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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If you have that Merkur-Pankset view, or that family of views, I should say, where we're talking about something very evolutionarily ancient, supported by subcortical mechanisms, mechanisms in the midbrain at the top of the brainstem, and that is about evaluative modeling of the animals' priorities and needs, then there's a very clear function relating to decision-making.
in that what sentience allows is, well, an escape from being a reflex machine and the possibility of weighing up quite different options in very flexible ways. So that view has some plausibility, I think. And I also think it's quite plausible that sentience facilitates learning. That if you think about that hot stove situation, Think about what the pain does for you.
What it doesn't seem to do for you is trigger the reflex withdrawal of the hand because that's underway already. But what it plausibly does do is help you learn about where not to put your hand on future occasions. And that leads to a very interesting debate about what kinds of learning sentience facilitates and why.
Well, as I say, I think the sentience candidate is a better concept in a way. Fair enough. And I suggest in the book that insects are sentience candidates.
So in terms of cases where we have enough evidence to really compel us to take seriously a realistic possibility of sentience, we're definitely talking about all vertebrates and the cephalopod mollusk, like octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, and the decapod crustaceans and the insects that are both arthropods. And then... It could be that we're talking about something that has evolved three times.
It could be something that is there in the common ancestor of all three groups, and we're not really in a position to have much confidence either way on that one.
Yeah, over 560 million years ago, very small worm-like creature So, I mean, yeah, perhaps unlikely to possess the mechanisms that convince us in those three cases that sentience is a realistic possibility. So I suppose I perhaps lean myself towards the three origin view.
Exactly, yeah, particularly in those lineages where we see complex active bodies. This is Mike Trestman's term, where you have the challenges that come with trying to manage articulated bodies with lots of parts. And you can't be a reflex machine as such anymore because then different bits of the body will start tearing each other apart.
there has to be some kind of centralized, sophisticated control system in place. And that's when we seem to start seeing realistic candidates for sentience. And if that's true, then certainly the cephalopod mollusks and the arthropods are looking like candidates.
Yes, well, the octopuses have become poster children, as it were. They're often the case that gets people to take the possibility of invertebrate sentience seriously. And I think once you've got that far, you think, well, you know, are they really the only invertebrates for which there's relevant evidence? And no, they're not.
No. And in the book, I have these two concepts, sentience candidate and investigation priority, where that second group of investigation priority is for those cases where the evidence is falling short of sentience candidature. But we think there's a
prospect of that bar being achieved by future evidence and we think there are welfare risks posed by human activity that might call for precautions and so some invertebrates are put in that category but unicellular organisms and plants i don't think are investigation priorities either.
Yeah, there's just no evidence of the relevant kinds at all, I would say, in plants. you have this quite wide range of realistic possibilities about the brain mechanisms supporting sentience, some of them emphasizing the cortex, prefrontal cortex, other ones emphasizing the midbrain.
These are all credible theories, and on none of those theories are any of the relevant mechanisms present in plants as far as we know. So I guess I don't want to say that people can't speculate. because it's all right.
And I don't want to say people can't research the question if they want to, but I think it would be a mistake to say that there is evidence now, which is very different from a lot of invertebrates.
Well, in the book, I'm trying to speak to everyone in the range of reasonable disagreement. And I suggest that physicalism is not the only reasonable view and that there are sensibly articulated versions of dualism, panpsychism, panprotopsychism. Often, in the modern versions of those views,
like the Philip Goff version of panpsychism, the so-called Rossellian monism, the questions we end up asking about animals end up surprisingly similar. It's just that where other people say sentient or conscious, the Rossellian monist ends up saying macro-conscious because for them, electrons are not sentient beings as such and that they don't have pain, pleasure, and so on.
They don't have rich inner lives. And so they still face this question of under what conditions do those tiny micro-conscious states combine to form a unified macro-conscious subject? And then they're asking exactly the same questions anybody else is. So I think it's a reasonable view in a way, but it doesn't make a huge difference to practical debates about... sentience.
Yeah, in terms of my personal views, I try to keep an open mind about these things. I think I've drifted, I suppose, from being relatively convinced materialistic as to being less convinced, I think, okay. Give those those alternatives some chance of being correct, 10% chance.
Yeah, yeah. Perhaps, I don't know if that's surprising or not, but those seminar room issues about the mind-body relationship, though intrinsically very interesting, don't make a massive difference when the question is, well, should we drop crabs into pans of boiling water?
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