Consciousness Live! with Jamie Woodhouse (S6 E7)

0:01 sounds good yeah all right then okay we are live uh very exciting today joining me an extra special guest um Jamie can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you yeah absolutely it's great to be here and um it's nice to turn the tables as you were a guest on my own sentientism podcast and YouTube a while back so it was a great conversation um so I guess my mission in life at the moment and this has crept up on me is to

0:34 talk about the topic we're going to cover today which is this sentientism worldview so I did have a sort of quar to Century in a traditional corporate career um and have in recent years been focusing on a variety of different sort of NGO and charitable projects that relate to different aspects of philosophy and uh yeah this sentientism idea is rapidly becoming the sort of center of most of the things I'm trying to do at the moment very cool yes and I'm highly supportive of this endeavor of yours uh so I'm curious about your background a little bit and how you got drawn into this so uh you said you had a

1:07 kind of quarter Century of traditional like you know business oriented stuff but did you have a degree in philosophy or Neuroscience or do you have any interest in this before that kind of turned or I kind of curious like what brought you towards this yeah so no no degree no professional qualifications in this field at T so I'm absolutely still an abject amateur in all of the things we're going to talk about sometimes I think that helps but you know maybe just an excuse but but a lot of these topics have been a real interest of mine since childhood you know since I was a early mid teens I was fascinated by you know

1:40 the ideas of different worldviews originally I was bought brought up Christian and I started to you know explore other types of religious worldviews and non-religious worldviews um that led me into all sorts of different ideas about philosophy um but there was always a strong fascination with different aspects of science as well whether it's the origins of the universe the nature of the universe and yeah that led me through to a fascination with the nature of life and humanity and evolution and Consciousness too so those those have long been sort of amateur interest and then yeah in the sort of quarter Century corporate world those very much pushed to the edges of

2:14 my life and my time as these things you know as tends to happen but they've always been a Fascination for me so yeah this work I'm doing now is sort of bringing them back into the center and really concentrating on them because the more I've brought them back into the center the more fundamental and more important they seem to be given the problems we're facing in the world today yeah absolutely so the the focus as you like to put it on what's real and what matters are are things I think that everyone is interested in to some degree or other um and that of course you have a distinctive take on that sort of thing but uh I think that way of phrasing it

2:47 is a really good at drawing people in because we all have our pre theoretic Notions about what we think is real and what we think is important and by drawing people in that way I think you're already touching on something that they they are going to find really relatable so I think that's a good way to do it um but just to follow up on this thing that you're talking about so were you raised vegetarian or around animals or like what I'm trying to get at kind of what brought you towards the the the concerns of sism is in particular yeah so um I guess the personal path on the epistemology side

3:22 started out being brought up Christian and then in my teens I became an atheist for a variety of reasons we can go into if you like um but that wasn't very satisfying to me because a Years A Min in a way is just you know an answer to one politic one particular question but there are so many other questions we might want to answer so epistemologically I was then drawn to a broader concept of naturalism in an epistemological sense so you know generally using an Evidence and reason based approach hopefully with a healthy dose of humility to understand everything about this universe we all share not just you know is there a god

3:55 or not which was just one question so that was a sort of epistemological path to naturalism epistemological naturalism which is one of the two tenets of scotism but on the ethical side there was a parallel there too because part of the reason I moved away from Christianity and ultimately rejected all of the religious worldviews wasn't just because the facts and the evidence didn't seem to stack up for me um but I was seeing ethical challenges that flowed through some of those worldviews too you know there were Rich elements of compassion and the Golden Rule and uh and so on and so forth but there were

4:28 also issues with exclusionary ethics where you know the compassion was maybe conditional on you being a member of the outg group or constraint to those who followed the right rules and quite often if you stepped over that boundary terrible things would happen it didn't seem very you know ethical to me so you know the idea of a a perfectly benevolent compassionate God who is the instantiation of perfect love you know torturing countless billions of largely innocent beings for eternity just didn't seem to stack up with what I thought of as ethic morality so anyway there's so

5:01 there was an ethical theme in that shift away from a religious worldview too um and that part that also as I was thinking about broader questions led me Beyond atheism because again atheism and or even more extreme agnosticism you know somewhere between those two doesn't really tell you much about morality except that you probably shouldn't base it on some notion of a you know theistic uh ethics or a Divine Comm the but it sort of leaves it open to where you go next it's a bit neutral on ethics so that searching led me to

5:35 humanism as a worldview which in simple terms and its modern Incarnation says look we have a naturalistic understanding of the world there probably isn't a God uh there probably aren't Supernatural things but we don't need any of those things to be ethical and to be moral so humanism says well we understand things naturalistically um but we layer on to that a universal compassion for at least All Humans you know we should care about every human regardless of what they're like where they come from uh you know how clever they are how cute they are

6:08 what cast they are it doesn't matter right call charistic charismatic animals right how charismatic they are that's that's exactly it right and it was um and and um largely but not exclusively restricted to our species um so that was part of the ethical path um and this is too long and ask your question no but the idea of non-human animals the idea of non-human animals as with most people was sort of in the back of my mind so I grew up with companion animals at home we lived in the countryside so I had some exposure to an experience with wild

6:40 animals and my interactions with them were were by no means uh consistently compassionate you and I I used to go fishing for example and I remember there were moments of thinking this is horrible right but it again it was just such a a normal thing to do I didn't really focus on engaging in that deeply but the trigger for thinking about it a bit more deeply was was largely because my sister was vegetarian from quite a young age so that always kept it turning over in my head and at some point I think in my sort of early mid 20s I took

7:13 the decision to go vegetarian purely for ethical reasons um because I didn't want to needlessly cause exploitation suffering or death to non-human animals right so that side of my ethics was was there too but it was calibrated in quite a narrow way so in a way my ethical stance hasn't changed that much today now I'm vegan but at the time there was a genuine ethical you know drive to my behavior that said look actually putting pieces of the Flesh of

7:45 an animal that's been killed so I can eat it to my mouth there's such a direct link there between the action that I see as unethical and my personal choice that that made vegetarianism quite an obvious step but it was also quite convenient socially too because in those days you know things are changing rapidly but in those days vegetarianism was quite weird but veganism was really weird so in a why I and this is embarrassing to say now right because I'm talk a lot about ethics and morality but it's remarkably common that my my choice about my decision was more of a social decision

8:17 than it was a an ethical decision um uh so um yeah I almost deliberately avoided engaging with the topics of this gap between vegetarianism and veganism you know thinking about Dairy and egg production and and so on I almost deliberately avoided the topic partly because I I sort of knew where I would go and I wasn't socially ready to to take what felt like a risk at that point and that's interesting that lasted that lasted for a couple of decades so so again too long on answer right but the this theme about you know moving towards

8:51 a naturalistic epistemology has been something that was there from my teens and at least the early signs of look it's not just us humans that matter you know there's something about non-human animals or capacity to have experiences that also matters too so I guess theyve both been both of these tenants have been bubbling away somewhere in my head for huh that's very interesting I mean I I personally myself was raised vegetarian as I think we talked about but um I always like wonder if I hadn't been like would I have turned vegetarian so I'm always curious and fascinated by these stories of people who come to it

9:24 for for their own uh on their own of course now I am also vegan as you um and it is interesting too because for a long time I wondered why just to mention follow up on your story why I wasn't uh vegan as I was vegetarian and a large part of it had to do with like that my mom raised me vegetarian and she was such an animal activist such an animal lover um that I kind of just felt like if it was wrong to eat milk and eggs that she would have like told us but we were raised eating that even

9:56 though we were taught like we have to treat animals with respect and kindness and think of them as our younger siblings that can't speak and things of that nature so it was really a kind of a misleading moral role model in a way um that that that insulated me and didn't cause me to question these things because I just thought gee it would have been pointed out to me already because my mom car so much about this stuff and then as an adult I talked to her about it and she was like yeah this is one of my shortcomings I never could give up on cheese and dairy I was like oh uh well gez so there's no good reason then um but it is interesting how we can be led

10:30 into these like comfortable like um low areas where we you we've reached a certain point we feel fairly good about a moral progress and we don't look any further for for whatever reasons for Comfort or whatnot so it is fascinating to me it's fascinating and and that's one of the great things about the series of conversations I've had so far is because in a way this sentientism idea focuses on you know epistemology how do we understand the universe and it focuses on you know moral scope of who should be included on our compassion and our moral consideration um but in a way

11:04 those aren't really the problem you know th those are the answers to those things I think are almost trivially obvious and right and in a weird way most of humanity sort of gets most of the way to agreeing on both of those points you know who who would want to believe things that aren't grounded in evidence and reason and and who would want to needlessly cause suffering to any being that can suffer it's sort of almost torical in its obviousness so the real problem in Practical terms comes in social norms authority figures institutional patterns you know as as

11:37 with many interhuman problems right the issue isn't so much the technical thing about the philosophy or the science it's uh you know humans are weird social animals and you know and that and that can have good impacts and it can also have terrible impact so yeah yeah so the stories about these paths people follow are are always always fascinating and there are you know there are the rare people who you know and I've interviewed some of them who at six years old thought through the science in a simplistic six-year-old way thought through the philosophy in a simplistic six-year old

12:09 way and decided to go vegan and then stuck with it right despite what their family thought those people do exist I know most of us are most of us are a bit more like you know you and me and very much shaped by the environments and the the social norms and so on and yeah exactly that that is we need more people like that um I I mean I have to say my mom was raised in a Veet uh a non-vegetarian household and she turned vegetarian as soon as she realized that the meat came from an animal like it was pretty much instantaneous um but uh she never got past that which I think is interesting um but but just following back up about

12:43 how your like conversion if you want to call it that to atheism and then this long Winding Road uh towards a more inclusive View kind of expanding out the horizons it's interesting that you took this route because a lot of people will challenge um the atheistic world view on exactly this point that there is no secure ground so allegedly for for moral truth and so someone who says I'm an atheist but I take like a pretty hardcore moral stance on this thing seems like something of a contradiction to some people so I am wondering like

13:16 what where do you think in your naturalistic worldview uh the source of morality and ethics come from like what on what do you base this and I know you're not a professional philosopher but obviously you thought about this a tremendous amount so I'm just curious like what what you how you arrive at that so let me give you a couple of different answers because one thing I want to do is distinguish between my own personal View and the sentientism worldview that I'm trying to develop and popularize okay because one of the things about the sentientism worldview which I I summarize as evidence reason and compassion for all sentient beings

13:49 so slightly more technically that's a naturalistic epistemology um as opposed to for example a fism or using an authority figure or revelation fabrication or a dogmatic approach right it's using good quality evidence and reasoning to maintain and update credences and our beliefs with you know that's partly where the humility comes from so that's not just science that's using evidence and reason much more broadly and generously construed as well it doesn't have to be a randomized control trial right so so that's the epistemological side but what it doesn't do is it doesn't tell you what to believe it doesn't tell you you know whether to be

14:23 be a flat earther or whether vaccines are effective or uh you know whether there's a God it just says look here's the tool kit we should be using because a naturalistic epistemology gives us the better chance of working out you know what what is real and what's true but we can we would we may well still disagree over an enormous amount but at least we have a basis of you know shared commitment to using evidence and reason to work it through so I have loads of specific beliefs that other sentien might disagree with but hopefully we all agree that we should try try to ground it naturalistically in terms of pison so the same is true when it comes to the

14:58 ethics in that sentientism says you know we should have compassion for all sentient beings so more formally you might describe that as a Centric moral scope so whatever ethical system you choose to apply down to logical feminist care ethic relational utilitarian broadly consequentialist you know pick your system or a combination of systems whatever you choose you have to include every sent being in your moral consideration and that has to be a meaningful moral consideration right has uh um so there's at least a Baseline and

15:32 I suggest non-maleficence is the Baseline obl minimal obligation we should have to every every sensient being but what it doesn't do is it doesn't tell you necessarily which of those ethical systems you should apply and I have my own personal views about you know the flavors I like to use but it also doesn't answer your question of okay but why should we have compassion or why should we extend moral consideration so you will find quite a iety of different answers to that question amongst people who um have a sentien worldview

16:05 So eventually I will answer your question but it's useful to sort of make I want to make that distinction partly because I don't want you know part of the idea behind the worldview is that it's broad it's pluralistic and it's a baseline it's very open H and and it's something I hope many many people could engage with and then find their own way through rather than just disagreeing with my person personal opinion and you know associating with the word right so that's why you are not sism you're a sist yeah I'm just one of them I'm just one of them right and many of the others

16:38 disagree and and our online communities and forums that really quite obvious right and that's healthy right that's the point whole point is there isn't an authority or a Dogma the whole point is we have an agreed tool kit and agreed moral scope and there's so much still to fight over but believe me right so right um so so you will find different answers to that question Mar senen is I guess there are some people who will say there is no formal structured grounding to why we should extend our moral scope to sensient beings or indeed have any

17:12 morality at all so there are sort of people who maybe are technically nihilists in the sense that they say well ultimately this is just a physical Universe the laws of nature are churning um we're just entities in that those patterns up there's no externally imposed morality there's no morality in the laws of physics we're just doing what we're doing but I still choose just as a choice to extend my compassion to all sentient beings so it's almost like a nice nihilist approach saying it's just a choice just a just a choice I can't

17:46 you know impose it on you I can't tell you there's some perfect answer that would compel you to agree with me it's just a choice I'm choosing to make and I hope you all make the same choice but it's just a choice there are others who um uh will adopt more of a sort of moral realist St where they will have a view that um not just morality but aeno Centric morality is itself an objective moral truth that you know sentientism has is part of discovering and they hope

