Jonathan Birch
speaker
151 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Jonathan Birch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Hi, Sean. Thanks for inviting me.
Yeah, I suppose part of what I want to do with this book, The Edge of Sentience, is get people using that term sentience perhaps a bit more. I think Stephen Harnad's been doing much the same thing with his journal Animal Sentience. And I think it is a term that is on the way up. Good. That doesn't mean consciousness is on the way down, but I think it's plateauing and sentience is on the way up.
And it's a term that, at least as I use it, it's an attempt to capture...
the most basic elemental evolutionarily ancient base layer of consciousness as it were, which is in part, just what philosophers like to call phenomenal consciousness, subjective experience, there being something it feels like to be you, whether or not you have any kind of overlay of conscious reflection on what it is you're experiencing. And then also there's a,
a slight extra component as well, which is that I'm focusing specifically on experiences that feel good or feel bad, like pain or pleasure, valence experiences, as it were, they have a positive or negative valence and, And I'm using that term sentience to capture that capacity for valence to experience like pain and pleasure.
And I think it's a really important concept because it, to me at least, captures what is really ethically significant. If a system is sentient in that sense, if it's capable of valence to experience, then its interests matter morally and we need to do something about that.
Well, I wouldn't say that to have a conscious experience, you need to know about it. But the problem is that the term consciousness gets used in quite ambiguous ways. And it can refer to the human form of consciousness, which is a very complex form, I think. And it does have Layers. So Herbert Feigl in the 50s talked about sentience, sapience, and selfhood.
Tolving in a separate body of work had these terms, anoetic, noetic, autonoetic. They're both ways of trying to capture the idea that there's layers. There's the raw, basic, subjective experience, like the feelings of pain, pleasure, sight, sound, odor. Then there's also the knowledge and the concepts when we think and reflect about what's going on.
And then also to some extent, there's a sense of self as well. And this idea, we recognize ourselves to be persisting subjects of experience with lives that extend into the past and extend into the future. And these overlays,
They involve levels of cognitive sophistication that you might not need to have that base level of just sentience, of just feeling ouch, feeling pain, feeling happiness, joy. Right.
Well, in some senses of the word conscious, yes. That's right, yeah. If you're the kind of person who wants to use this term conscious to refer to that whole package, the sentience, sapience, and selfhood, then yes, there's going to be lots of animals that are sentient without being conscious.
Now, I don't necessarily think we should use the term in that way, but one of the things I like about sentience is that it very strongly draws people towards that. that most basic aspect, just the raw subjective experience.
Somewhat. Yeah. Which is not to say that it's perfectly defined. You know, there are real limits on our ability to define subjective experience, but, um,
The problem with consciousness as a term is that even when you bracket that issue of subjective experience and its mysteriousness, it's still a term people use to refer to many other things as well, like reflection and self-awareness and those other things.
So I'd rather use a term that is perhaps a little bit more constrained in how you can use it and where people will let you stipulate a bit more. And if I say I just mean the capacity for valence to experience, I think people get that. And they get the need to have a concept that is drawing our attention to states like pain and pleasure, but is a bit broader than that.
And that is not just about pain and pleasure, but about that whole category of. feelings, experiences that feel bad or feel good.
Well, Jeremy Bentham famously had this footnote where he wrote in relation to other animals, the question is not can they talk nor can they reason, but can they suffer? And I think that's a
to me at least, a profound insight that if an animal can't speak to us and tell us how it's feeling, if it can't reason very well, as arguably is the situation with a shrimp, for example, it doesn't mean that it's feeling nothing. It doesn't mean that it's incapable of suffering. So it doesn't mean that there aren't things we could do to it that would be cruel and that would cross ethical lines.
Yeah, I think we're already asking the questions and I think it's right to be asking the questions and it's right to try and run ahead as it were to for the ethical debates to be running ahead of where the technology actually is, because we might get quite rapidly overtaken by events in the AI case. Right.
When I think about aspects of human consciousness that might possibly be uniquely human, I think that inner monologue is one of them. It's not something even all humans have. And you get a lot of reports of variation among humans where some people say, what is this inner monologue? I've never experienced anything like that. And other people, including myself, for whom it's there constantly.
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