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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Because it's about, well, is there a realistic possibility of sentience established by at least one view in that zone of reasonable disagreement? And is there an evidence base that is rich enough to allow us to identify welfare risks and to design and assess precautions? To me, I hope at least people find that pragmatic shift helpful.
And I think if you're thinking about animals like crabs, for example, to me, it's quite clear that they are sentience candidates in that sense, and that we do have to worry about welfare risks posed by the way we treat them, despite the fact that, of course, we're still uncertain about whether they're sentient or not.
I think it's everything at once. I think neural evidence and behavioral evidence are both powerful evidence. And they're more powerful when pursued together as part of a coordinated research program than in isolation from each other.
What we have with a lot of invertebrate animals is quite tantalizing, I think, because often you've got a lot of behavioral evidence showing surprising things, impressive things. And then you have studies of neuroanatomy saying, well, there's perhaps there's more neurons in there than you think, particularly with octopuses.
There's big integrative brain regions that are plausibly performing functions relating to learning and memory. And then those are the two parts of the picture and they don't join up as it were. that what we're lacking in most of these cases is detailed knowledge of the mechanisms in those brain regions producing the behaviors we're seeing.
So people talk about grasping the elephant from different sides. It's two ways of converging on a picture that are both valuable and all the more valuable when pursued together.
Well, there's a range of different studies, and I don't see any individual study as being conclusive, and it's an area where phrases like conclusive evidence, proof, are not really appropriate. But
What we have is research programs, particularly Bob Elwood, who is another of the signatories to our declaration, really started with this question of, well, people think that all that is going on here is reflexes. So they think that the crab skitters away and it's like when I put my hand on a hot stove and my hand withdraws and that reflex withdrawal is underway before I feel anything.
And people say, that's all the crabs have. They just have those reflexes. And he thought about how might I convince someone who has that view that that is not all that's going on.
And that just like in us, the information about the noxious stimulus, like the hot stove, reaches the brain and is integrated with other kinds of information and is used for lots of functions relating to learning, memory, decision-making. And he came up with these motivational trade-off experiments where what he had was hermit crabs.
And the hermit crabs, they're interesting because they have very strong preferences for certain types of shell. And in the wild, you see them exchanging one type of shell for another. And they have this hierarchy of what they think the best shells are. And Elwood, in these experiments, he drilled holes in the shells, put little electrodes in and administered small electric shocks to the crab.
And his question was, well, would the crab just evacuate the shell when it was shocked as a kind of reflex? Or would it take account of how good the shell was and how bad it would be to lose that shell in making that decision? And would it require a higher voltage of shock to make it leave a higher quality shell. And he found evidence that indeed it seems to.
And so this is the kind of thing where it's not conclusive proof, but if you're coming in with this view that they're just reflex machines, all they do is stimulus response. There's nothing integrative or centralized going on. This kind of evidence should shake that confidence.
Yes, credulousness, right? Taking the surface behavior as immediate evidence of sentience.
would it be too provocative to say thinking contemplating musing on the part of the crab to balance the different aspects integrating integrating modeling and weighing of yeah the opportunities and risks posed by the environment yeah and then you have a certain family of theories associated with bjorn merker yak panksepp that treat that as very closely linked to sentience that they say well what what
What is sentience? Fundamentally, well, they propose that it's to do with this evaluative modeling where you're trying to represent in an integrated model the opportunities and risks posed by the environment. And so there's a nice mesh there between the behavioral evidence we're seeing in the crabs and the sorts of...
brain mechanisms that according to this family of theories would be enough for sentience.
There's no reason to think the magnet is internally representing those field strengths.
Yeah. Yeah. And according to the sort of Merkur-Pankset, that family of views, not just any internal integrative representation, but it has to have this evaluative character as well. It has to be a certain kind of modeling of what are the opportunities and risks? What are my needs? What do I need to prioritize right now?
Well, I mean, I think it's quite important in these experiments that it has some representation of some kind of the different shell types and their relative qualities. And that is somehow getting integrated with how bad is this electric shock.
Showing 41–60 of 151 · page 3 of 8
← Previous
Next →