I’ve personally given a lot of thought to this topic even before co-founding Sentience Institute, so I’d like to spend the rest of this blog post detailing my current views, even though we’re not yet willing to commit the organization to a philosophical position on the topic. “Consciousness Semanticism: A Precise Eliminativist Theory of Consciousness.” In Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2021, edited by Valentin Klimov and David Kelley, 1032:20–41. The following section of this blog post has been superseded by a new paper on consciousness, a non-paywalled version of which is available here. T entative views on the nature of sentience and consciousness This position is all we need for most of our organizational decisions at Sentience Institute, at least for now. This suggests they deserve much more moral consideration than they receive today, and thus we need to substantial ly expan d humanity’s moral circle to include an extremely large number of beings. While we are always ready to update our beliefs on this matter, f or now we think there’s significant evidence relative to these perspectives that nonhuman animals as simple as shrimp and insects have at least a small level of sentience or a small probability of sentience. There is substantial disagreement among researchers on which theory is most likely correct, and in fact there is disagreement about whether there is an objectively correct answer, as intuition suggests (the second part of this blog post will argue that there is not ). Is consciousness just a set of processes ( functionalism )? Is it behavior ( behaviorism ) ? E tc. There are numerous theories of what exactly consciousness is. Sentience Institute chose to focus on sentience, which is a specific kind of consciousness, because most people who have given significant thought to the topic see sentience as morally relevant, rather than all conscious experience. Usually the term consciousness includes capacities beyond happiness and suffering, such as the experiences of seeing or visualizing a color. This is narrower than the most common definition of consciousness in philosophy, which is “something it is like to be that organism ” (details in the second section of the post). If we had to commit Sentience Institute as an organization to a single definition of sentience, we would say it’s simply the capacity to have positive and negative experiences, usually thought of as happiness and suffering. This suggests that most common definitions and theories of consciousness agree that expanding the moral circle to all sentient beings includes expanding it to farmed animals, with perhaps an exception for the farmed animals with the simplest nervous systems such as shellfish and insects. There also seems to be consensus in the field of neuroscience that there is strong evidence for the sentience of many nonhuman animals. Our survey results suggest that 87% of US adults agree that “Farmed animals have roughly the same ability to feel pain and discomfort as humans.” Presumably an even higher percentage would agree that they have at least some level of sentience. Sentience Institute’s current focus is on expanding humanity’s moral circle to include farmed animals like chickens, fish, cows, and pigs. Most of what we do doesn’t depend on the specifics. We launched Sentience Institute in June 2017 “to build on the body of evidence for how to most effectively expand humanity’s moral circle, and to encourage advocates to make use of that evidence.” Our aim is to expand the moral circle to include all sentient beings, but the term sentience opens up a host of important philosophical and empirical questions about exactly which beings we’re talking about. Many thanks to Oliver Austin, Antonin Broi, Guillaume Corlouer, Peter Hurford, Tyler John, Caleb Ontiveros, Jay Quigley, Jose Luis Ricon, Brian Tomasik, and Jay Quigley for reviewing and providing feedback. Cham: Springer International Publishing.Įdited by Kelly Witwicki. The second section of this post on “Tentative Views” has been superseded by a new paper on consciousness, a non-paywalled version of which is available here.
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