18:22 and expect everybody else to come to that agreement because ultimately it's a real thing and you know we should converge towards agreeing on the reality and this is where my amateurism as a philosopher comes in because I'm not really sure where I sit because some people would describe my view as moral realist and some people describe it as anti-realist but in a way it's a sort of conditional realism where I'm quite comfortable drawing a link between the good and bad of an experience for a sentient being to the good and bad and right and wrong of ethics and morality I'm quite comfortable making that

18:56 connection um such that that you know if I suffer by just the definition of the word that's a negatively valenced experience for me so if someone causes me to Suffer Without a justification that is the essence of a immoral act or an amoral act if they don't care either way so I'm quite comfortable drawing that link from the the veilance of an experience which is I guess the central concept of being a sentient being through to the good and bad and right and wrong and the and the judgments we might make of morality um and in a sense

19:29 that is objective conditional on the existence of sentient beings right so if you imagine a lifeless Universe with no sentient being no capacity to suffer to flourish to experience any veence whatsoever I don't think there's any morality or any ethics in that universe so in that sense it's not objective I don't think it's like a sort of platonic thing floating out there it's not really what moralists think necessarily um but conditional on the existence of sentient beings I I think morality Springs from that and and if that's the approach you

20:02 follow I've struggled to find any rationale for excluding any sentient being in a moral consideration if our morality is grounded in what it's like to experience good and bad things so yeah I does I don't know how much sense that makes no it's interesting I I guess one question that I was thinking about while you were talking was is it really the case that you could take any kind of account of morality and end up with a sentient sentien worldview like for example you mentioned deontology and I know you could have versions of deontology that maybe take

20:35 into consideration animals um but the most famous version of it from Kant does not and only takes into consideration Ral rational agency which animals allegedly lack so is it do so I'm wondering on your view then like yeah so is it really that you meant to say that any account of morality that you could give you could make a case for sentientism or are there some accounts of morality where this doesn't even come up like the hardcore contition who says it's not sentience it's rationality that matters um but or

21:10 so yeah I'm curious about is how how much you think this extends all the way out yeah I think I think many ethical systems you could take a sentien approach um but you don't have to and many people don't so um so I think you could take a deontological approach which look you know rules or concepts of Rights and you can then very easily extend that beyond the Canan approach to uh non-human animals as cause guard and many others have done for example um utilitarianism gets there very naturally although disappointedly many

21:42 utilitarians still seem to be quite focused on us humans as being the source of utility but it's sort of from benam built in that you know can they suffer is is the question builds it out when he says there's higher and lower Pleasures which I think a lot of people would distinguish yeah absolutely so there are distinctions that that people can make so I think there is there are there's a portfolio of different ethical systems you could use at care ethic and and so on to to apply a sentien approach but that doesn't mean those systems necessarily lead you to a sentien approach you know I think they

22:14 should but many people would disagree with me I think there are there there are some approaches to ethics that I don't I think it's much harder to make fit so if you are you know a pure annihilist um or you take a you know a really strong form of moral relativism that in a sense is similar to nism it's just saying well descriptively so this group has agreed a set of rules so by definition that's moral for them regardless of the suffering they cause you know in a sense I think that's an you know both of those approaches are an

22:47 abandoning of morality rather than a flavor of morality um or you could have a Divine command uh sort of morality or ethic where ultimately you know what's good or bad is defin by what the deity tells you to do and by the nature of the deity themselves which again is completely independent of you know the impact of your actions or the suffering you might cause so so I think there are types of morality you know nihilism strong relativism Divine command theory that don't really fit with a sentien Approach at all because a sentien approach is

23:21 insisting that morality should involve a concern for others right and those others should include all Senti beings so does that does that make sense but that still leaves there's a bunch of different ways you can put that into practice you could have you know a virtue ethics that talks about kindness and justice but that that justice has to be extended to all sentient beings for it to be sentien right or you could have a you know a rights-based view but for it to be a sentient this rights based view it has to extend rights to all sentient beings or a feminist care ethic you know that care has to be extended at

23:55 least in some form to every sentient being yeah you could implement it yeah yeah I was mishearing you I thought I thought you were saying that every moral system kind of like entails or logically implies that you should be a sentien but rather what you're saying is that most moral systems are compatible with sentientism yeah yeah and I you know and I you know obviously I'm a bit biased right but um in every one of those different ethical systems where you can get to a stien this conclusion I've never seen a compelling reason why we'd exclude

24:28 sentient being so when people do take a deontological approach or a virtue ethics approach or utilitarian approach and then they restrict their moral consideration to an in group or an in species you have never seen a good rationale for doing that that isn't in some sense arbitrary yeah I I I tend to agree with you about that but just following up on this Divine command Theory and the stuff about religion um it it seems built into the sentien worldview that it's kind of atheistic and naturalistic so I am curious whether you think that that is the case or

25:01 whether you could be a sentien Christian or a sentien Muslim or a sentien Buddhist or do you think those are incompatible in some way yeah I think it's possible because there's a distinction between the epistemology and the ontology so um I think the vast majority of people who say look I'm a scientist and I have a naturalistic worldview you know they probably don't adhere to any religious or Supernatural beliefs yeah um but I think you could you know there are there are people who say look I I do

25:35 believe in a Dey or a good or a God and I ground that explicitly in what I see as good quality evidence and reasoning and and they um so in that sense they could be a sentien who's committed to a naturalistic epistemology but they do have you know some beliefs in the Supernatural now for me they tend to collapse quite quickly together because in a sense if I'm grounding my beliefs and credences in evidence and reason and that evidence comes from reality around me and natural sources I struggled to understand how I

26:10 could get really good quality evidence about something that was beyond the natural that was Supernatural because it seems as as soon as I get some evidence of this phenomena the evidence itself is natural because I'm experiencing it in some way it's coming into my senses or it's you know being processed in my brain so that almost makes the supernatural thing as soon as I have evidence of it part of the natural world right um so for me you know a naturalistic epistemology leads me to have a very high Credence in a naturalistic ontology um but but other people that you know it is a it's a looser

26:44 connection and I think for those people sorry go ahead well and for those people um you know that's not just a question about religion you could you know find disagreements in almost every aspect of life where we might believe or have different credences and different things and and sometimes people will tell you that their views are based on evidence and reasoning but when you scratch the surface it becomes clear that's not quite the case and and there are good ways of testing that you know when when you explore different types of evidence that go against that view how open are

27:18 they to considering that in good faith or if the evidence changes will they change their view so quite often if someone says well My Views are grounded in evidence and reason but I refuse to engage in evidence that disagrees or if the evidence changes I'm still sticking with my view the reality is they are actually locked into something that is more dogmatic or more fistic um but yeah I think there's still some some space there for people to say look I'm committed to using evidence and reason that gives me a decent Credence in some sort of theistic belief and then at least we can have a conversation about the evidence and the reasoning and and

27:50 work that through together so what would you call someone who said I'm committed to the existence of the supernatural deity of some sort but I believe that the deity commands compassion for all sentient creatures so they reject naturalistic epistemology but they sort of endorse the idea of Senti did they are they not Atia your view like so I'm asking because I'm curious how much is the naturalistic worldview and epistemology a core part or of the view yeah so I think it is a core part

28:22 of the view so I'd describe that as a Centric view rather than a sentien view okay and there a distinction some people won't necessarily recognize because the two words Centric and sentient sentientism have often been used almost as equivalence in fields of philosophy um and I think that's partly because most of the people using those World words have such an intuitive naturalistic worldview anyway it didn't really struck them as an important distinction to make so focused very much just on the moral scope piece but not on

28:55 the naturalism and not on the naturalistic epistemology so i' I one of the things I've been suggesting is that in the same way as you can think of a sliding scale of moral scope from for example anthropocentrism through to biocentrism and ecocentrism centrism fits into that Spectrum so you can go from anthropocentrism concern centrally for humans asenti centrism concern centrally for sentient beings biocentrism for living entities even non-sentient ones and ecocentrism that goes beyond that

29:27 ecosystems and even rocks rivers and trees and Concepts that aren't even living so in that sense centio centrism is a term that focuses very clearly just on how we set our moral scope of inclusion but is neutral about epistemology and how we understand the world so I suggest that person has a Centric view I would enthusiastically work with them as an ally to try and drive the implications of that compassion through our world and quite a few of those people you know join in our sentientism groups and communities and you know work together with us on all sorts of different stuff even though

30:00 they don't share our naturalistic worldview if that makes sense but part of the part of the reason I I do want to emphasize the naturalist naturalism part and some people will say this to me it was like well you know I really like what you're doing with this worldview and the movement you're trying to develop around it but isn't this insistence on a commitment to a naturalistic epistemology you know isn't that a bit problematic doesn't it annoy some of religious people we might want to work with engage with constructively um is it really important you know surely what matters is our

30:33 scope of moral consideration that's the only thing that really matters yeah um and I don't think that's true and so part of the reason I do focus on it it's not to exclude people with a supernatural worldview or with a faith-based or a dogmatic worldview at all because I think we'd work with them in common cause and all sorts of different things if they have a expansive compassion for non-human animals and they're welcome in all of our forums and groups but the reason I do think naturalistic epistemology is important is because I think if we're wrong about the world you

31:07 know we're we're just our credences are set wrong we believe stuff that isn't true even richly compassionate people can end up in terrible places um so so there are many examples from history and today where genuinely compassionate good people have false beliefs about reality that lead them into doing terrible things right and maybe a more praic um thing to Think Through is the way humans think about animal agriculture today right which I think to you and to me is a is an abject

31:39 unethical horror and a completely avoidable one so when you so so so you might if you you know landed as an alien and looked at this planet with a Centric compassion and saw what was happening in animal Agro culture and many other forms of exploitation you know one conclusion you could come to is you know most of humanity is basically um morally broken they're arbitrarily excluding vast quantities of sentient beings from their moral consideration and are brutalizing them in horrible ways but then I think when you you know land on your spaceship

32:12 and you interview some people and you talk to you probably find that most people are just nice decent Ordinary People right and you know they're not evil you you talk to them about non-human animals and they'd say of course you know we should care for non-human animals and their suffering matters and you know while I needlessly cause harm so there are some people who have made an ethical mistake right they they are deliberately and clearly anthropocentric they genuinely think for example um you know that we that ethically we should not care about non-human animals but I think those people are very rare you know the

32:44 people who actually made an ethical error when it comes to animal agriculture you struggle to find many of them I mean there are some of them on Twitter but you can find anything on Twitter most of the problem when you say to people well why do you still support this industry it's not errors of Ethics or mistakes in Morality fact it's epistemological errors it's facts right and and do they really believe them or have they been told them different questions right but but actually it's the fact so there are some people who will deny the Senti of non-human animals yeah so look they cannot suffer that's getting rarer and rarer over time

33:16 because the science is so overwhelming um there are people who will say that the practice of aculture and farming don't harm non-human animals um that Slaughter for example can be done in a humane way where the word Humane means kind and compassionate implying that you can kill an nonhuman sentient being that doesn't want to die in a kind and compassionate way because you want to sell bits of its body so again that's that's an odd belief to hold um uh or some people believe that you know it's impossible

33:48 for humans to survive or be healthy without consuming these adal products so yes it's a shame but you know what choice do I have and these are epistemological errors not ethical errors um and um I'd argue that they're more of the problem than the ethics I think most people probably share your my ethics in theory you know if there's a the puppy downstairs or a companion animal or you even get them to spend some quality time with a pig or a chicken or a fish or or insects right people don't want to hurt these beings unless there's a really strong justification for it um but it's the epistemology that's the problem yeah

34:23 so that's partly why I do come back to saying look I'm nervous if we just focus on moral scope and compassion that that can be taken in dangerous ways if people don't have a you know a naturalistic grounding of their understanding of reality it doesn't always have to but uh often that's the case and many of the ethical problems we see in interhuman ethics as well as inter species ethics I think are driven as much by epistemological errors as they are ethical errors and the two feed each other right because to justify an ethical exclusion quite often you have to you know believe things that aren't

34:56 true to justify those ethics and if you make some epistemological errors about you know another race of humans or another group of humans or another species that can then justify your ethical exclusion so yeah so I do you know I guess that's why I think we need a good epistemology and good ethics neither is good enough by itself yeah that's a good point I mean there's some really striking examples too from history that are pretty gruesome so even the most some of the most uh people we consider debauched in horror horor people in the world like

35:29 himler and those guys you know um Bernard Williams wrote this nice essay where he quoted some of himmler's diary where he says he has compassion for the Jews he feels bad for them but he has this duty to do what he has to do so it's a case where you know he's compassionate and I mean it's hard to think of him as compassionate to be honest but he in his journal he's talking about how bad he feels having to do this stuff but like Duty compels him so it's a bad Theory I mean that was kind of Bernard Williams point in that uh essay was that we're kind of stuck because on the one hand bad theories can lead us to but on the other hand you know close relationships can lead us astray too and his other example is hug

36:02 Finn um but anyway so I don't want to get too distracted but I I do take your point that if you're just you know you could be very compassionate but if you have these weird views um then you're going to be doing horribly immoral things however I do wonder if there is like really a uh in the philosopher sense a true dichotomy here between what you call the naturalistic epistemology and and a supernaturalistic one because isn't it the case that most people have a bit of a mixed bag I mean maybe not you or I since we're pretty thoroughly committed atheists for many many years

36:34 however take your average person I I don't think that the average religious person is anti-science in a certain way they certainly can be reasoned with on a on with empirical evidence they also have some strange beliefs about Revelation and you know God talking through burning bushes and stuff like that um so yes they have that kind of dogmatic view uh about that taking on faith but then also you know you could confront them with some EV and they might change their mind on this or that view but not the larger picture about whether God exists or something like that so so I do wonder if like you could have it in between view where you have

