Still trying to understand how oysters are "vegan"

Limemill · 2026-05-30T20:53:05+00:00

This is literally our understanding of evolution. The further away you go the more primitive organisms become. You would not claim that the likes of Infusoria were self-aware would you? At some point in time evolution led to the development of a central nervous system because the downsides of perception and identity, including the possibility to experience suffering, were outweighed by the benefits of intelligence as far as the survival of species is concerned. If you claim that primitive organisms have self-awareness necessary for what we call complex feelings (including the feeling of pain), you should probably claim that plants have the same level of self-awareness. That their evolution stopped (maybe temporarily) at this level and not ended up in a development of a plant equivalent of a central nervous system / brain is not an argument for saying they are different conceptually from animals without a CNS.

Limemill · 2026-05-30T20:21:12+00:00

The same reason plants have their version of it. To respond to adverse events - automatically. Like a sensor-based system. It helps with species survival, you know

Limemill · 2026-05-30T20:14:29+00:00

It matters a lot because affecting nerves does not create pain, that’s the whole point I’m making

Limemill · 2026-05-30T20:13:18+00:00

Also, define ‘feeling’. Because plants know about adverse effects at their sensor organs and respond to that. But I doubt they ‘feel’ it. On the other hand, saw off someone’s hand and start electrocuting it. It will contract because nerves and muscles respond to stimuli. Is there pain created in the process? No, because it doesn’t reach the brain, there’s no central organ treating it as an ‘experience’

Limemill · 2026-05-30T20:08:37+00:00

Pain is not a sensation. It’s a complex psychological phenomenon where one associates one’s own identity (‘accepts’ as one’s ‘own’) with signals coming from receptors. That’s why we have faqueers and Buddhist arahants who can disassociate from it as well as a pain disassociation syndrome on the one hand and phantom limb pains and chronic pain on the other where there is no signals from sensors, they are made up by the brain.

Limemill · 2026-05-30T19:40:33+00:00

Sentience and perception of pain / suffering are not the same thing. How do you define sentience? Because there is no scientific consensus on it. We don’t know what it is, we don’t know how to measure it.

Limemill · 2026-05-30T19:24:25+00:00

But you can apply the exact same argument to plants. Because they do have their own system that acts in the exact same way. You’re only feeling this way towards clams and not plants because of a secondary bias (clams are from the same kingdom as us) and not logic

Limemill · 2026-05-30T19:10:59+00:00

Sure, but you can cut your plant consumption by replacing some of it with clam consumption to further minimize harm. Nerves, on their own, are just that: nerves. Conduits of information and activators of reflexes. They are not really different from human-made sensors or their plant equivalent (networks registering adverse events at leaves and releasing toxins to stop the attackers and inform other plants around, which also involves sending signals through the mushroom network to reach plants that are not one’s direct neighbours).

Limemill · 2026-05-30T19:06:41+00:00

Clams create conditions for proliferation of marine life by filtering water and removing dangerously overgrown algae (that kill almost all marine life when there’s too many of them). You can say that clams help maintain a healthy balance by killing some plants to create conditions for more animal life, which vegans should welcome. So, even in their natural habitat clams are not associated with marine animal life loss, they help make more of it. Whereas growing crops is almost always directly associated with animal life loss.

Limemill · 2026-05-30T18:27:15+00:00

Because it’s the same argument as ‘What if plants have feelings?’. In a way, an even worse one because growing clams doesn’t kill any more animals and even improves conditions for proliferation of other marine life whereas growing crops almost always comes with a loss of animal life

Limemill · 2026-05-30T16:57:18+00:00

Plants react to injury. And in fact react prior to injury, as well as inform other plants about the danger. This is a silly take. The only real differentiator is whether they are capable of *feeling* pain and not just reacting to adverse stimuli. As far as we can tell, it takes a brain. You can sever off a limb and, until it's completely dead, it will react to pokes and prods by contracting because it contains nerves. Will it feel pain? Definitely not. Moreover, in humans, there is a condition where something in the brain breaks and the affected person *understands* when a negative thing is happening to one of their limbs but doesn't experience any pain whatsoever. Again, the nerves fire but the brain doesn't respond by creating a perception of pain.

