Despite all my rage I’m still a rat refreshing this page.

I use arch btw.

Credibly accused of being a fascist, liberal, commie, anarchist, child, boomer, pointlessly pedantic, a Russian psychological warfare operative, and db0’s sockpuppet.

Pronouns are she/her.

Vegan for the iron deficiency.

  • 19 Posts
  • 182 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2024

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  • Not even but like literally this country. There’s less justification for the Australian government to claim sovereignty here. When you look at how aboriginal Aussies are treated, by the legal system and the health system for example, it’s hard to argue it isn’t genocide of a minority who have a claim to this land.

    I get so frustrated at how, meaningful issues about the dubious actions of nation states are justified under international law become political theatre for power struggles.

    Basically all large nations have peoples that want to split, but because international law requires nations to recognise a people before they get the protection of the law nobody properly does it as everyone could say “ok, you first”. International law is important, it lets us resolve conflicts without war and somewhat check superpowers. Reducing it to farce is a tragedy.




  • Been feeling the crushing weight of vystopia lately. It’s disappointing that almost everyone I know is more interested in their own convenience than justice. Over the last ~7 years I’ve basically lost interest in maintaining relationships with my non vegan friends (that are left lmao).

    Where I live is pretty cliquey and carnist which has made finding meatspace vegan friends hard. Half of those I’ve met are wishy washy health cheating “vegans” which also sort of suck.

    I’m glad my wife and my sisters are all vegan though. At least I do have a few people I’m really close to who understand that there is a difference between right and wrong.



  • Everyone seems to use the words differently but in general sentience is accepted as the ability to feel and respond to one’s environment. That implies a thing which is able to feel/be aware often synonymous with consciousness although some people say consciousness is sentience + imagination etc.

    I mean it as there being a thing which feels like something to be.

    If you mean it otherwise could you please define it? Or if you’re happy to proceed with that definition of consciousness and sentience (which requires consciousness as defined) could you proceed with answering my questions?


  • This sounds like Penrose’s stuff which is umm not widely accepted.


    Being alive is not a clearly defined state, it’s a classification we impose on the world. Assuming life is conscious is pretty close to panpsychism, especially when we get to organisms like fungi or plants without centralised structures. That’s not saying it’s wrong, as you say we can’t exactly go and measure it. At this stage it is not an empirical question.

    But uncertainty doesn’t mean anything is equally likely. toy example: radioactive decay timing probabilities.

    Most people tend to come down on assuming brains have something to do with consciousness because humans describe consciousness being modified by stuff happening to their brains and not the rest of them. If you come down on all life being conscious to some degree or another why? and where do you differ from the pan psychics who say all stuff is conscious to some degree or another?


  • Sure those behaviours are observed. But what specifically makes you think consciousness is likely? Obviously we can’t measure consciousness at this point, (or perhaps ever it’s quite unclear) but most people fall somewhere between “brains do it” and the more chauvinistic “human brains do it”.

    This isn’t really something you can talk about particularly scientifically, the closest to that is basically that we observe that in humans people report modifications to consciousness if you dick with their brains and we tend to avoid wanting to overcomplicate hypotheses with second order things until necessary. We can then try making comparisons between human brains and non human brains but it’s all very speculative.

    You can assume behavioural complexity requires consciousness but it’s pretty vibes based and drawing lines is hard. Most people also seem to not ascribe say complex algorithms, bacterial colonies, or water cycles or whatever consciousness though.

    So I’m curious where you fall. Personally I don’t think pan psychism is woo but I don’t subscribe. Stuff just is conscious doesn’t seem any more or less reasonable to me than a lot of other “stuff in this particular arrangement just is conscious” type hypotheses, especially when humans can have all sorts of modifications to their brains and continue to describe being conscious (p zombies???).

    I don’t want to bait, I’m genuinely interested although personally consider myself more of a fence sitter on non animal sentience. Suspecting it’s less likely but of course unprovable one way or the other atm.


  • Plants are living yes, and hormone signals etc happen in them sure. It’s not known what causes consciousness though, hell we don’t even know why general anesthetics work in humans and we generally only believe them to disrupt consciousness because you ask people about it later and they say they have no recollection, except sometimes when they do so amnesics are often administered as a failsafe.

    What do you mean when you say anesthetise a tree? And why is that evidence of sentience? Like lignocaine will work on the nerves in my arm. You could keep my arm alive after removing it from me (at least for a while) and inject lignocaine and observe interrupted nerve signals. Most people don’t believe amputated arms to be sentient though.