37:06 kind of a commitment to to being you know naturalistically challenged but you could still you know believe in some higher source higher power I mean I don't want to be that type of person I'm not asking this question because I have these views I just think that like you were saying it does seem a bit exclusionary and a bit like um off-putting to to people to say that this view has to be naturalistic or else you're not really doing the thing that we care about um or in other words not naturalistic friendly but like fully atheist in order to like really commit

37:41 to this view um and I wonder so if you think that that's like something that could be a middle ground I think it could be and again I think I I think I think this is maybe seem a weird thing to say given what I've said so far but I think a a naturalistic epistemology can still leave us open to be to the possibility of a supernatural ontology I mean anything could be possible so so um and I think a good way of thinking that through is that quite a few you know very committed atheists I think have moved away from a naturalistic epistemology because they've become

38:13 dogmatic about their atheism yeah right so and my own thinking about this has shifted over time as well when I started out on this I was thinking more about the ontology you know the natural world versus the supernatural world and do Supernatural things existed exist and over time I've shifted to focus more on epistemology partly for this reason because um my what I'm challenging with this idea isn't a supernatural ontology as you know you just shouldn't believe in that what I'm challenging are um grounding beliefs or grounding

38:47 credences in things that aren't linked to reality so so what I'm the sorts of things I'm resisting are more things you know epistemologies like fidis or F right where you're you're saying I've chosen to believe something regardless of the evidence right and the evidence is in a pure sense irrelevant here because I have this Faith or a dogmatic approach that says I have these beliefs and they will not change regardless of the evidence or you know a revelation based on some Authority that says you

39:18 know if God tells me to kill my firstborn child then you know that that's the thing I will do right so those the reason I'm resisting those is not because um it's because I think they're very unlikely to help you understand reality accurately and may take you off the rails ethically so I'm I'm whereas I think approach based on good quality evidence and reasoning is much more likely to give us a chance to be roughly right right but a good a naturalistic epistemology one that absolutely by no means guarantees you're right about

39:50 anything and as soon as you think you're 100% right you've made a mistake epistemologically because you should always leave some space for even crazy stuff right because anyone who has a basic understanding of modern physics knows that it's full of totally crazy stuff right so I think we should be ontologically open you know I think it's it's it's conceivably possible there could be a deity right you know I'm I'm I describe myself as an atheist as a Shand but I'm not 100% sure there's no God by absolutely and I can acknowledge that there is some evidence that might point you towards theism I think that's a a healthy approach yeah um so again that's a long answer but that's why I'm

40:24 more focused on the epistemological commitment to using evidence and reason then I am a denial of the possibility of the supernatural I think these things are I think they're very unlikely but you know they're possible and we should just be open-minded and keep following the evidence yeah so that's helpful so that fism and dogmatism that really you see as sort of really deeply incompatible uh I think so and part of the reason is because in a sense I see those things as being being arbitary in a way right if if you believe something based on faith that isn't grounded in evidence or you believe some a Dogma

40:57 that isn't connected to the evidence it might as well be arbitrary I mean you and once you've moved into that mode there's nowhere to go in a discussion right if I if I say you know based on faith you know uh I don't know pick some pick some Bel like the Earth is flat or you don't exist or and and it's a faith-based thing the conversation has basically ended I mean there's no purchase right on that so part of the difficulty is I think there are many beliefs that people have based on faith or based on dogmatism or based

41:30 on Revelation from some Authority that that can be quite benign right they might actually incentivize their compassion and that can be a wonderful thing but the difficulty is as soon as you've accepted the validity of a belief that isn't grounded in reality you've opened the door to extremely harmful beliefs that aren't grounded in reality and once you've opened the door it's very hard to shut again because if you've said well that's your belief that's your faith that's the Dogma you stick with you've got no basis to push back on it um so that's again it's partly why sort of the the naturalism

42:03 the naturalistic epistemology is important to me I see okay so um CH changing topics slightly I wonder if you think that uh sentientism as we've been defining it entails veganism or whether there's wiggle room there um because there's all sorts of weasel words that show up like like uh harm without justification for no good reason and these other sorts of uh Escape hatches so I do wonder if someone could be a

42:37 sentien on in your view and um and think that there's good reason to think that these harms are Justified at least in some cases or something like that or how where you come down on that yeah so I think there's a pretty strong link so you know I uh I'm vegan because of my sentientism if you like um and the reason for that hardly comes back down to the definition of words like compassion and moral consideration because you're right there's there's all sorts of you know wiggle room in the story that can lead you to veganism you can deny the sentients of non-human

43:11 animals you can deny that harms are being done or you can and I think this is actually the most Insidious tactic which is very commonly used is you can actually claim that for example animal farming practices are consistent with compassion moral consider ation and being Humane right and to my mind the reason that's the most Insidious resistance is because it's destroying the very meaning of those words um so to my mind um if someone if you were to say to me look Jamie I have

43:44 moral consideration for you I have compassion for you I want I'm going to treat you humanely but then you treated me like any you know aquatic or land animal is in any Farm anywhere in the world you know not just factory farm but the the supposedly nicest Family Farms right I would immediately turn to you and say what you are doing to me is not Humane it's not kind it's not compassionate it doesn't meet even the minimal requirement for any moral consideration here um and I guess more technically

44:17 what I suggest is that those words at the very least should imply an obligation of non-maleficence I.E you know we should at least try not to cause suffering exploitation and death to any sentient being um so I draw that's partly why I draw quite a clear link between having moral consideration for a being and the implication of veganism how does Death get in there though so that's an interesting question because some will say if you're only

44:50 interested in the sentience of the sentient beings you're interested in their experiences and you could find find some way of killing without suffering and without pain right would Death itself intrinsically be a wrong I had interesting conversation with Peter Singer about this when he came on the sentientism podcast well I haven't seen that one I have to watch it because exactly my kind of objection to utilitarianism is I don't think they have a good answer to this so I'm curious to hear what he may have say I don't think they do either right so the first point is that that thought experiment has nothing to do with animal

45:24 exploitation or agriculture whatsoever but because there is no painless killing there's no euthanasia um secondly it has nothing to do with it because at the very least there are family and group members and others impacted um thirdly you know the the overall process end to end is generally pretty horrific and exploitative and unpleasant so so one you know okay it's a thought experiment right but it let's not kid ourselves it has anything to do with current animal agriculture exactly and and and believing that it does is one of the epistemological errors we talked about before because many people will at least

45:55 kid themselves that this is exactly how animal agriculture works right long happy lives and then a and a and a peaceful you know death post euthanasia right so that's the first point the second point is that and again my thinking on this has shifted because when I started out working on this I probably was thinking more about moment to moment sentient as being the raw material of morality and ethics but over time I've shifted instead to thinking about moral inclusion for sentient beings as beings so that doesn't mean we just have to care about their sentient or their momentary EXP experiences what

46:28 it means is that as a moral imperative we should consider their perspective and their interests whatever those are um and to my mind almost that almost seems torical to most modes of Ethics that and somehow we're considering the other and taking that into account and choosing what to do so when we try and do that I think that does open us up to a broader range of things that might matter to that sentient being and some people would still you know draw those things back down to their momentary s experience but that does open the door up to things like autonomy or agency or

47:00 other things that could be important to that sentient being and I think an interes in continuing to live and not being killed is pretty Central to most sentient beings because I think it's probably one of the most deep evolutionary drives that led to sentience existing in the first place right if a sentient being doesn't have an interest in most circumstances in continuing to live and not being killed you know I'm not sure what interest it might have so so I think that you know almost regardless of the harm done you know murdering someone is a bad thing to do right right so it's almost

47:35 like a shift between like traditional utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism where you stop focusing on like pain and pleasure and you start focus on maximizing the preferences of the individuals um is that do you think that at least from a utilitarian point of view would capture what you're talking about I think it it probably would would at least open the door to that it wouldn't necessarily insist on that but but it would say that you know we should if we're going to have moral consideration and compassion for someone we should consider what's important to them and act with that in mind and killing them is you know except in

48:08 genuine compassionate Youth and Asia killing them is not generally in their interest so we shouldn't do it it's a wrong in that sense so I think yeah it opens the door broader than a you know a sort of a very narrow honic moment to moment utilitarianism it says look the you know other things might matter to sentient beings and all sentient beings should matter yeah I mean it's interesting because I grew up thinking that it was wrong to eat meat that the that the bad thing was eating the meat and then when I started interacting with other people what I found out was no one else really believes that they believe it's like wrong to kill animals it's wrong to

48:41 cause them to suffer but like if you could get the meat magically without having to do any of that then it would still be okay and I really struggled with that I still don't really have that same intuition I sort of feel like it's disrespectful to the kind of creature to turn them into energy for my purposes so that I can go walk to the Subway or like climb a St of stairs or something like that and to think of them as and and I have had some fascinating conversations with people who want to go beyond so that's one of the other things I've tried to do with sentientism is also to not make it um uh you don't have to say only sentience matters you have to have

49:15 compassion for all sentient beings but you could go beyond that if you want so you can compare about you can care about other things that matter to those sentient beings but you could even go beyond sentient beings if you want to um so I've had conversations people like niik Dill who's been exploring whether agency should matter yeah you know independent of Senses going Beyond and I've talked to people like Suzanna monzo who talk about the idea you were just mentioning of dignity right is there something about the Dignity of a non-human animal that should be a moral motivation for us you know regardless of their experience um and I you know I'm somewhat cynical of some of those things

49:49 because they feel a little bit more to me like human concerns than a genuine concern of the other being but um you know I'm I'm quite open people who want to go beyond sentientism I'm much more concerned with people excluding sentient beings than I am people saying you know can't we add some extra stuff in you know over and above sentientism so it's quite open in that way I see so I but let me I I wanted to I wanted to come back to the your your question about the wiggle room as well because I think that's an important point about sentientism and veganism because there are some there are some differences

50:20 between the philosophies um but I think they overlap very strongly I guess one thing I would say is there's there's actual and practicality even within the definition of veganism itself right so the definition of veganism talks about you know as far as practical and possible it doesn't it's not some sort of Purity thing where it's you know you're binary and if you meet the vegan standard you're ethically perfect and if you don't you're out you know it it has as far as practical been possible built into the very definition so there's I think an intelligent you might call it wiggle room but as long as it's dealt with in a

50:52 good faith way right people might EXC use that as an excuse people will say you know it's well it's not practicable for me not to eat bacon because I really love bacon right okay we know what you're doing it's very funny but it's it's not a good there's not good faith engagement with the definition of veganism and so you can find those same things in sentientism as well because you can as you say you can say well okay we I I agree you we should have this Baseline obligation of non-maleficence where we shouldn't needlessly cause harm but yeah but what does need mean and so of course you can then have plenty of conversations with those and I'm happy

51:26 to do that if it's done in a good faith way but yeah I like bacon is not a need right you know we have to be serious about what these words mean and where we're going but but again like veganism it's not a pure perfection thing it doesn't pretend to solve difficult moral trade-offs it doesn't pretend that there's going to be an easy answer to every ethical situation it leaves the door open that there may well be situations where it could be justifiable to harm or kill just as it is in human ethics you know if I see a mass murderer running towards a school bus with the machete I'll quite happily you know do whatever it takes to

52:00 take that person out this is not an injunction against harming or killing but it's just saying that you know we have to have serious moral consideration for all the sentient beings involved in these situations and engage with that in good faith and there is a danger that the wiggle room can be used in bad faith ways but um I mean so there's a couple of uh wiggle room type issues that I was uh had in mind when I was T when I asked that question so one of them I'm I mean I have like from from kind of ordinary to farfetched you know philosophers love our farfetched I'll get to the farfetched but the kind of ordinary

52:33 ones start with like a you know I remember having this big argument with someone many many years ago where they were saying look I'm very kind and compassionate but I want to eat animals um but and I respect the animals and I treat them as as well as I can um minimize any kind of pain but of course you know you can't get rid of the pain completely but they thought that was compatible with respecting and being compassionate towards the animal because it was part of like an enrichment that that enriched their life in a certain

53:06 way that was what is important for this person was you know enriching their life so you know that's a bit arbitrary and we could have a whole debate about that but it does kind of open this you know the idea of like if you think of you know the traditional Native American who's like you know very reverent of the spirit of the animals but sees it as necessary to use you know they're in this harsh environment they need the there's not they don't have a lot of resources and you know so this is unfortunately what is required to do but they're very respectful of the animal they they even as they're killing it they're you know appreciative saying

53:38 thank you to its Spirit or whatever if they believe in that sort of stuff um so you are you're going to say that they're not truly being compassionate or they're misusing the word or is it that this is a weird extenuating circumstance so yeah I am curious about how like so obviously I think factory farming is out duh obviously but like a lot of these like more like personal interactions with the animals where there is this deep reverence to the animal and what it's what it's providing for you and how the animal is actually giving up its life in order to provide for you so I I have met people I who I feel sincerely kind of

54:11 feel that way um that they genuinely feel like a respect towards the animal giving up its life for them and um so you know I I mean I don't share their view but I'm just wondering like on the sentience sentien worldview what do you make of a person like that yeah I this question of you know justifiable and need is a really important one and there are absolutely situations where for S survival or sustenance needs people you know effectively don't have

54:43 another choice and I can understand that um and and and respect that to a degree in the same way as in extremist we do within interhuman ethics right there are situations where people will do things that we consider deeply unethical in interhuman ethics in extremist and we go well yeah we understand why right there was there was a need to do that so there's absolutely space for that um I think we do need to be a little bit careful about putting too much weight on and traditional ways of doing things or things that humans have come to see as

