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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And I don't rule out that some other animals might have something a bit like that, but I don't really think crabs do. And I think this is an example of something that is probably a lot more cognitively sophisticated than sentient.
Yeah, it's a bit like that for me as well. But I mean, there's always inner music playing. Yeah, very often. And then there's usually some line of thought running over the music. Not so much when I'm talking like this, because when I'm talking, it's like the inner monologue becomes the outer monologue. But in the rest of life, yeah, it's like I'm constantly having a conversation with myself. Yeah.
But, yeah, I think the need here is to try and distinguish that, that sophisticated thing I have, from just the raw experiences that it's providing commentary on. And those raw experiences the crab may well have.
I think it's a topic of ongoing research. I don't have much to add to that, I think. There's some looping. There's feedback loops. In the past, there were people who thought that the vocal cords were genuinely moving a little bit.
behaviorists sort of had to think this right okay because they they couldn't really believe in true interiority so they had to say well what you think isn't in a monologue is actually a motor action being prepared and just getting to the tiniest stages but never coming out audibly but i think according to current theories not even that is happening it is genuinely internal it's engaging
some of those speech production processes, but they're never reaching the actual motor neurons.
Well, I don't know. But I mean, the point is really to say, well, even if your cat doesn't, it may nonetheless be sentient. Because when we're talking about sentience, we're talking about something much more basic than that. And of course, we have a tendency to strongly anthropomorphize our pets and to imagine our pets as little humans. And we can actually oppose that.
We can resist that and say that's a bad idea, while nonetheless thinking they are sentient beings with ethically significant interests. Right.
I was one of the co-organizers of the New York one. Okay, good.
So well established that it feels like... It feels like it's at least a year old, yeah.
It's a delicate balance, I think. What we wanted to do, and it's similar to the project in the book, the Edge of Sentience book, was to acknowledge that there is a huge amount of disagreement about these issues. And that's fine. It's to be expected when our understanding of what sentience is is so poor.
But nonetheless, despite all of that reasonable disagreement, there can be certain points of wide agreement about what the reasonable range of views is and what the realistic possibilities are. That was the thought behind it. And then, well...
we got together an initial group of 40 signatories and just had a series of Zoom calls where we were talking about, well, what are the, do we agree about a realistic range of possibilities? And if so, what can be said about what that range is? And that's how we got this text that acknowledges a realistic possibility of consciousness, which was the term we used there,
perhaps a more widely used term than sentience, in octopuses, cephalopod mollus, decapod crustaceans, and insects. And so we were trying to avoid the sense of projecting certainty, or even confidence or knowledge, but using this language of realistic possibility to say, what we do agree on is the need to take this really seriously. Sure.
That was always my view. Yeah, that was my view. But in this group of 40, a more common view was that people don't understand the term sentience yet. They're not ready for it. Use a term they already understand. namely consciousness. Both sides have pitfalls, because as I say, if you start talking about consciousness, people might think you mean the inner monologue, self-awareness.
There's quite a range of things they might think you're talking about. So there's trade-offs there. I think the term sentience is on the up, so to speak. And for me, it's hopefully the term of the future that will start to displace consciousness in these debates.
That was the thought, yeah. And that may be true as things stand.
How do we know when another animal is, do you mean? I think we know when we ourselves are.
Right, and when thinking about crabs, for example, we're very much stuck with the third person perspective. And we're stuck too with a big range of reasonable disagreement and quite a lot of realistic possibilities. Some will make it very unlikely that crabs are experiencing things and others make it very likely that they are.
And what I do in the book is I suggest a pragmatic shift in how we think about the question. from is the animal sentient to is the animal a sentience candidate? Where this concept of a sentience candidate is defined in such a way as to make the question answerable,
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