lmfao this is hilarious

The above comment is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning. The Code of Hammurabi is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning.

So the comment will very well be likely a significant contribution to human culture.

And just like that I became a racist.

Gimble vice and a fleshlight?

It’s a book about non monogamy and how to practice it in a considerate and sensitive manner.

She makes a handful of digital toys free. Slurs hurt real people. Keep this in context

I would quibble here and say that torture is actually an incredibly civilised act. I mean this not as an endorsement, but rather in the sense that only highly ‘civilised’ societies appear to have every carried out systematic torture. It seems to require a great deal of centralised, bureaucratic control in order to prevent instincts like empathy from preventing it.

It’s also worth pointing out that torture, as defined in a UN convention that is pretty broadly ratified is much broader than we normally think of it. It is defined as follows:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Which I think is food for thought. Portrail of torture is incredibly systemic in media, and I think we are numbed to it a great deal although I don’t know which way causality goes there. How many of you have seen cops handling someone roughly with the intent to hurt them or intimidating someone to make them pliable as routine ‘justice’? That is literally torture by a convention that it is highly likely the country they work for has ratified.

Also we need to distinguish responding to the environment and even making decisions from experiencing pain.

I can make a robot from Lego that follows a line pretty well but I think we’re all pretty comfortable with the idea it is vanishingly unlikely to feel pain (although there are people who feel punishment machine learning schemes are unethical lol).

No I’m not, I’m asking why you specifically believe those things to be comparable.

What specific knowledge do you have which prompts these apparently very deeply held and unusual beliefs?

Damaged plants can send out signals to other plants, and chemicals to repel what is damaging them (to the specific area where the damage is being done) and repair their damage.

Could you please explain how this can be distinguished from wound healing in a human. Like what chemicals are sent out? what is the mechanism? are they transported anywhere in particular? are different signals collated in determining a response or does the same hormone guarantee the same response in a dose dependent manner?

Some plants will avoid growing towards areas that they have been unable to thrive in before.

This is surprising to me, is it distinct from following chemical gradients? I have never seen this, or heard about it. The closest I would say I have ever seen is not growing towards salt or dry soil. What is the evidence here please as I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is there a memory effect? if a grass doesn’t grow south and you put it in a new area will it also not grow south?

You still seem to be talking about things from a purely human perspective. Dogs will damage their feet and not even let you know sometimes.

I’m really not, I had a whole thing about memory and will to live and avoiding areas where I specifically spoke about rats.

Whether or not you notice it (and it’s true that many animals will try to hide injuries, humans included) doesn’t mean there is no modifications to behaviour. E.g. licking, protecting the area (less weight on paw, lifiting it up etc), reacting to the same stimulus more negatively such as not eating or growling etc when being touched.

You literally said she stopped using it. Aka she felt pain. Ever eaten after a dentist when your mouth is still numb? you will straight up bite off chunks of your lips and keep eating. If there was no pain she would keep trying to use it and probably just be confused when it didn’t work. Which btw is how she’ll behave if you anaesthetise her!

Also if you’ve ever noticed her behaviour after removing say a piece of gravel from between the pads in her feet you’ll probably notice despite no damage the first step or two will be tentative. She’s anticipating pain, again behaviour modification.

Plants just don’t do anything like this.

It does though, you will stop walking. Clutch your foot, say ow, look at where you hit the thing, be more careful when walking near there, move the object, pad the object, maybe wear protective covers on your feet, maybe dress a wound if the nailbed was damaged etc. If your toe keeps hurting you will travel to a doctor for assessment, or splint the toe and so on.

Unless you don’t notice, in which case you feel no pain despite the toe signalling furiously.

Along side this a bunch of cellular processes will happen to repair the damage, but they happen even if you don’t notice (distraction/nerve damage, anaesthetic etc) and so we can notice “huh, there are 2 clusters of things happening, one is conditional and one isn’t” and that’s a clue that there’s something more going on than just a body repairing itself.

You’ve got to operate on evidence, there’s an infinite number of things you can’t falsify and you have no criteria for choosing which to believe or not.