55:16 important to themselves that does matter right the fact that something is important to a human matters because they're a sentient being as well but where that justifies harming others I think we need to be a little bit careful about it and um you can see that story told um not just talking about you know different lifestyles of various indigenous communities which you know you can't summarize across because they're so various and diverse and Rich and I should let them speak for themselves um but you'll find that story coming through from you know American cattle ranches as well you know it's a story of tradition it's culture you know

55:49 we care about the cowers you know it's a circle of life so on and so forth um and there can be stories of respect and reverence and uh you know is this some sort of symbotic symbiotic relationship where we look after them they give their lives to us um and I I can feel the pull of that but but we have to be very careful because what those perspectives are doing is failing to take the perspective of the other right the animal when it is whether it's hunted or whether it's slaughtered slaughtered is not feeling respect um it is not giving its life they're not giving their life

56:25 right this is not biotic thing the very language is cling and that's true whether it's someone you know who comes from ating culture or whether it's a Rancher right the language is clouding it it's all about what's going on in the human's head it's nothing to do with what's going on in the head of in simple terms the victim because what that victim wants is probably to live a long happy life with their family you know they don't want to be harmed or killed or constrained right so so there is a danger with some of that language that it can feel um you know Progressive and open and respectful but it's failing to take the

56:59 perspective of the other and I think one of the interesting things is that within many are of the cultures where you know animal hunting or usages um uh is is a pattern of traditional cultural practice there are some differences because I think there is some genuine recognition of the the otherness of the animal and there is some regret in taking a life that can be there and that can lead often to a much more restrained approach that isn't about you know farming or maximizing it's just taking

57:32 what we need so I still think there's an ethical wrong being done there to the being but you know it does put it in a different context but quite often in the value systems that you'll find around the world in many of these cultures they have a richer connection to a sentien idea than certainly most of the eurocentric western cultures do so if you look at ideas like uh you know animism or a HSA or there ideas that come through Mari culture or different parts of African culture um that I think do get close to a sentien idea of recognizing the otherness of non-human animals and and

58:06 there being some respect and there are people working in each of the in most of those communities trying to take them in a similar Direction where I think with many of those communities if they could find a path forward that respected some of their traditional ways of living but didn't cause these harms and killing they'd be quite happy to go in that direction and you know more more power to those people and I think they're much closer to a vegan ideal or a sentien ideal than the you know the industrialized West is certainly yes but but but having said all of that even if harming and killing is seen as Justified

58:44 for whatever reason the wrong hasn't been erased right the being is still being wronged and being harmed and we we should never lose sight of that being's perspective effective even if we do come to a position where we think okay it's morally justifiable it doesn't erase it doesn't wipe the Slate clean that being still exists they still had interests or preferences or a hope or love for their family and things are being done to egregiously go against that whatever the justification is we can't lose sight of

59:16 that I think that's and US humans are so us humans are so brilliant at coming up with all of these I mean I'd love to know some scientific research from a psychologist about what percentage of human brain activity is dedicated to post rationalizing things you want to keep doing 99.98 it's where most of our Brilliance goes and some of it you know feels harsh and dissonant and some of it we go oh yeah that's a really nice idea you know I can I can I can appreciate that and you know there's the reverence and there's a respect I'm like what okay

59:49 it's still going on in our heads interesting so just expanding out to my trajectory towards the mor ludicrous I I feel like my own views um about veganism sentientism are most challenged by uh Wildlife Conservation ideas and when I talk to people that are deeply knowledgeable about conservation um I I think it it becomes really hard to take these sorts of ideas and apply them there because what is the

1:00:23 alternative if you let the if you let the animals untended then they overpopulate um there's not enough food they die horrible deaths then the population is back into control so uh many conservation activists will ask questions like what is better for the animal that you let it starve to death um it's family starve to death or that you allow hunting and maybe people will you know eat the meat of the animal that they hunt maybe they even enjoy just killing a animal who knows why they do it but they're performing a service actually um for the animal uh for the population not necessarily for

1:00:58 the one that gets shot but for the overall population of the deer or the whatever it is that this is somehow beneficial in a way that just leaving them to their own natural uh lives would not be and I have to say that this is in my own thinking been something that's really challenged me um because I don't see a good answer uh either way because obviously I don't want to condone people going out shooting these poor deer but on the other hand what's the alternative it seems much worse so I I do Wonder like in the Practical terms um doesn't this seem like a big wiggle room sort of

1:01:32 area where where we don't really have a good answer so I wonder what your view is it's a tough space right but this is also another interesting tension sometimes between vegans and sentien because many vegans and in fact many of the people who founded the vegan movement in the 1940s were motivated essentially by sentien STS right they were talking about sentients being the reason we cared for animals it wasn't because animal is a biological taxer that you know we have some objective concern for right it's because animal is a Shand for the beings that are sentient so for many

1:02:06 vegans and today um their concern goes to all sentent beings including those in the wild living free ranging whereas the primary uh focus of veganism and the definition of It Centers mostly on um the human exploitation and harming of nonhuman animals and pushing and driving to end that but doesn't explicitly talk about wild animals or those topics um so some vegans will say look all we need to do is end human exploitation of non-human

1:02:40 animals and that's the end of the story other vegans and me included will say well actually I have a Centric concern for every sentient being and that includes seeing as bad the suffering of a sentient being even if they have never had any interaction with humans whatsoever you know the fact they suffering still is morally Salient to me so sentientism doeses push us to go beyond the eight billion humans and Beyond the 100 billion land animals in our farms and Beyond the you know two to three trillion fishes and you know however many shrimp and you know it

1:03:13 pushes us beyond that into the quintilian quadrillion sentient beings living free ranging in the wild and many of those beings clearly are still impacted by humans because of our catastrophic impact on the planet so even if it's indirect you know in terms of habitat loss or climate or various other impact you know we're we're impacting the wild already so it's in a way not just a question of should we intervene or not it's a question of we already are intervening so what should we do about it um but there are F and difficult debates both on the big topic of wild animal ethics you know there's no doubt

1:03:48 a lot of joy and pleasure out there in the while but there's no doubt a lot of suffering and horror too you know this is a sort of winning healthcap to some extent evolution is an amoral so um probably shouldn't be using that language but get you get the impression so so so there are some people when we think big picture about the wild who will say we should have compassion for all of those beings and maybe there are things we could do to even help you know even if we're not currently exploiting

1:04:20 maybe we should intervene in the world in ways that should mitigate World animal suffering um and there are all sorts of different ideas about that some quite you know Leading Edge and sci-fi and some are much more pragmatic and grounded and already being tested and done um there are others who will say partly because they're so horrified by Humanity's impact on Senti entity if you like that we just need to end our exploitation get out of the way minimize the human footprint and leave the wild as it is either because they're skeptical about Humanity or and this can go along with it too or because they

1:04:53 have this sort of weird rified view that nature is a wonderful happy place then as long as the humans got out of the way all the animals will be happy which unfortunately is just not true and that could lead us back into some of the ideas why I'm not a theist either um you know this this is not a planet that would have been created by an all benevolent uh all- knowing deity as far as I'm concerned and wild animal suffering is just probably the most egregious counter example there so but let me bring it back to finally answering your question which is this idea of intervening in the world for the

1:05:26 benefit of wild animal populations and I guess um I don't see populations as being objects of moral concern in their own right I don't think a population has an interest uh I don't think it can suffer I don't think it can flourish I don't think it wants to be a high population or a low population or a growing population I don't think it has an I don't think it's a morally Salient thing at all don't think it's interesting um I do come back to the you know sentient being individuals being the only uh objects of moral concern because they have this capacity to have

1:06:00 experiences they have interests and they have preferences now I might go beyond that and think about Concepts or you know groups instrumentally where I might say well you know I can see that that population is high here which might lead to suffering of individuals intrinsically I do come back to the individual sens beings as being the only objects of moral concern okay so as we look out in the wild and um and see issues I think the first thing to do is to work out you know one is it really an

1:06:34 issue or is it something that you know is encroaching on our own human interests in ways we're uncomfortable with and you can see that when people talk about you know we use categories quite viciously in this mode as well you know veran or invasive species and you're like what what is or P you know what is the actual problem here sometimes there isn't a problem at all it's just some changes happening and we don't like those animals and the human response generally is Kill Them All right so as soon as there's any conflict or overlap or you know a deer is eating some of my crops the answer is just kill them

1:07:05 all so you know I'm not a fan of that approach and again this post- rationalization is something that us humans are really good at when it comes to wild animals if we want to go out hunting we want to you know run these businesses and these industries we come up with all sorts of creative ways to justify it but at the same time I don't want to pretend there AR sometimes genuine problems out there that might require causing harm or even killing right there might be a rationale I guess my appeal is that if we take a genuinely sentien stance which recognizes the moral salience of every sentient being that might be impacted in these

1:07:37 scenarios we're much more likely to be motivated to find a better answer there might there might be no good option but we're much less likely to be motivated to let's go kill them all if we genuinely have this deep moral concern right and this moral concern could lead us to more creative ideas and many people are working on those and piloting them today so there are people going out and doing vaccination programs for wild animals and that's not normally for the benefit of the wild animals it's for the benefit of humans and for livestock but it does benefit the wild

1:08:09 animals there are things you can do with fencing or wildli corridors or you know other interventions that yes they do constrain wild animals in ways that they probably don't like but at least it's not as bad as shooting them um there are things you can do around contraception darting and control uh that again there's been some really interesting Pilots around that will give Alternatives if there genuinely is a need or a reason to manage populations in some ways which again often I question you know there are different ways of doing that um so but again I'm not pretending there's always going to

1:08:43 be an easy answer to this or one that doesn't involve some harm but I would recommend that whenever you're in those conversations it's worth digging into the motivations of the people who are talking about these things and really understanding what their ethical grounding is and quite often you will find this post rationalization coming through so one fascinating example I came across a couple of years ago when I was in a debate with someone about uh Venison and deer and the argument was along these lines where they're saying look you know I don't consume any farmed animal products because of the harm they cause

1:09:16 but uh because of deer overpopulation we need to manage the population down um you know hunting them seems to be a reasonably ethical way of doing it given the options we have available and you know once the meat's there you know I'm not causing any extra harm so on and so forth right so you can see how that story would play out but when you actually go to the website of the Scottish Deer uh Estate Association and you look at the PDF that tells you how to run a deer estate there's a big section on there in breeding so the the Estates that make

1:09:51 money off the hunting trips are deliberately breeding more deer right and then using overpopulation which they which they drove to justify ethically rich people going up and shooting deer yeah it's a bit again yeah so so so so it's quite interesting to just dig a little bit deeper and go well if we imagine we genuinely had a Centric concern we really cared about the sentient beings involved one what is the problem this overpopulation is causing right is there actually a problem here and then two you know are there

1:10:22 alternative solutions that don't involve just going out and harming and culling and three surely we shouldn't be subsidizing businesses that are deliberately making the problem worse and then using that problem as an excuse to justify themselves so yeah I'm very skeptical of any human story where they're like well it's really sad but I just had to go out and kill some stuff right yeah the motivation is much more often a you know a story that they've told themselves and maybe telling others and finding more compassionate Roots yeah I'm thinking about my own like

1:10:55 Journey towards veganism and I remember when I first started like around 2012 is when this happened I first started uh realizing about how horrible Dairy and farming all that stuff was and I started thinking okay so we can't do this anymore but then we immediately my wife and I immediately started finding what we called no kill dairy farms where and some of these are like you know by Hindu uh people who you know rever the cows they're not slaughtered even after they're they're done being milked or productive there were other places that did it with goats and so so there is a

1:11:28 small community of no kill um Farms or whatnot and so we for a while were're eating this you know cheese product from these places but I eventually just started thinking like why am I so desperate to have cheese what is it that's so importantly valuable that even though there these animals are being treated in a different way they're they're still not great it's still not perfect it's still not best for the animal so what's so yeah I really started once you dig into the motivations it turns out it's just like I like the taste I was looking for a way to enjoy the taste and that doesn't seem like a good enough reason so I I eventually had to

1:12:01 stop doing that but um I do find that yes we often feel very motivated to try to find some way to make this acceptable and that very motivation should be question I feel like which not age do and it relates to you know a broader topic which is that there's one of the big things in the Z Gast at the moment is more and more people are waking up to the horrors of animal Agriculture and there's some really interesting surveys that when you ask about factory farming very high percentages of people will say of course I'm against factory farming you know um and sometimes that can be you know 47 52 you know around half of people depending on where you serve they

1:12:35 say I'm absolutely against that now of course in Practical terms they still buy from it because in the US 99% is Factory farmed and 90% globally is Factory farmed so but we can put that to one side at least in theory they're against factory farming um but what that leaves open is this idea that non-factory farming can still be ethical yeah and the tragedy of course is that again that's a that's an alluring story for us humans to tell ourselves that actually there is a nice way of farming is respectful and of course that's probably where I'm buying from anywhere although

1:13:08 I don't really want to concentrate too hard on that um once again that's us humans telling ourselves the story and ignoring the interests and the perspectives of the beings going through those processes because the very worst parts of the factory farming process for a pig or a cow or a fish are exactly standard in non factory farming right the the family separation the mutilation without anesthetic you know they all end up in the same slaughter house as the you know forcible artificial insemination right these aren't things that only happen in factory farms because the non-factory Farms are you know nice and happy experiences right

1:13:41 these standard processes the worst parts of the process are also in the nicest Family Farm too so again it's this temptation to go back into our own minds to post justify rather than and and forget about what it might really be like to be a you know a fish or a pig or a chicken in these processes yeah so now I want to ask you about something that's a little bit more uh on the Sci-Fi side of things but definitely within the realm of of of human possibility and it's it was kind of this idea was inspired by an article that came out uh

