Mindscape 292 | Jonathan Birch on Animal Sentience

[@draconyster]

We definitely should not make any animals suffer. Thanks!

[@davegrundgeiger9063]

I really like how careful the guest is to avoid saying, "this is what you should conclude," but instead, "this appears to be the overlapping conclusions among people of differing viewpoints."

[@willwcbb]

I once witnessed Sean Carroll resuscitating an injured Guinea fowl. It was amazing to watch the dexterity of his hands as he tended to the wounded bird.

[@willwcbb]

What an inspiring story 🥺🥺🥺

[@michouharoliyk2050]

Where was this?

[@willwcbb]

@@michouharoliyk2050 This was in Ethiopia. He arrived on horseback like something out of a book

[@TriuraniumOctoxide]

Great that the .epub and .pdf are available for free. Thanks Sean, thanks Jonathan.

[@peterz53]

My dog dream whimpering suggests an inner monologue of sorts.

[@geneticjen9312]

Vertebrate dreaming is just being awake but your brain has more freedom to let schema run wild due to lack of contradiction from senses. So technically you could dream without inner monologue. If you have behaviour while awake, as all complex animals do, your brain just does the same behaviour when asleep. For example, if you track an object from across your vision, your eyes behave differently and we know what part of the brain is activated to do that functionality that tracks and reduces saccadic eye moments. If you track an object across your vision while dreaming, your brain activates in the same way. You're just living your life. It's different than day dreaming or imagining. I don't actually disagree with you and I expect mammals and many vertebrates to be conscious (well technically I don't believe consciousness is an actual thing but by the usual definitions of other people I would include dogs). I'm just pointing out that dreaming doesn't necessarily imply inner monologue

[@rodrigolabarre]

​@@geneticjen9312how would you define that inner monologue? Some kind of recursive thought?

[@Amethyst_Friend]

Inner experience, not a monologue necessarily.

[@MrPDTaylor]

Which is why they used the qualifier "of sorts"​@@geneticjen9312

[@d-5037]

Basically all animals try to avoid danger and injury. Pain is a primal message from your body to avoid harmful things. I definitely think many animal species feel at least physical pain as much as humans do. That's enough for me to try to minimize the harm I do to other animals.

[@garydecad6233]

Mindscape is a gift to my universe.

[@helios80000]

from a bayesian perspective, I think we should already have a strong a priori for animals to have the basic sentience Jonathan talks about.

[@mxm5783]

I don’t recall ever hearing SC interview someone with so much skepticism.

[@mimidhof2179]

Where can we find the PDF yet

[@gilbertengler9064]

Pity that we don't have M. Minsky around us to discuss this matter! It is indeed difficult to precisely formulate the definition of consciousness, self awareness and sentience, mainly when virtually nothing is know scientifically about these complex neural functions. It is however logic to suppose that these capacities progressively came into place. A shrimp might take into consideration the second before and after an interaction, while dogs may memorise and project data from few hours before and after an happening. We human beings are almost unlimited in the time scale we can use to build up a strategy to proceed in our actions. I am however convinced that these abilities need lots of time to develop. In fact, being totally absent of awareness would make no sense at all for a being to exist. AI is not constructed to develop self awareness and I don't believe you can acquire it just like that. AI is simply devoid of sentience and consciousness, I THINK!

[@Reddles37]

Cats might not have internal monologues, but they do have internal meownologues. 😸

[@B33t_R007]

This guy either doesnt know anything or doesnt want to reveal anything. Sean seemed to be much more knowledgeable on this topic.

[@peterz53]

It does seem like Sean is pulling teeth. The most awkward convo I’ve heard here.

[@MrPDTaylor]

Wow, I couldn't disagree more

[@tonybowen455]

Really didn't think you'd get to llm's, but you snuck it in there! Another great ep, ty!

[@catherinegrimes2308]

I care for two 7-year old ragdoll pussy cats. Like yours, they are brother and sister from the same litter. They have distinct personalities and I am sure that they are conscious. I treat them like little children.

[@opensocietyenjoyer]

are there cats that aren't pussy cats?

[@stephenknox2346]

The whole conversation starts with 20 minutes of failing to commit to a definition for the supposedly more clearly defined concept of sentience. I just can't help feeling this is idealogy attempting to use science to cloak itself in legitimacy. I think we all, myself included, give this more credence than it deserves because we deeply want it to be reality, but it's based upon our preferences rather than meaningful data.

[@karlvann5840]

I have 2 cats also.. they are just as sentient as you and I

[@MattAngiono]

As are the pigs that become bacon, or the mama cows who have their babies stolen to make milk and cheese.... We should be concerned about them ALL

[@Mablak200]

We don’t need two words for consciousness, and most philosophers are using consciousness unambiguously to refer to our stream of experiences over time. Talking about ‘sentience’ and ‘consciousness’ is unnecessarily confusing imo

[@JakeMackinze]

I agree. The basis of what this guy talked about was just semantics. Interesting topic but this episode was wack.

[@gilbertanderson3456]

You should recognize that cats, dolphins, crows, octopi and humans have different implementations of consciousness with different strengths and limitations, different needs and perils, but they all have sentience.