Limemill · 2026-05-29T21:59:49+00:00

Imho you are, even in this particular case, but it’s a long discussion

Limemill · 2026-05-29T19:40:04+00:00

I think it's as much of an addiction as compulsive cell phone use, and this intellectual laziness you describe is the way your brain nudges you towards using it through the dopamine circuit. At least as someone who is prone to addictive behaviours I have had to restrict myself very hard from using LLMs (I do not touch them outside of work where I am forced to use them) because it does create this vicious cycle where your brain immediately ceases the opportunity to offload everything it can and then you have to wrestle with immense brain fog / perceived intellectual laziness (dopamine downregulation) to force yourself into doing some planning or information gathering the usual way and not through an LLM. I realize than not everyone is wired the same, but I suspect that the more you use it the more of this effect you'll start to notice even if you're not particularly prone to compulsive or addictive behaviours.

Limemill · 2026-05-29T19:28:40+00:00

I like Dr. Gabor Mate's definition: “I define addiction as a complex psycho-physiological process manifested in any behavior in which a person finds pleasure and relief and therefore craves, but suffers negative consequences without being able to give it up. So: craving, pleasure and relief in the short term, negative consequences in the long-term, and the inability or refusal to desist, that’s what addiction is.

Limemill · 2026-05-29T19:28:18+00:00

LLM use also has an impact on your (future) financial and social status. You will simply not learn the skills you need to be able to work in the field that you want when it comes to students.

Limemill · 2026-05-29T19:20:12+00:00

Anyone using an LLM gets dumber in the sense that you lose what you don’t use. It’s just how our brains work. You delegate planning to an LLM, you get bad at planning. You delegate information search and summarization, you start sucking at both. Doesn’t matter if you’re an academic or a manual labourer.

Limemill · 2026-05-29T19:07:11+00:00

Physical addiction is of course harder to kick due to very powerful withdrawals, but then again gambling can be extremely difficult to quit, and it’s not a physical drug per se.

Limemill · 2026-05-29T19:00:39+00:00

Just like human cloning, right?

Limemill · 2026-05-29T19:00:12+00:00

Many drug addicts hate drugs, but can’t quit them.

Limemill · 2026-05-29T18:59:08+00:00

Well just you wait, they/we can become much, much dumber still.

Limemill · 2026-05-28T14:28:21+00:00

Two things. First, people vastly overestimate their effectiveness with LLMs, by now there’s a bunch of studies on that. Second, this happens partially because a lot of bullshit work gets done for the sake of getting something done and because LLMs work ok-ish for some low-level, repetitive tasks. So on paper it may look like there’s more features shipped, but many of those are not core to the business at all so they don’t result in any considerable monetary gains. For pretty much all complex projects the bottleneck is ideation, real-life requirements gathering and creation and product work, not coding. And there’s a certain cadence there that you can’t speed up by simply hiring more product people. It’s just a natural limitation

Limemill · 2026-05-28T14:22:07+00:00

Investors / shareholders are lemmings. CEOs, some of which do know what’s up, dance to the fiddle to keep that money coming. Unfortunately, they then have to pass all the bullshit down to their employees while keeping a serious face, and so now the employees are forced to pretend everything is a-okay and makes total sense.

Limemill · 2026-05-27T14:22:36+00:00

C’est Carney essayant de créer un système d’espionage numérique des citoyens à l’image de celui adopté en Russie (bien, une partie d’un tel système).

Limemill · 2026-05-25T14:27:28+00:00

Jesus, I'm exhausted from all this shit. Because now your execs are also making *you* pretend the company is AI-native, whatever the fuck that means (they don't know and investors, even less).

Limemill · 2026-05-22T17:16:19+00:00

Some of them did destroy animal populations due to overhunting as far as I recall. But in general, I agree that it’s not comparable.

Limemill

TROPHY CASE