1:14:15 I don't know maybe five or 10 years ago um it was an oped and I forget which paper boat maybe New York Times LA Times one of those big ones and it was a bioethicist philosopher type whose Name Escapes me at the moment I probably should have looked it up if I was going to ask you about it but I didn't so I forget but uh what they basically were arguing was sort of like sentientism with I don't think they knew about that term but they were saying we should have respect concern for sentient animals and and these animals that were farming our sentient we're doing something horribly morally immorally wrong um so what should we do about it well

1:14:50 their answer was genetically engineer a type of animal animal that doesn't isn't sentient so one that can still walk around and you know behave in in relative ways but one whose pain pathways are just absence uh one who doesn't suffer in these sorts of ways um and so you know they the large part of this guy's argument was that this is actually feasible that we could sort of do it with the technology that we either have or is coming eventually um so I I when I read that I was like horrified um

1:15:25 sort of for these reasons that I was just mentioning that just seems like why are we so desperate to have this but but on the other hand a large part of the argument was you know globally people depend on these these meat supplies it's not really realistic for the whole world to switch over to veganism right off the bat so at least as a stepping stone is this something that a sentien should support um changing a certain kind of animal to be more like a mollusk or a mushroom and less like the kind of animal that it is now um at at

1:15:59 the end result would be an animal a creature that doesn't suffer at least if it were possible but is that something the sentien would support I mean I think no and again I can't speak for all sentien we have a dazzling variety of views but the short answer I'd say is no um and I think there's a few reasons for it one is we don't need a transitional step right because we already have the answer to all of human agricultural problems and they're basically called plants right it's already it's already running at four times the scale we need to

1:16:32 supply the current Earth's population so this idea that we need some other type of meat product as a transitional step just doesn't fit to me so almost regardless there are so many better paths if you genuinely care about sen thingss there are so many better paths that are just staring ourselves in the face the idea we' need to create that seems you know a little bit bizarre and partly because we have the plant based we have plants you know beans and PES and legumes and actual plants right um but we also have the plant-based foods and all the Technologies there um and uh

1:17:05 you know fermentation technologies that are ancient and there's new model stuff come through there so there's loads of alternative food paths that we could follow that I think would be much more direct and simple and straightforward and also ethically cleaner than that approach I think I also had would have some issues that they're thinking maybe about sentients a bit too narrowly and this is quite common that people will think well sentience is just about can you feel pain and if you can't feel pain you're not sentient and I I don't think that's quite right I think of sentience is the capacity to have any Veen experience whatsoever so um I can imagine you know genetically

1:17:40 engineering a pain pathway out so a cow might not be able to feel physical pain but I can imagine them still having veilance experiences of other types that absolutely mean they're still a sentient being we should not you know you mean like fear or anxiety or something like that fear could be and and could be positive things could be love their family could be you know you know a range of other experiences I think I'm nervous of naring too quickly down on on physical pain um and and there are many sentien you say look I do care about sentient beings

1:18:13 and I care about sentient but I I also care about autonomy and agency and dignity and so on and so many of those people would go also have your reaction and go well this is just horrific now you know I guess another thought experiment is to be genuinely insentient those animals would have to be essentially Like a Rock right or a or or or you know they would genuinely have to in their own mind not care if you tortured them for six hours right it they just would be ambivalent about it would wouldn't

1:18:47 mind either way it just means nothing to that so you know I just I guess that's just a reverse thought experiment to go are you really imagining engineering an animal that would still be able to have some sort of vaguely normal life cycle but would have zero veillance no interests in anything no I mean it it wouldn't even eat what would it do would be like a rock it would just sit there it would have no motivation to move it would do do you see what I mean so I'm

1:19:20 just not sure that the thought experiment these people are framing they're trying to say it's a normal animal it would live it would have a family it would do all the things an animal does but because it wouldn't feel physical pain it's okay to do whatever we like and I'm like I don't think you can just take the sentience out of a living biological organism and expect it to be the same thing anymore and you know why why would we ever want to do we have want to go down that path anyways yeah I don't know that's a satisfactory answer if we did have the rock you know I I kind of I'm thinking now of the uh the thought experiment from David chmer of the philosophical Vulcan because the

1:19:53 philosophical Vulcan is supposed to be exactly this type of creature which has conscious experience but no veilance um and so you know uh many people have the intuition that these guys don't don't matter morally whereas chers tries to argue that they do and that it's Consciousness not veilance that matters um although he's not vegan for unknown reasons um but uh yeah exactly um yeah but so so on your view do these philosophical Vulcans not mer consideration if they're possible like

1:20:26 for forget about what they're actual no that's a it's a good point and I um I'm not an academic but I actually count David's presentation where he talked about this as my first citation because he posted out one of my articles yeah so I'm counting that as a citation I'm you know I'm like a re I'm like a real person from David cited by David Char you're a real boy now Jamie yeah exactly exactly um but um again he talks about broad versus narrow sentientism in that context and

1:20:58 he um prefers a broad sentientism which says you don't have to have valenced experien you just have to have any experiences at all and again irritating this is another thing that sentientism itself is is is a bit neutral about I just you have compassion for sentient beings it sort of leaves open whether that means it has to be Veen or not so personally I I I do attribute importance to the veillance because in this Common Sense way of thinking about morality I'm trying to take the perspective of the other as far as I can genuinely imagine what it would be like to be them what they would care about and what would

1:21:31 matter to them and take that seriously into consideration so um if there is genuinely zero veillance there then you know I could see the being might fall out of my moral consideration um I guess the reason in Practical terms why I think David and many people have a sort of visceral you know negative reaction to that idea because the idea of the philosoph Vulcan is you know a being that in many other respects acts very much like a human for example you know there sci-fi examples that get close to this but just

1:22:05 doesn't experience veence um is partly because I think we just have a suspicion that they probably still will care about something and and in all the Sci-Fi stories that often is the way plays through right because because again the to to make this thought experiment work this philosophical Vulcan there you know data from Star Trek would genuinely have to be ambivalent about you torturing them to death over days right they would literally have to be yeah I really don't care either way I'm not I'm just not interested right and it's hard for us to

1:22:39 imagine a being like that so I think that's partly where the re reaction comes from it but I think I'd also part of the reason I'd also wouldn't needlessly harmm this philosophical Vulcan it's just out of ethical and epistemological uncertainty prau 100% sure you know 100% sure in my ethics 100% sure my epistemology you know technically maybe they'd fall out of my Mor scope but in all practical terms and because I just don't think you can really separate sentient from beings that have these characteristics um you know in Practical

1:23:14 terms I wouldn't and again sentientism doesn't say you should stop here it just says all senent being should be included and if you want to include Vulcans to you know because they're neutral sentients or even because they're not sentient because they might show some autonomy that's fine but just make sure you include all the sentient beings MH okay interesting um and then finally in the most far-fetched sci-fi example I I think of Douglas Adams and his Restaurant at the End of the Universe where you get to meet your meat and the uh you know the the meat comes out from

1:23:47 the from the kitchen and says hi I'm your dinner tonight and you get to have a conversation in fact he has a philosophical argument about whether it's right to eat this thing um and and the thing says no this is my goal my my goal in life the thing I was meant to do the thing I value most in life is to be your dinner um and now obviously that's a farfetched science fiction but it does bring up the question of whether we could genetically modify our engineer animals not to care about their survival in this way um and sort of almost be willing in that sense like we could actually provide

1:24:20 genetically modify them so that they did have this desire to be slaughtered or something like that would that alter your view about killing this sort of creature yeah I don't know I mean I I I struggle in a way because my what I'm likely to do in the answer is to start from an intuition and come up with my own post nationalizations right because my intuition would be one of abject horror one just creating this being in the first place into the act itself and my post rationalizations would probably

1:24:54 include some degree of distrust as to whether that really was their interest or not you know there are um you know humans who sometimes seem to have self-destructive um interests and express them but we then take a I think sometimes appropriately paternalistic approach to protecting them from their own interests maybe that would be one angle um but yeah so I I mean there have been some humans who have volunteered to be eaten it's rare but has happened a few times yeah I mean again in a in purely technical sense if it genuinely

1:25:26 is in the interests of that being and you know I find it hard to object to it beond without appealing to more intuitive Notions of dignity and you know some of the other other stuff that drives it but um and I I guess the only point I would make and you're very familiar with this right is that there I love the philosophical thought experiments around the edges of all these topics you know where's the boundary of sentient you know what's the what does it really mean to need case though is I guess what you're say that's that's that's the main thing I want to draw people back to is that I love

1:26:00 that's I'm happy to talk about the thought experiments with a fellow vegan where I get really get frustrated is where someone is deliberately using these thought experiments to distract from the fact they're going to have a burger for lunch right and I'm like look that's fine this is fun we can have these discussions but the Core case where the sentience is obvious the harms are obvious and there is no need or justification right can we agree on that first and then we'll do the thought experiments yeah no I I'm with you on that because I've been too many times as growing up and like oh well what about plants it's like okay but we know about cows like we don't know about plants

1:26:32 like don't start bringing up plants yet bro like let's deal with the chickens and the cows first um so I I'm fully on board I didn't mean these as distractions or as justifications curious about what you're what you're because these are things that in my own life that I thought about and I was like I don't know exactly what the right answer is in these cases yeah and as a fellow vegan you're allowed to we're were allowed to do F experiments okay I mean anyone anyone is anyone is but we're not doing it for nefarious purposes hopefully um but does speaking of plants it does bring us uh up something which I was going to ask you about when you mentioned singer because

1:27:05 um you know one of the things that singer says in his famous book animal Liberation is that these ideas are shouldn't be based on facts or on science because they are ethical ideas and he kind of Compares it to the idea that you know um well so the equality of the race is a moral ideal and if you sort of Base that idea on any kind of factual evidence then you could find out you're wrong and then what you have to believe the races aren't equal like if if you find out factually that you know some group of people X is different from

1:27:39 group of people Y in some sort of way then does that mean that you've refuted the ethical idea that they should be treated uh equally and so he says look this idea is is got to be based on some you know it can't really be tied to the factual world has got to be a normative claim this is how we should be acting regardless of the way the world turns out and and I do wonder if like a similar kind of concern might be raised for your defense of of the sentius world of you especially with regard to plants um because clearly we we don't know that whether plants are sentient or not

1:28:14 according to your definition and you are open to evidence and reason so it could be the case that you find out that to your level of convinc this that plants are sentient and then what you become a Janus you starve like what do you do at that point so I mean then the old quip you got to eat something and it come it kind of comes up to comes to mind so I do Wonder like how how much are you willing to put on the like science turning out your way I think I'm willing to double down

1:28:48 on it because I think if we if we declare a normative start that isn't grounded in reality it again becomes arbitrary in the same way as me deciding to only care about my own group of humans is arbitrary um I think this links back to this you know the conversation we had a little bit earlier on about moral realism and you know the isort boundary whether you can ultimately I do think it makes sense for our moral normative stances to be grounded in reality in some robust way and that does mean we are beholden to the you know the evidence and reason our

1:29:19 understanding of reality so the reason I care about other humans is because I care about what it's like to be them the reason I care about other animals is because I care about what it's like to be them and their perspectives and their interest and in simple terms if it turns out that you know a forest of trees with its micro rizone Network you know the tree is sentient and does actually have its own perspective and it can experience things you know arguably with a with AV veilance then I think they should become a moral patient now what that means you

1:29:54 know we've just I think we just got to deal with it um and and work that through and you might move towards Technologies which produce uh you know fermented products that maybe we're very confident aren't sentient because there are only certain types of plants that are you might have to revert to uh an understanding of different gradings of sentients that might say well you know to survive we're going to have to eat something but at least let's work at the very bottom end of the sentient scale so maybe you um you know certain types of plants are

1:30:28 of a lower degree of sentients and we would still you know move in that direction rather than animals because they have a different degree of sentience and therefore a different degree of moral consideration so there are a different bunch of paths you could follow but I think we should follow it because um you know otherwise we have I think drawn somewhat arbitrary boundary and undermine the rationale for our morality in the first place which just trying to take the perspective of the other now um so so sentientism doesn't have a stance on where the plants are sentient it just says you know use

1:30:59 evidence reasoning follow that reasoning where wherever it might lay and that could lead us to some uncomfortable places I mean my current understanding of the scientific consensus is that there's a very strong consensus that plants um don't have sentients and that when you see the Articles claiming they do it's normally the editor of the magazine who's written the headline it's not actually the scientists who claiming when you dig underneath it there's not much there and my understanding as an amateur of rational often is because of an evolutionary history and the adaptiveness pressures and questions

1:31:33 about motility that seem to have driven sentience and Consciousness in non-human animals because they had a much richer decision environment and that invoved involved moving around in ways that plants don't seem to do quite so straightforwardly but it also seems to be driven from the information architectures as well so we're very familiar with you know neural firings and nervous systems and so on that go in our minds and animal minds and I'm not saying that that's the only way sentience or Consciousness could run but plants don't seem to have anything that's even analist to that and their rigid cell walls seem to restrict the amount of information or processing or

1:32:07 computation they do so at the moment my intuitive or my my my sort of summary of the scien of consensus is very confident the plants aren't sen in right but we should follow it where we should follow the sence where it leads I think yeah yeah interesting okay um I mean I I spoke on some people who think that plants are sentient uh some of at least one of them is a scientist um I guess her reputation is under somewhat of a you know people disagree with her but um she actually believes that they're conscious more than sentient conscious

1:32:41 that they have intentions feelings um and that they communicate with humans uh and you know some traditional kind of you know Vision quests and and certain sorts of drugs will allow you to understand this according to her so I'm not saying I agree with her but she also made the argument that the plants want us to eat them uh because it's good for them it's how they spread their seeds convenient it's uh exactly it's very convenient so it is it does raise this question I think about you know so it comes back to the Douglas Adams experiment of yeah ex that's why I brought it up exactly because I was

