current way only the former.

I believe that in the future not even cultivating plants will be the most efficient way for producing food and other organic substances.

The most efficient way will be to use solar energy gathered by photovoltaic cells to capture carbon dioxide and dinitrogen and incorporate them in some simple organic molecule or molecules, perhaps glycine or a mixture of urea or ammonia with a simple carbohydrate or a short-chain fatty acid.

Whatever will be synthesized using solar energy, at a better efficiency than currently achieved by plants, will be used to feed some genetically engineered fungi (or parasitic plants, i.e. non-phototrophic plants), which will produce any kind of desired food or other useful complex organic substances. (A first step in this direction is shown by the recent news about strains of the Trichoderma fungus that have been genetically engineered to produce either whey protein or egg white protein, but in the future it should be possible to make for instance fungi able to grow fruiting bodies that are bananas or turkey thighs).

[catlifeonmars]

> How do we feed ourselves at scale without causing harm or exploiting nature?

Half jokingly, maybe we don’t, and human society develops morality that is not compatible with the continued existence of humans.