Sentience and Sauce

An Anecdote: 

My mother's an excellent cook, often making her own ingredients in her recipes: ginger-garlic paste needed? She'll squat down and sweat it out on the grindstone. Need some pickled chillis? Marinate them in vinegar. Pastes of poppy seeds? Done.

One thing she hadn't touched, though, was tomato sauce. She would always buy a bottle from the store.

One day, I found her reading from a small notebook and chopping up tomatoes on the kitchen counter. I asked her what she was doing. She said she was following the recipe grandma had given her for making tomato sauce. I saw the knife slice through the skin of the tomato and the red juice ooze out of the injury.

Like blood.

"Wait, why are you using a butter knife?"

And in that instant, I knew that there was something wrong with this. The way the knife casually chopped away, no, the way my mother casually chopped away and diced up the poor vegetable... I could feel it's pain and imagined it scream.

"Don't hurt it, mum!"

"It can't feel it."

What is Sentience?

Sentience is often considered to be the sense of being. Self-awareness. However, the word's meaning is actually rather nebulous. While discussions on sentience often do bring up concepts of self-awareness, sentience is also the ability to feel pleasure and pain.

Contemporary Australian philosopher, Dr. Peter Singer bases his idea of moral responsibility on sentience, a position advocated by almost all animal rights groups. Therefore, if anything can feel pleasure or pain, it should have the right to not be tortured or killed.

Now, how do we judge if an organism has the most basic form of sentience? As Peter Singer himself wrote in his article, Sense and Sentience, 

A developed brain and nervous system is a prerequisite for a capacity to suffer.

Thus, we now have a distinct method for ascertaining the morality of using living beings which, at first glance, seems appropriate, too. But, that's not the end of the tale, my friends.

Should Sentience Matter?

Our idea of sentience is built entirely on our limited perspective as members of Animalia, and so is our science. Just like it would be difficult for us to imagine non-carbon based life-forms, it is difficult to think of pleasure and pain in terms other than the way we experience it. Our ideas of evolutionary progress are extremely linear: we consider evolutionary movement to more human characteristics such as motor functions, intelligence, tool utilisation, and cephalisation to be progressive.

For example, let us analyse the quote from Singer. "A developed brain" he says. However, one shall notice that even in the animal kingdom there are organisms that do not possess a definite control centre for their body, e.g the starfish or sponges. Does it mean that we must not consider starfish capable of suffering? And if a brain is not necessary to feel pain, might it not be possible for nerves to not be necessary for feeling pain?

Can you kill him? I can't. 'Cos he's animated

Every living being seeks survival, and the need for survival is abstracted by pain and pleasure for us. It would be tunnel-visioned for us to think that the manner in which we experience our need for survival is the only manner which should be ethically respected.

Are Plants Really Not Sentient?

As we have mentioned above, plants cannot conform to the human concept of sentience. However, there has been research on it. In fact, one can see sensory perception in plants all the time: stoma closing at night, the touch-me-not's leaves curling up (so cute!).

Plant perception is, in fact, a quite well-accepted physiological phenomenon. I didn't know it back then, but the tomatoes that mum was so mercilessly chopping up were producing methyl jasmonate, a chemical signal that other tomato plants are capable of responding to by producing chemicals that deter insects and other potential aggressors.
And while it is true that plants have no neurons, plant cells are electrically excitable and are often responsible for quicker turgor responses, like the aforementioned touch-me-not's reaction.

There is also a 'paranormal' side to plant physiology which says that plants are capable of suffering and fear and emotions just like animals. While we at PETOV do not believe that it is in the same way we animals perceive, we think that plants may experience something homologous to these which should not be so  casually discounted.

What Does This Mean?

The sentience argument for denying vegetables their rights falls flat upon closer inspection and critical thinking. So next time someone cuts up tomatoes to make sauce, tell them that plants just might feel it, and even if they don't, they are still murdering an innocent.

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