1:33:13 going to segue to the maybe the plants are the one of these kinds of things here um but on the other side too it sort of opens you up to the idea that if science went against view if it if it turns out that fish are not sentient then you're going to treat fish differently um that whereas on my view I I think I would treat them the same um because I have considerations that go beyond whether they're sentient or not having to do with agency and dignity and so forth um that uh I think would be important in that case but you know I you're right that probably most people

1:33:47 most scientists feel that you know fish are are conscious but it's not the universal view I think the most universal view as mammals and some birds um that that mammals and some birds are are uh things with a cortex of a certain kind and the other ones it's still not really clear uh like an octopus or your lobsters or you know bees that thing so could so it does seem like you could given that again there a flip side of this question about basing it on how the science turns out that you're really going to like you know what and then the

1:34:20 science could be wrong and you're going to be flip-flopping it back and forth so one day it's okay to eat the Lobster the next day it's not whereas if it's just you know a moral consideration uh not based on the science then you're free from that which I think is the kind of singer Point yeah and I um I mean I do think we should follow the science where it leads but I think we should do it with humility we should think that our beliefs and credences are probabilistic we're never 100% sure either way uh that they're provisional so we are open to new evidence and that we should be prudent in that context as well so just because someone writes a paper that says

1:34:53 fish AR fishes aren't sentient that doesn't mean they flip flop in and out right you could still be prudent and and and and work that through um but I still would stick to this idea that we should ground our attribution of sentience to uh you know an Evidence and reason-based naturalistic approach and ultimately that asenti is that capacity to you know to be another is the grounding of the morality and my understanding where the current um scientific work is is that there's actually quite a strong degree of consensus around mammals reptiles

1:35:26 birds um uh fishes deck pod crustations um octopuses and some really interesting work been done on insects and other invertebrates now as well so at the asent lab in uh London School of Economics for example Jonathan bur and his team have been doing some fascinating work around bees which again it's it's not 100% but it's also nowhere near zero it's actually a reasonable confidence that there's sentience there and there's brilliant scientific work going on in welfare biology and different scales that you know I I think still give us pretty good confidence

1:36:00 that a very broad range of animals you know have a decent possibility of sentience so again I think you you know you're right there could be some risks and there could be some differences there um but ultimately in Practical terms I think there's still such a rich overlap and I would still follow the evidence where it leads and ground on that basis while as you say leaving the door open part of the Prudence is saying well is it just technical narrow momentto moment sentience that matters or are there other things is it autonomy agency the ability to have desire dignity maybe

1:36:34 some of these other things are like safety mechanisms we should put around these ideas so that sentientism isn't only sentience matters and only sentient beings matter but it's you know at least they matter and if you want to go a little bit further maybe that makes sense yeah I guess I was thinking of sentientism as that stronger view that only sentient beings matter but if it's at least sentient beings matter um then I I think it's on I mean that was always my hesitant of being am I a sentien no because I don't think that's the only thing that matters I think there's all these other considerations but obviously it does matter it is an important consideration so I think that's an

1:37:07 important distinction yeah I think that's important and again that's one of the shifts in my thinking over time I think because I was probably more now originally and I think sort of through some of the conversations I've had with philosophers has sort of left that door open a little bit more even though personally I tend to draw everything back to the sentience itself um but um the the other thing that I think links to that idea and that risk is that sentientism quite neutral about degrees of s sentience and degrees of moral consideration as well so there are many sentien who will at least aspire to a

1:37:40 much more egalitarian view where they'll say look if a bee is sentient and a pig is sentient and a human is sentient you know however different their sentient is they're all sentient they're equivalent they matter in exactly the same way where there are others in including me who will say look in my sense and this will come on to the philosophy of Mind topic where many other sentien cists disagree that sentience is likely to be an evolved class of computation and as such it has a dizzying dazzling variety that you

1:38:14 probably can't measure on a single scale it's probably multi-dimensional it's very radically different even within our species and when you go across the species boundary you know the variety are mindblowing you know the different senses and different experiences and so on so I think there's an enormous variety of different sentience sentien um so I think it is possible to think about different degrees of sentience we've got to be very careful about that because that's another way of privileging us as humans and pretending we're the most sentient but that could also lead you to differential degrees of moral consideration as well and I think

1:38:48 ultimately that approach um does also mean you're a bit more ready to cope with the potential that the lower bound of sentients could be a bit fuzzy and a bit porous and you could think about plants you could think about different philosophies of mind that push sentience you know more broadly out into the world and thinking about graded moral consideration degrees of sentience enables you to cope with that in a way that a sort of purer every sentient being matters exactly the same yeah like each counts as one yeah it would it would you know wouldn't it

1:39:22 would make it tough for you to cope with that yeah if you want to be really egalitarian about it okay so I I know I can't keep you forever but I have so many things I want to ask you but um I I I wonder if just to cover all of our anti-vegan bases uh because I'm I'm curious in what people have thought about this for a long time and seriously have to say about these issues um but when it comes to plant farming it's a bit idealistic to say that that is somehow free of harm to animals because obviously pesticides obviously

1:39:57 harvesting you know that kills animals in the process and so so actually vegans are even living on a plant-based lifestyle contributing to the harm of animals now of course we're not more Saints and no one wants to live up to that standard but it does I think legitimately raise the question how realistic is it for there really to be this kind of sentimental not sentient I say sentimentalist uh philosophy uh sentien kind of worldview that really takes into consideration the

1:40:32 point of view of all of the sentient beings how many they are because it's impossible to navigate any realistic way of living without doing harm um or at least you might think we'd have to radically change the way we do agriculture uh to even make a dent in this so so I I do Wonder like what you think about the practicality of implementing these ideas in in that regard yeah there there's there's a strong human tendency in many fields but particularly in ethics for binaries and Clarity and Purity

1:41:07 and I think they're often counterproductive because when we say okay well we'll have a binary approach we'll have a pure approach we'll have approach that's 100% clear that does lead us to I think arbitrary calls just to sort of assuage our own need for that clarity um so sentientism as I mentioned before it doesn't say you can never harm and you can never kill you can never exploit any sentient being it says we should have moral consideration for them all and that does leave the door open that you know it's almost impossible to

1:41:39 live without causing some harm or some exploitation or some even death for other humans let alone non-human animals so um it does it gives up on that sort of idea of a Perfect Purity where we can't you know we we could live somehow without causing any harm whatsoever it gives up on that while maintaining a seriousness about the moral consideration that at least motivates us to find a better way so in the agriculture space I think that's a really important point because if for example you present veganism as some sort of unimpeachable Moral Moral Purity

1:42:13 standard you've achieved and then someone challenges you on crop death well you know your world starts to collapse a little bit and the coherence of your stance you know looks a little bit more wobbly because you've made a claim about perfection and Purity that could never be sustained and I think most vegans and most sentien would actually look at that with a genuinely Centric concern and say absolutely yeah crop deaths are a problem like there pesticides and and Har harvesting injuries and deaths and so on those matter too in the same way as the

1:42:45 suffering of wild animals matter you know every sentient being matters where that then takes you one is that drives an even stronger motivation to transition to end all animal agriculture because as we know feed conversion ratios mean that for animal agriculture to operate you need you know between four and 20 times the amount of feed crops to feed to those animals so animal agriculture basically wastes about 90% of its inputs you take all of the feeds that are grown through plant

1:43:18 agriculture which causes those crop deaths and you lose 90% of it because most most of it turned into blood and and sweat and heat and and and waste products right so animal agriculture itself is the most catastrophically wasteful way of producing food you could imagine and it drives enormous chunks of the plant agriculture that's out there that's also causing the crop deaths so you're causing the animal deaths plus multiples of the crop deaths whereas if we transition to a plant-based agriculture yes there would still be crop deaths and incidental harms there but there would be radically less because you'd lose the

1:43:52 animal agriculture but more importantly or as importantly you lose all of the feed crops too so the the simple story is an easy way of visualizing when you think about land use so half of habitable land on Earth is taken up by agriculture only 1% is lived on by humans but half of the habitable land is taken out by Agriculture and most of that is taken up by animal agriculture the space of the animals but then the feed crops to feed the animals so if we transition to a completely plant-based agricultural

1:44:25 system globally which I know may sound like a pipe dream but there's no reason we can't do it we could do it you know it's just political will and social social norms that are standing the way we would reduce our Agriculture and land use for the same Cal calorific and protein output by 75% we could produce enough food and calories for the current human population on a quarter of the agricultural land that's like freeing up North America and Africa in terms of land size right so so one the plant crop Des we should face up to an acknowledge but it's another reason for driving to

1:44:58 end animal agriculture but then the second thing is it should absolutely motivate us to improve plant agricultural systems as well and there's some brilliant people doing just that they're working on ideas like veganic agriculture where there are agricultural systems that don't use pesticides that don't use animal uh manure fertilizers that you know take a cyclic approach based on crop rotations and there are all sorts of Technologies coming in that could mean we could radically improve plant agriculture as well so again it's similar to the conversation we had before where this stist worldview

1:45:32 doesn't mean there's going to be an easy answer to every problem but at least it sets out the motivation to drive you towards finding a system that's more compassionate but yeah pretending we're in some sort of state of moral Purity by being vegan today is you know naive and brittle we're just you it going in the right direction I guess yeah okay very interesting um yeah I I tend to agree with that so um we it it's often times that we act as though there's nothing we could do it just has to be that way but there's obviously many things we could do just a matter of whether we want to

1:46:04 do them um and and do you really think we could transition to a full like just like suppose the world tomorrow decided with in the next 20 years we want to be vegan the world uh you think we could transition all to plant agriculture feed all the world's population um without radically changing I mean the way that food is shipped produced or accessed I mean many people I feel like it's just not a feasible option for them to live a

1:46:36 plant-based lifestyle because of well it's expensive I'm obviously upper middle class white guy uh making decent money I can afford to live a vegan lifestyle but it's expensive man it is incredibly expensive you know what's not expensive a Big Mac at McDonald's that's very cheap um but uh eating actual quality food is is quite difficult to get first of all and expensive to buy so it would take more than just like growing a bunch of food it would radically have to you have to give access to people in places of

1:47:09 the world where they just don't have it right now yeah so it would be more possible but yeah I I think it is possible but it is absolutely a transformation of the entire food system I don't want to underplay how challenging that would be um but I I do think it's absolutely doable because at the top level we're already producing four times more you know plant products than the entire human population needs so the scale is there but you're right that the nature of those crops would have to change the production process would have to change through the entire supply chain you know the shipping the distribution all sorts of things would

1:47:42 have to change the political will would have to be there the social norms that would have to change would have to change um but I think those things are addressable because if you think about the amount of money in terms of government subsidies and corporate influence that driving the current animal agriculture model if you could transition those subsidies so that instead of perpetuating what's going on at the moment and we could use them to improve food accessibility and product development and Innovation and new Supply chains uh all of those problems are eminently solvable and I think again

1:48:16 when you when you dig under those issues quite often the people telling you it's a problem you know have a motivation for explaining that problem so the fact that it's socially difficult becomes an excuse when actually that's the problem we need to fix the reason it's socially difficult is because people say it's socially difficult and the reason people say it's politically difficult is because you know well yeah exactly that's the problem we need to fix um so so I do think all of those things are addressable and it's also interesting because in the food space there is this sense that for us to transition

1:48:51 individually you need to from you know a mixed diet of Animal product and uh plant-based products to add all the Alternatives in and those Alternatives often are more expensive you say if you want a plant-based Burger you want an impossible Burger it will cost you more per pound than than a you know a cheap beef burger um but I I'd say two things one is the reason for that is because 99% of the subsidies are going into the animal products and hardly any of it is going into supporting the development of these alternatives um and I think that would change and it will change rapidly

1:49:25 but you know if you imagine taking those subsidies and shifting them on to improving the next Beyond Burger I mean things could look very different because those plant-based Alternatives don't have the waste of Animal product intrinsic to their production so they have an inbuilt advantage if only the subsidies and the lobbying would shift to support them but the other thing I'd say is that we don't really need those Alternatives so there's an interesting survey done recently in the UK and again we're in a very lucky position here where they switched from a standard diet to a plant-based diet that actually involved beans and pulses and

1:49:58 lentils and plant products and their weekly food shop went down by 30% so if you go from a you know standard omnivore diet to on now I need lots of vegan cheeses and vegan burgers and impossible Burgers yeah your shopping budget's going to go up if you go to the types of products tofu and Tempe and lentils and beans and pulses and rice and Aster and Breads and you know and just fruit and vegetables and all the things that people around the world have been eating for thousands of years before Western industrialization and colonialization pushed animal

1:50:31 agriculture on them right you know you can drop your food budget by 30% today so yeah in short I I agree it's a big soci of systems transformation and there are brilliant people working on all of those different paths and how to make it work but with the right political will uh I think it could happen remarkably quickly and it needs to happen not just ethically but for envir enironmental reasons and waste reasons and um well I mean environmental stuff is because I I I read a a paper that was saying that if the whole world turned vegan it would actually be worse for the environment um bizarre it's a bizarre argument you okay

1:51:08 go go yeah I mean it's it's it's I think it's it's it's always interesting to work out who wrote those reports which Institute they came from when are they funded by the beef Federation right because there's there's a massive industry that is driving it's what big tobacco did what Big Oil did and are still doing big animal agricultur is using the same lawyers the same lobbyists the same s funded scientist to do exactly the same thing just quering the pitch but when you look at the raw fact of the waste driven by the feed conversion ratios when you look at the land use and the

