Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
292 | Jonathan Birch on Animal Sentience
Mon, 14 Oct 2024
It's not immoral to kick a rock; it is immoral to kick a baby. At what point do we start saying that it is wrong to cause pain to something? This question has less to do with "consciousness" and more to do with "sentience" -- the ability to perceive feelings and sensations. Philosopher Jonathan Birch has embarked on a careful study of the meaning of sentience and how it can be identified in different kinds of organisms, as he discusses in his new open-access book The Edge of Sentience. This is an example of a question at the boundary of philosophy and biology with potentially important implications for real-world policies.Support Mindscape on Patreon.Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/10/14/292-jonathan-birch-on-animal-sentience/Jonathan Birch received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Philosophy Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is one of the authors of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, and has advised the British government on matters of animal cruelty and sentience.Web siteLSE web pageGoogle scholar publicationsPhilPeople profileWikipediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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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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