[@rossw1365]

I forgot about (the small number of) people who think in terms of images but it doesn't change my theory of running voices and self like running voices, stream of images is also involuntary and serves the same purpose, viz, to represent thoughts and (conscious) mental activity and just like running voices, running images also serve to represent our selves in our minds they also help explain what happens in animals who do not have human-like language I struggled with this point but now it becomes clearer rather than voices, animals prob have a stream of mental "perceptions" corresponding to their dominant sensory perception so birds, eg, have been found to have running images, prob bc their dominant sensory perception is vision other animals prob have running echolocations, touch, or smells but whatever form it takes, it remains my contention that they all have the equivalent of our running voice bc it is how mental activity surfaces to consciousness awareness, where it may be acted on and bc it is the brain's representation of that activity and of the self bc just as the brain represents external perceptions and bodily sensations as qualia, it also represents mental activity and the self as qualia, as a stream of words, images, sounds, etc this representation serves to organize experience so animals don't confuse the world with their bodies or with their minds and selves this is why representation of the self is involuntary and why it takes great and unnatural effort to suppress it (in meditation) and why ppl report experiences of "dissolution of self" and "merging with the world" when the voice (or images) is suppressed so running images is not only easily explained in my theory, it actually helps explain something I struggled to explain originally, namely, what goes though the minds of animals who don't have language as we do

[@rossw1365]

btw, experiences like the "dissolution of self" and "merging with the world" that are induced by meditation, far from being "deep insights into the nature of reality" as some suppose, are just malfunctions of the mind they happen when "wires cross" in the mind's "circuitry" that's why similar experiences can be induced by taking drugs so to the extent spiritual and even religious beliefs depend on such experiences - and religions prob have their geneses in these types of "visions" - well, they are unfounded the "visions" were just malfunctions

[@rossw1365]

it reminds me of an experience feynman relayed or was relayed about him (I forget which) but he was curious about psychedelics so a friend who was into these drugs took him to the beach and gave him some lsd, I think it was supposedly, he lay on the beach watching the waves come in as the normal barriers between him and the world dissolved "there has to be a line, there has to be!", he kept saying, as he hallucinated his lines, or wiring, got crossed by the lsd it was an induced malfunction I don't think feyman learned anything about the "nature of reality", not anything that helped his physics, anyway

[@albin2232]

All animals are sentient according to the accepted definition of sentience. Whether they are Counscious is an entirely different question. I concede that all Human Beings are sentient, but the majority are not conscious, in my opinion.

[@jonnybeware6598]

what’s the difference between sentience and consciousness?

[@albin2232]

​@@jonnybeware6598 There's a very big difference that would take quite a while to explain.

[@frankdominiani8089]

Well... duh.

[@biometronome7010]

How about thinking more about human suffering? The political economic system that has given us factory farms where we torture pigs has also brought about massive human suffering, along with extinction in the near future if we don't wake up

[@MattAngiono]

Okay, sure, but that shouldn't be at the expense of the MUCH GREATER suffering this causes to the animals themselves. Plus, most people already spend a ton of time concerning themselves with human suffering of all different kinds while giving barely any time concerning themselves with the suffering of non human animals. These aren't exclusive categories and we can give both their due at the same time. If we are talking about sentience from an ethical perspective, then ALL animal suffering that we cause cause should be of concern, and that includes humans, naturally

[@charliesteiner2334]

Dear philosophers: please try to find continuous concepts to fit a continuous reality. I am allowed to care about crabs 0.0001% as much as a human just because crabs are dumb and I don't care about them much. I doesn't have to be because I think there's a 0.0001% chance they're "REALLY sentient", equal in weight to humans, and a 99.9999% chance they're totally worthless, utterly unworthy of concern.

[@spaceinyourface]

I've heard people get quite upset that when their automatic hoover was repaired and it didn't comeback the same" Meral Sweep " 😂

[@SONALI-w2s]

!!🎉

[@GGoAwayy]

I always wonder how someone as smart as Sean Carroll reconciles the sociopathic-ness of choosing to eat conscious beings that have been murdered for food.

[@origins7298]

Well it's not clear that we can feed everyone and keep a healthy population and environment without doing it. It's the way our economy and food supply has evolved. Would you rather see people starving to death to save animals that have been bred for hundreds of years to be food. Also why is it wrong to eat animals and okay to eat plants? Why does just having a nervous system Make it qualitatively different? Why do you feel okay about killing and murdering plants? And remember it is not clear that plants do not have feelings and some awareness in ways we do not understand, there's tons of evidence of plants communicating and interacting in more complicated ways than we realized... A food chain has evolved as part of natural evolution. Attaching irrational feelings to subjective and arbitrary deleanations is probably not the best way forward for the health of both people and the planet

[@B33t_R007]

@@origins7298 we could absolutely feed everybody without animals. it needs even less ressources. but we don't want to. meat is part of our diet, we are apex predators. we like meat. we are on top of the foodchain. eating meat is the most natural thing in the world for a human. NOT eating meat, isn't. eating meat has absolutely zero to do with sociopathic-ness.

[@origins7298]

@@B33t_R007 it's tougher especially vegan

[@B33t_R007]

@@origins7298 it would require a good balance of what is being produced. but generally, "feeding" humans purely vegan or some form of it, would infact take fewer ressources and produce less emissions.

[@B33t_R007]

while i don't agree with you that eating meat per-se is sociopathic, i do agree that eating meat from sources where animals are not held properly is not ok. luckily, in switzerland we have generally good laws and labels in that regard.

[@bubaks2]

Wow I’m here early! 1st 😅

[@michouharoliyk2050]

Well done! It's a shame you couldn't mark the occasion with any kind of meaningful comment.

[@user-yv6xw7ns3o]

​Simply exclaiming in excitement of being early is a meaningful thing to some, and not others. It's not shameful to enjoy a simple pleasure like this just because someone else casts judgement.

[@michouharoliyk2050]

@@user-yv6xw7ns3o I wasn't being judgemental. I chose my words carefully - it's a shame.... And I stand by that.

[@stoicsveganage]

Plenty of meat of the bone to chew on here

[@nowhereman8374]

Perhaps dolphins and killer whales have more capabilities to evaluate the crab's sentience than we do. 😊