1:51:39 potential to rewi and recapture carbon by giving up on agriculture in those spaces and when you look at the emissions the CH4 the NO2 the CO2 the land pollution the water pollution the list just goes on I mean the if if animal agriculture didn't exist today and you suggested it people would think you were functionally insane it's probably one of the most crazy things you could imagine and that's true even if you don't care about non-human animal sentient beings even if you even if the ethics doesn't register it's one of the most insane things we could do as

1:52:12 a as a population interesting okay um so I want to ask about something which was recently uh invented which I don't know if you've heard of this or not but it's called meat meaty Rice have have you heard of this okay so the scientists have infused beef cells into plants growing uh a kind of hybrid um so that meat rice that meaty rice is um not sentient one assumes if you have a view about rice where it's not

1:52:44 sentient obviously some animals were harmed to get the cells but once you have that product is this a good idea I mean is this something so again you you you'll get different answers from different sentien because some will say there's there's an ethical Association problem there right um even if it's cultivated meat that causes no harm there's an unpleasant ethical association between that flesh and the historic practices and harms that are done and you can see that interestingly in interhuman ethics as well there are

1:53:17 certain things where you could say well this is the thing that hasn't harmed anybody but it's associated with something really horrific so there's a sort of Association ethics there that can also link to a dignity ethics that can again be say look you know if you to do that with cultivated human flesh wouldn't that feel like there was some affront to human dignity um I mean personally I tend to be a little bit more Technical and narrow and that ultimately if there's no sent being harmed or exploited or killed in that process and it solves the problem I'm pretty comfortable with it there are quite a few other sentien who are like you know still un nervous about that for

1:53:50 other reasons or would want to find a different way yeah I'm nervous I mean this is one of my things about the whole fake meat industry it's like when I grew up I used to think I likeed fake meat I lik eating Satan and tofu and these sorts of things and then as they became more impossible burgers and stuff I I really um well it's hard to describe but I it's not that you know when I when I eat these things they're very flesh-like and I'm terrified of losing the ability to tell the difference between something

1:54:25 which was produced by suffering and harm and something which wasn't so I'm I'm like really afraid of like biting into a steak and thinking this is delicious and finding out no that's a real cow um yeah almost like a risk of renormalizing something we think is horrific yes exactly told me want to draw the lines more cleanly exactly so this is something that's given me pause um in my my own life but at the same time you know my my my wife's parents who are not Vegan eat impossible burger and say less they feel less filled and I mean less heavy and less weighed down and it's

1:54:57 better and I was like okay so people like that that's that's a really great product and we need those sorts of things um but I do Wonder like yeah like this company called chunk that makes these like meaty Stakes like why I don't know if I can actually eat one of those things it is a bit weird so I don't know how much of it is just like my ickiness factor and if there's really something um going on here but I I yeah these things one and I don't know where you wanted to go next but I wondered if it might be interesting because there is a t tendency when talking about sentientism that we do zero back in on agriculture

1:55:29 and food and veganism and because that's that's probably the most obvious clash with current social norms and practices right that's the obvious right thing where you go well okay evidence reason and compassion for all senent being sounds sensible but then it smashes into you know Humanity's current practice and what we think of as normal so the two prob challenges really are I guess you know religious worldviews that are grounded in fism and dogma and the other one is this big beast of animal agriculture but wider animal exploitation as well so often we do zero in on agriculture and Food

1:56:02 Systems and veganism um but one of the interesting things has been I think there are implications everywhere else too so in the same way as if you're serious about you know a Buddhist worldview or a Christian worldview or a humanist worldview um if you have a sentien this worldview and it shapes how you understand reality and the tools you use and you have a moral scope that includes every sentient being at least you can run that through every domain of human endeavor it's not just about Food Systems right so you can think about sentien politics and economics and law and culture and language and you know

1:56:37 the the list goes on you can re-engineer the sustainable development goals to be sentien development goals you can rewrite the universal Declaration of Human Rights is the universal Declaration of sentient rights you can think about sentien education what would it be if you know we taught kids in a sentien way so I just wanted to it out before we wrap up see if there's you know any other sort of interesting stuff Beyond The Food Systems and agricultural space that it might be worth digging into or just to let people know that that's other stuff is out there too and other thinking is out there too yeah I know I I agree with you because you know

1:57:10 what's interesting is like someone recently told me that raising my children vegan was a child abuse they said I was yeah they said that I was brainwashing them um by teaching them about you know uh Care for Animals and and having a ethics is ethics is brainwashing yeah I it's so I I do think that you're going to get a push back if you want to say you know sentim and and sentien education or politics there is this kind of I mean my response was no it's the you guys that are doing it like

1:57:43 putting a dead animal on the table and and saying that that's normal um when the same child sees a dead bird in the street and runs away crying um is just inconsistent my view is just completely inconsistent that's a dead animal on the table and I certainly remember that when I was a kid you know going over to people's houses for and watching them eat chicken or and you know I had chickens that I considered my friends at home and I was like this could be one of my friends on the table over here you guys are eating my friends like this is insane um so and and the idea that you want to treat the animal as something or teach people to treat animals as

1:58:16 something that matters or is important some people find that idea deeply offensive yeah and that I I don't know if that's like a defense mechanism or I don't know so I think that you know obviously vegans get a bad rep because everyone thinks we're sanctimonious and judgmental and you know all the jokes about vegans being on their high horse um hopefully you know this conversation is going some way to dispelling that idea because I don't I think what your points you're making is that that's not the right view that those vegans are dogmatic um and that's not the kind of uh that that not the kind of thing that we're talking about but this general idea that you want to expand this

1:58:49 worldview into education into politics um uh as opposed to you know people are fine it's your personal choice like my you know someone told me hey if you want to only eat popcorn your whole life that's your choice but don't tell me what to eat and I was like uh well it's not exactly that's not why we're doing it you know but they want to restrict it to this like personal choice as opposed to like this deep societal issue so they do that in a way that they would never apply to interum ethics and I think that's where you see what's happening right the way it's framed as a personal choice um is trying to say look

1:59:23 we should have a completely different ethical system for how we think about non-human animals whereas if I said it was my personal choice to you know hurt my kids or you know do something horrible to other humans no one would say oh that's fine that's your personal choice and it would be indoctrination to explain to my kids that it's wrong to hurt others yeah um yeah so but I think it's partly just because we're very social animals right so so what is socially normal is understandably more important to most people than what is theoretically ethical and that's that's

1:59:56 the sort of the battle that Humanity has always been in in a way are you optimistic about change in the future on this broader scale not just about diet but about all the things that you just mentioned well ultimately I am and it's it's it's difficult because because these social norms are so pervasive and they can feel all powerful you know it feels like forces are arrayed against you and it's one of the reasons why vegans sometimes are a little bit susceptible cons to conspiracy theories

2:00:28 because we really are the tiny minority who are absolutely convinced we're right and the world is you know shadowy forces are against us right so we're right about that conspiracy just not the other ones um not all the other ones anyway um so that can feel really tough because when you say look here are the facts and you know these animals are sentient farming harms then we don't need to do it and you talk about the philosophy right we should care about all sentient beings because you care about the puppy at your feet so why not a pig or a fish um there are some people that works with right the the fact and the ethics just

2:01:02 works but for most people it doesn't because they're driven more by and I as I was you know driven by social norms more than the philosophy and the science um so that is really frustrating but the I guess my hope comes from a couple of places one is because so many people already agree with sentient ISM at least in theory right so as we said right at the beginning right who would who would really want to believe things that aren't based on reality and evidence and reasoning right even people who don't want to often frame it that way so right

2:01:36 you're already most of the way there on the epistemology and as you said even people with a deliberately you know faith-based view still will use evidence and reasoning in most of their lives often it's just you know maybe it's compartmentalized in some way so we're most of the way there in theory but the same is true with the CTI compassion too because it's very rare to find a human who says only humans matter because they're already cracks right they already care about some charismatic wild life or they care about the cat that shares the home with them or like often we'll care about wild animals too which is really interesting so there's a these videos of like helicopters trying to

2:02:10 rescue the horse that's in the caught in the ice you're like look at all this Manpower and resources to save this animal how is this consistent with what we do in other places yeah there's a local community group here where you know a duck at a pond gets hit by a car and the outflow of concern and compassion and people are on the phone to rescue places and go and help I mean this this is there right um so again on the Centric side people basically agree in theory um the other thing that gives me hope is is working with the young people so on this sentien education thing I do a lot of work with schools even down to like you know five six

2:02:44 years old and and six-year-old kids are better philosophers than the average human on Twitter and I know that a low there a very low bar but these these kids just get it right they have the they feel these way anyway right because most kids they're sort of exploring the world honestly trying to understand it that is a naturalistic approach they wouldn't put the word to it but that's roughly what it is I'm trying to understand um and they have that c Centric compassion I don't want to pretend they're perfect right there are small boys who will pull the Wings off flies and so but you know you put a young child with a pig and say by the way their flesh tastes good and they

2:03:17 would look at you like you're crazy right so yeah they start out at least reasonably attuned to this sent into his way of thinking then Society takes them away but young kids in conversations are brave enough to deal with these things and have common sense conversations about the implications of these stuff in a way that really gives me hope so the frustration is partly about sort of dead weight of those social norms but there's also hope because we know social norms can change fast it's not guaranteed it's often two steps forward one step back or even three steps back but even in recent years and

2:03:49 decades we've seen in certain countries in certain parts of the world really seismic deep shifts in social norms and I think people's intuitive philosophy means this change could really happen fast because there's this latent ethic and this latent epistemology that people already agree with in theory and if we can start to find the cracks in those social norms and I think it's happening already um do you think there could be a surprise ourselves how quickly it change do you think there could be a sentien country one who's found found foundational

2:04:22 Doctrine do was we hold these truth to be self-evident all sentient beings are created equal something like that or is that yeah I don't see why not I mean um I had a conversation um a while ago on that topic about you know could you imagine rewriting the US Constitution on a sentien basis and I think that's one of the things you can one of the really interesting thought experiments I've done it with the universal Declaration of Human Rights you can take loads of the things we've done to try and improve Humanity's ethics and cooperation and just rethink it from a sentient perspective and you know ultimately I think that's where it should go and it

2:04:56 may seem fanciful but you can already see parts of that happening there are some countries in South America and in India and other places where they already recognize forly not just moral consideration but actually the personhood of at least some s beings and they're doing that at the Constitutional level at the legal level you know the cracks are already are already showing so yeah I can absolutely see a position where you know a country would lay this out and move towards it and maybe it could even happen at you know Regional or un levels ultimately you know these things could turn from thought

2:05:28 experiments into into reality but I have a bias towards sort of naive optimistic utopianism so well change wouldn't happen without naive optimists so you know I I think we need those types uh definitely I mean yeah um uh one would the world would be a better place and but I mean my own personal view is I would like to give up eating altogether I want to be photosynthetic that's that's my goal um I love that idea I love that idea which I heard you recently explain as another argument against uh you know the perfect transver deity because they would have made

2:06:00 humans foot synthetic surely that's my position yes exactly it's like uh I think it's a puts a problem of evil just really in an almost irresistible form that if they're worly will there's perfect being then there's this very clear better way of doing things um and you know I even like the idea that if you like the taste of bacon then the sunlight in the evening could taste like bacon and you know yeah Breeze in the afternoon could taste like Cheerios I mean if you have all power you can make things any way you want so I I really do find that people when it comes to you know thinking about what a deity could do really limit themselves and what they

2:06:33 really are thinking is like what a powerful human could do or something like that but like really entertain this idea of like full control over reality uh people don't take that seriously like if there really is a being with full control over reality and if it really is moral it wouldn't be like this that's the most obvious thing in the world to me this is like just look around um but okay so I I do uh know that we're getting on in time and I do have some questions that have come up in the chat so I wonder if you if you could stick around and answer a couple of these questions if you don't mind yeah of course okay so one of them has to do with uh um your definition of sentience

2:07:10 uh which I guess came up here and there in our discussion um and I think maybe you kind of partially answered this already but this is from Puja Sony who says if what it is like to be a sentient being means to to be able to experience suffering um or flourishing like pain and pleasure uh then what about people that are catatonic so is someone in a coma sentient on your view so I would yeah I mean this is another era where probably defer to you know philosophers like you to do this properly but the way I frame uh sentient is the capacity to have experiences and

2:07:45 a sentient being is a being that has the capacity to have experiences and I describe it as it has to be a a current capacity even if it's not exercised so for example if someone said um you know a human spermato or blasy you know should be counted as a sentient being because they have the future potential to be sentient I would say well okay they have the future potential to be senent but they're not a sentient being at the moment whereas a a human who was catatonic who had been sentient and could be again I would still count them as a sentient being does that make sense so it's it's rather of are they of the

2:08:19 kind of thing that could be sentient that could have experience yeah I mean and again you could we could get into the you know the medical scenario exactly here because if they were you know catatonic and technically brain dead and could you know had and had therefore lost the capacity for sentients in the future then I think they probably cease to be a sentient being at that point you know so a dead human I don't count as a senent being um but if if they have if they're in a com coma or they have the you know the

2:08:52 current capacity to be sense experience things again then I would count that yeah and I'd also Chuck in a bunch of epistemological uncertainty there about whether catatonic people might actually be having experiences that we're not aware of because there's been some really interesting experiments recently where through brain scans and so on people who were thought to be you know unconscious were shown to actually have conscious experiences and were able to communicate through through certain me ex you're yeah the vet so I'm always chucking in some some epistemological uncertainty just to throw some caution

2:09:25 in okay so um a person who was known to be insentient still deserves moral consideration on on your view or not it I think it depends whether they have the capacity to be sentient if they do then they still count as a sentient being but if they've lost that capacity permanently then they essentially dead and incentient right so on your view you can't harm or be immoral towards a dead person uh no I would say that I I would

