292 | Jonathan Birch on Animal Sentience
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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
1h 12m
2 speakers
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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.
Maybe there's a threshold or maybe there's a series of many thresholds. One way to make this a little bit more careful is to switch the conversation from consciousness, which is a little bit unclear what it means, to sentience. Sentience is sort of the ability to have a feeling of what it is like to be something, the ability to experience feelings and sensations, okay? Especially feelings and sensations that we would characterize as having a valence, a good sensation, or a bad one, a positive one, or a negative one. That's a little bit more well-defined. And then we can go ahead and ask which kinds of animals are sentient. And also the public policy question, what should we do about it? How should we act if we believe that certain kinds of creatures are sentient? For as much as we tend to cutely anthropomorphize our pets, there's also a temptation to sort of ignore the possibility of sentience in animals that are not like us.
It is very common to cook crabs and lobsters by boiling them alive, and they thrash around a little bit, but you say, well, that's just an instinctive reflex reaction. That's not experiencing pain in the same way that we are. So regardless of what your opinions about it are, we should be able to think about this. rationally, coolly, calmly, okay? It's hard because we get very emotional.
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Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026