In other animals we observe things consistent with pain such as long term behaviour modification in the absence of a persistent hormone. Things like avoiding places they were injured, becoming more cautious or less curious, even changes that destroy them like starving themselves to death.

Anyone that says “only humans feel pain” is a chauvinist ignoring stuff like rats giving up the will to live.

But trees or mosses or whatever do none of this. A tree will keep trying to grow towards a fence that damages branches in a storm, a tree never starves itself to death making thicker bark after teens carve lovehearts into it, a tree doesn’t stop reproducing after 3 droughts kill all its children and so on. Leaves might change colour in response to periods of high or low sunlight but these changes are like tanning, they don’t modify anything about how the tree trees.

We can’t know is true, but we also can’t know I don’t have an invisible dragon in my garage. you should definitely not live your life thinking I have an invisible dragon in my garage. Why? you don’t have any evidence to suspect it’s real that is distinguishable from a random lie. We have no evidence of behaviour in trees indistinguishable from chemical signals we know are below the level of consciousness in ourselves.

You’re conflating very different processes here. While there is the hard problem of consciousness and we can’t falsify ideas like panpsychism consider a few things.

If you amputate my hand and press on it it will emit nervous signals. Does anyone feel pain? If you destroy most of my brain but keep me alive, then stab me almost all the nervous activity and hormones etc associated with injury will happen. Is there any reason to believe there is any pain felt?

I would say no in both cases, pain is not emitting nervous impulses, or something that precedes releasing endorphins and inflammatory factors etc. Pain cannot even necessarily be reliably correlated with stress markers like heart rate, and in the case of phantom limb syndrome pain can even be associated with a complete lack of signals.

There are good evolutionary reasons to exhange information and resources, even unwittingly. Apparently some bacteria in my tummy are in conversation with my body constantly but I’m not at all aware or actively participating in that. Maintaing pain only really seems to offer advantage if you can do something about it, while it’s possible for things to exist accidentally it’s not like grass can move to places without mowers or trees shade themselves. In all animals with nervous systems the nervous systems are the vastly most expensive thing to keep alive. In fact there are a few creatures who when entering an immobile stage of life rapidly digest their own (a good explaination for both tenure and retirees!).

Plants don’t have rapid long distance communication in their bodies, they don’t have centralised organs, they don’t even have anything approaching the levels of activity we associate with the simplest nervous systems.

It’s probably best to think of grass “screaming” as skin cells “screaming” for resources to make more melanin when exposed to UV. Or lymph nodes “screaming” when releasing hormones to heal a wound and stuff. This is all vastly below the level of consciousness.

Or whatever, embrace panpsychism, like the invisible dragon in my garage nobody can prove it false /shrug. Animals eat plants though and thermo law 2 is a thing so even panpsychics minimise suffering by being plant based.

Seems well adjusted. I’d keep my kids away from them if I were you.

ya, my sister is raising kids atm and she’s had to hunt for books that don’t associate farming with cuddly-happy—funtimes

Silly vegoon, only the cute animals I didn’t want to eat have feelings. The others are unfeeling slabs of meat that is magically created by wholesome farmers being folksy.

Yeah but you understand the difference between the state and the people who lived there right? Like Jewish settlers came from Europe, to the place Palestinian people were and had been living in.

They have a connection to the state of Palestinian (inasmuch as it exists given differing degrees of recognition) by way of having moral rights to continue living on the land they live on regardless of what some lines on a map call it.

What are the odds of that working? You think I’d leave myself open to a simple brute force collision attack?

Also all sysadmins share a hive mind.

Having been a sysadmin you would be surprised at both the amount of times I had to explain why we couldn’t just put an unprotected endpoint outside the firewall and also how much alcohol I drank to cope with the former.

It is like being builder to architects that think you can have a second story just floating in midair. I am baffled by how ignorant of the basics of infrastructure many developers are.

Obviously I don’t expect a website dev to know the details of like iptables configs for load balancing with failover or whatever. Or even be terribly familiar with how to set up a production web server. I do expect people to know stuff like every computer on the internet is under constant attack from scripts. Or that taking advantage of peoples’ trust and leaking their data is bad actually.

It is also the emotion that happens right after confusion but before fear after someone punches you in the face.