I'm not a vegan, but I think about fungusamongus all the time. I'm not a vegan, and I make concious decisions about my meals too. Why are we adding vegan like it's 'special' in this case?
I'm just trying to meet other vegans. It is a lonely world for vegans, a very underrepresented group, so when I see there is another vegan in tech, I get excited, and HN doesn't provide a way to contact others so leaving a comment was my only option at creating this connection.
I think a vegan has a significantly different relationship with non-human life than non-vegans do. It’s quite the leap to avoid an exploitative relationship with animals.
Vegans are special, in all cases. They have made a superior moral decision (whether by moral grounds or not) to contribute less to global warming (and thus the destruction of our habitat) than other, non-vegan members of their species.
Not a full and consistent vegan, but what sentient becomes more important because it has practical implications for your diet choices. Should I eat fungi or not? I'm sticking with eating them but this topic is more relevant because of the diet impact
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of a fungal mycelium. Fungal intelligence (if it exists) is quite distributed, and exists mostly in the mycelial structure, since that’s where it eats and grows. It only puts up mushrooms when there are favorable conditions.
This is not to dismiss your concerns about sentience; it is an interesting topic. Compare with a raspberry, for example. That is the fruiting body of a plant. It has the capability to produce many other plants from its seeds. Part of the plant’s strategy is to be eaten by birds and then shat out, and so dispersed much more widely than it would be by wind.
Mushrooms are different in that you can take a piece of one, stick it into some growth medium, and get more mycelial growth from it, unlike the plant material around a seed. They are maybe roughly analogous to pluripotent stem cells in that respect. But a mushroom’s main reason for being is to send out spores, not to act as a central part of the organism’s “mind.” If it was essential, it wouldn’t rot after a few days.[0]
If we ignore for a moment the question of sentience, then it is clearly more ethical to eat a mushroom than a carrot, or any other root vegetable. Pulling a carrot kills the whole plant, while picking a mushroom does not kill the organism.
They’re just…weird. That’s part of why I love them. Somewhere between plant and animal, hard to map our notions of existence and intelligence onto, a mysterious form of existence, etc.
[0] Some species have very hardy mushrooms, so this reasoning doesn’t necessarily apply to them, but they are also inedible.
I personally draw the line at “I don’t want to form an exploitative relationship with another life-form with a central nervous system.” I’m open to expanding the line to include explorative relationships with fungus, but given the current science I haven’t found any reason to believe any fungus is more intelligent than a goldfish.
OP never claimed to be special but simply above average, which I think is fair since most vegans transitioned to that stage by starting to think much more about what they consume than they ever did before.
Did your philosophy on non-human life lead you to choosing to be vegan, or because you were vegan led you to learn about non-human life? I ask, because you can have the same learning of non-human life and still choose to not be vegan. They are not exclusive. (I ask as curiosity not a challenge to you)
I’m not sure I agree. If I were to hire a Personal Trainer and they were in terrible shape I’d be doubtful of their skill. What shape the person is in _shouldnt_ matter for their ability to do the job, but because they haven’t gone through the process themselves I’d have initial doubts about their skills. Your actions say a lot about your values and thoughts.
