Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
292 | Jonathan Birch on Animal Sentience
14 Oct 2024
Full Episode
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Sometimes on the podcast, I will refer to our two cats, Ariel and Caliban. They are born at the same time, you know, twins, I guess if you can say, but they're, of course, part of a bigger litter. Brother and sister with very different personalities.
If you met Ariel and Caliban and interacted with them, even if you didn't see them, you would instantly know which one was which. There's a danger there, though, if we want to be a little bit more careful, a little bit more rigorous in using a word like personality, right? We tend to anthropomorphize our pets, other objects in the world. We anthropomorphize our GPS Google Maps system.
I feel bad when I drive in a way other than what Google Maps tells me to do, and it seems to be upset with me, right? So if we're thinking about it very, very carefully, we can have fun using words like personalities and being anthropomorphic with our pets, but maybe we want to be a little bit more rigorous. So you might want to ask... What kinds of animals are conscious, right?
Consciousness is a big topic in some of these debates. You instantly run into the problem that we don't agree on what consciousness is. Different people are going to have different standards for that. We might agree that rocks are not conscious, but maybe panpsychists will even argue for that. Most of us will agree that humans are conscious somewhere in between.
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