2:10:00 say yeah yeah in simple terms I don't think they' I don't think they're a moral patient anymore so we may well still have concerns about you know the their family's wishes or we might have concerns about dignity or but yeah I don't think a dead dead human is a sentient being and it isn't intrinsically a moral asent we might have instrumental reasons to care and to treat them with respect and so on but um so on the other side Pua also asked you about uh um single cell organisms microorganisms

2:10:33 um they don't count as sentient on your view one ass SS so sentience is sentientism is is again it doesn't tell us where the boundary of sentience lies and irritatingly for many of your audiences it's also neutral on philosophy of mind as well which can OB have a radical you know radical shift your view of the distribution of Consciousness if not of sentient I mean again my personal view of the current scientific consensus is that those entities you know like plants are highly unlikely to be sentient and to have a subjective experience um and I guess one of the lines of argument I to that I

2:11:08 find interesting and quite compelling is that of evolution um because my sense is that like pretty much everything about us our sentience and our Consciousness evolved and the again as an amateur the stories I found most convincing is that sentients probably emerged around the Precambrian um as a result of mobile animals having a sufficiently complex decision environment that it became useful to have a veillance sense of how am I doing now how am I doing now

2:11:42 how am I doing now that would lead you towards good stuff and away from bad stuff and my guess is that's probably the to use a biblical term the Genesis of sentience so people like like um Ginsburg and Ja blaner have developed ideas around unlimited associative learning which is about the capacity to learn to Coop you know exist intelligently in that sort of environment uh one of my guests Al V has talked about pathological complexity which is a related idea about you know how complex is the environment could kill or harm you and when it gets to a certain level of complexity sentence becomes a useful thing because it's like

2:12:14 a a currency you can convert lots of stuff into to work out how your life is going um so again on that evolutionary basis my sense is that single- cell organisms and the super simplest uh living things aren't sentient it was something that happened from the pre-cambrian and that sets roughly you know where sentience and Consciousness are in the animal kingdom today okay I see some other question but I kind of lost track of them there's a lot of a lot of uh comments going on here so um you know one thing that I joked about a long time ago was uh we'll see if you have any questions by the way

2:12:46 feel free to put them in now while I'm stalling for just a second um uh one thing that I joked about a while ago was uh about uploading Minds to the computer so you speaking of philosophy mind you you mentioned that you view sentience as based on some kind of computation so I do wonder what you think about mind uploading and then how it relates to this issue because one the joke that I made was that in the future people can like Slaughter the turkey and eat its body but upload its mind to the to the digital Farm yard where it can live eternally um in a still looking for ways

2:13:22 to have your have your turkey sandwich on you yeah I've never had turkey I've never had meat my entire life you would eat your friend yeah exactly but I but I just uh you know I I think it raises this question I mean part of the reason why I made this joke was because I think it has to do with like respect for the body like it still would be in some way um I I don't feel comfortable but I but I do Wonder like yeah so do what do you feel about uploading generally speaking and um these kinds of issues like transhumanism and those sorts of things yeah so my my um my best guess and again

2:13:57 I have different credences for different things but my favorite is that sentience and Consciousness um are classes of evolved computation that evolved in biological beings but because of that I don't see any reason why they couldn't operate in some other substrate as well so as well as being anti- speciesist I'm I guess I'm anti- substra as well right you could run in anything so that would at least conceptually lead you to the idea of sentient AI or sentient uploading um but sentientism again is irritatingly neutral in that topic so it doesn't suggest a philosophy of Mind as long as

2:14:29 you take a naturalistic approach to working things through go anywhere you like so I know sentien who are uh you know illusionists even eliminativist I always struggle to say that um who have a more sort of functional computational view physicalists or a pan psychist um uh there anest illusionists yeah and and and and part of the reason let me let me put it this way one of the ways I say in a common sense way is whatever sentience is it

2:15:02 matters right if I stick a fork in the back of your hand you won't like that and that should matter to me morally and I think that's true even if you think um Consciousness is an illusion phenomenal Consciousness is an illusion I think even if you think phenomenal Consciousness is doesn't exist or is an illusion that would still matter to you and I would still call that thing sentience even if you don't think phenomenal Consciousness exists um so that's and that's part of the reason why I've tended to focus more on sentience as a term than Consciousness partly

2:15:36 because sentientism is already quite a clunky word and Consciousness ISM would be even worse it's like another symol um but it's also because I do somewhat want to sidestep some of the challenges of philosophy of mind and remain a bit more neutral on them and that can work in two ways one is because many people load a load of extra stuff into Consciousness so some people will say that Consciousness isn't just about awareness or capacity to have experiences it's also about an advanced model of the self or the ability to plan for the future or creativity or you know loads of other stuff they want to bundle in which often is part of a desperate attempt to you

2:16:09 know restrict it back to humans yeah so I want to say well okay that's fine you can do that if you like but sentience to me is in that context the morally Salient component of Consciousness it's just this capacity to have experiences which gives you the capacity to be impacted negatively or positive and that's the raw material of morality so you can add in loads of stuff to Consciousness but sentience just is that basic minimal capacity to have an experience but it can also so that that means that even if you think phenomenal Consciousness is an illusion or doesn't exist that still

2:16:42 leaves you open to thinking about affect Consciousness or other things that can still you could still imagine that comprising sentience but it also helps the other way so if someone has a pan psychist approach where they think that ultimately Consciousness is foundational to physics and you know even very simple things if they even are things like electrons and protons might have some absolutely minimal raw form of Consciousness because ultimately the universe is made out of Consciousness again sentience enables me to sort of step to the side of that and say well

2:17:16 you know those micr consciousnesses you know might be conscious in your definition you I don't think that's a useful definition I think you've just destroyed what we mean by Consciousness but let's fine we'll we'll we'll go down that rout and I've had fascinating conversations with people like Luke roloffs and David Pierce and Emerson green you know about this perspective but if the micro consciousnesses are minimally conscious I don't think they're sentient because they don't have the capacity to have experiences whereas a macro conscious once you've broken through the combination problem and you've got to you know simply animals

2:17:49 and you and so on those macro consciousnesses that we typically think of as conscious and I think of as conscious are also sentient um so in a way and with some of those conversations that's been interesting because someone like Luke roloffs has a very different philosophy of Mind from me but we both practically set our moral scope in quite a similar way because he he agrees with me that you probably can't harm an electron even if it's conscious whereas you absolutely can harm a pig or a fish or does that make sense so it does yeah I I wonder there those are the two reasons why why I sort of focus on

2:18:23 sentience rather than Consciousness but yeah no that totally makes sense I understand but there are I mean I'm thinking of people like Hada uh Mor um who uh thinks that you know that these microc consciousnesses are valanced so that the reason why electrons and and and U positrons repel each other is because they don't like each other or something like that you know so that that you know a little tongue and cheek there but that there's some kind of vean uh and people like Philip go who think that there's a kind of fundamental tending an intentional kind of towards

2:18:57 that these M particles have so and my sense of those things is it's once against it's us humans taking stuff that matters to us and pushing it into other entities where I just don't really think it belongs and we can do that well in some ways right if if I anthropomorphize a pig because I think that they probably suffer just the same way I do that's based in reality and it's ethically positive but for me to say well you know I feel intention agency and there I therefore I think it

2:19:32 must somehow be primordial and present even in a photon I think that's a mistake that's another one of these things of us humans sort of imposing ourselves on the universe in appropriate ways rather than recognizing with humility we're just a weird tiny pocket of it and and and I guess that's partly the conversation I have with panus about you know okay well what would the experience of a photon be like because it's an experience without inter reception or appropri reception or no reception or sensation or thought or language or even the passage of time for

2:20:06 a photon because they're moving at the speed of light so time doesn't even pass so so what I guess the first question is you know what would that Consciousness even be like because you've stripped every aspect of my Consciousness away from it I don't think there's anything left right that's meaning and it's certainly not morally Salient because I don't think you could hurt a photon or frustrate a photon or you know being hurt or frustrated requires other stuff going on that these entities just don't have the capacity to do um but even then some people will you know I don't know if you had a chance to see Thomas metzinger's recent

2:20:40 book The Elephant in the brain yeah I just started reading it oh cool but in a way get them on the podcast eventually that would be a fascinating conversation because in a way don't think he would answer the question this way but I think some psychist would say that if maybe humans can have a contentless even Timeless pure awareness that advanced meditators have maybe that's what it's like to be a photon um you know I don't know again I think I think I think we've taken this sense

2:21:14 of of course we're special and our Consciousness is special right and it's the only thing we experience why we see everything through it but there's a temptation to see it as so distinct that we then push it into primordial places that I just don't think it really exists we're just another evolved ape on a branch of a tree of life on a weird little planet I'm not sure there's anything about us that is really has to be primordial to the whole universe I think exactly we sort of we're less special than that but in a way we're less special than that

2:21:47 but in a way we're more special than that right right yeah okay a couple more questions uh no I'm enjoying it so one question from non plus uh how is normativity quote robustly grounded in reality STS independent world/ brute happenings why not just make the case for how you wish things would be without normativity well if you how they would be is normative yeah and and in a way in a way setting out these two tenants of

2:22:20 sentientism distinctly is sort of recognizing that for some people a naturalistic understanding of the world doesn't mandate a Centric normative starts right so if you if you don't feel that then that's why these two pillars are there somewhat independently right it's it's I believe naturalistically you know and I choose to have a Centric compassion and there are two things that you might feel are just distinct and if you don't choose them you don't choose them um so in a way that's a recognition of that challenge that we were talking about

2:22:51 earlier on about grounding and you know moral realism right but I think at the very least the two go really well together because if you do have a Centric compassion that drives your motivation to understand reality because presumably you want to make it better or less bad for the sentient being so that drives you to want an understanding of reality that is grounded in reality because you're motivated to change it or at least not make it worse but I think it works the other way around as well because as I said that evidence and reason based understanding of reality has led me to appreciate that there are

2:23:24 sensient beings like you who don't seem to like suffering and seem to want to live and seem to want to enjoy quality time with their families um that has driven my ethical normative starts as well so I think you know they might not be locked together you know they could be indep I do think they work quite well together but there are some people who insist that all you need is epistemological naturalism because that if you follow that path it will enforce you going to a Centric moral scope but it's partly because I'm not you know I'm not sure how convincing that is that I insist on these you know these two tenants being there these two pillars

2:23:57 very cool okay interesting and then finally one last question from chean Smith um is a quote thing conscious if it knows what it's doing or shows signs of knowing what it's doing individually all by itself I'm not so that's a really interesting question you know and I guess it takes you into the philosophy you know what what does knowing mean um I think if a if a being is aware that it knows something that is sentience because it's the awareness that counts but if the knowing is you know a register in the CPU of a Roomba or a

2:24:34 spreadsheet in my laptop you know it knows how much money is my bank account for example I don't think that counts because I don't think there's an awareness of of the knowing so it sort of depends on what you mean by knowing but I would say an awareness of knowing implies sence but if it's a narrower sense of kn where it's you know a list on a piece of paper or something then then it doesn't quite count and the other thing that's really interesting in this space is how the language shift because I I think as as you go from being insentient to sentient you stop being a thing and become a being and you stop being an IT and become a a them or

2:25:08 a he or she if they're gendered and so that it's goes back to what we're talking about before that you know the way we think is infused into our language and sometimes changing our language can be an interesting way of Shifting opinions and Minds as well yeah okay so and then finally I know we've talked about everything under the sun and Beyond it but was there anything that hasn't come up yet which should have come up the answer can't be no but uh I just want to check it's it's difficult to say no because this topic might seem like it's quite a weird sort

2:25:41 of Niche philosophical worldview but because it's talking about how we understand reality and what we should and who we should care about in reality affects absolutely Ely everything so I guess that's the that's the closing thing I'd say is that it's a really interesting thought experiment to run these tenants through absolutely every aspect of human life and just to be brave enough to challenge you know when we bump so much of humanity is based on you know we we think about the way what's normal to us and we think about

2:26:13 the implications of an idea and use that to reject the idea it's like backwards philosophy whereas i' really encourage people just to start from the epistemology I want to understand reality based on evidence reason with a dose of humility and imagine a Centric compassion and then work through the implications and then just be brave enough to face those implications even if there's some social challenge or some politic some that's the bravery and but we can do it and the more people do it the easier it becomes um and ultimately I think I think that's that's the key to

2:26:46 whatever progress we've managed to make ultimately in humanity and I think that's the key to whatever promise that might be in front of us too but we one thing that's true right you whatever your view of humanity whether we've managed to make progress or not within the human scope our impact on Senti entity right if you want to go from Humanity to Senti entity has been pretty egregiously awful right even if you're someone who likes Steven pinker's graphs that all go in the right direction if he'd written if he'd WR even if and many don't if he'd written a CH chapter about

2:27:18 non-human animals the charts would be going the wrong way so I guess that's the that's the other thing right we that can lead people into a very negative frame of mind but just imagine the potential shift we could make in the role Humanity plays with all of our power in it in our impact on Senti entity which is not this separate thing it's something we're part of too so it's yeah it feels like a weird thing to radically expand our moral scope that the opportunity is phenomenal and it will be good for us too right as with interhuman

2:27:50 ex expansions of a moral scope it benefits those who are doing the expansion who are privileged enough to do the expansion right this isn't some sort of altruistic thing it's it's good for good for us well absolutely I agree and let me just say personally that I now consider myself a sentien um after having talked to you officially um wonder and I just Jamie I have to say on a personal level we have 7.8 billion left to go cool one at a time but on a personal level I just want to say that I really admire what you're

2:28:23 doing um we need people like you who are optimistic intelligent willing to follow the evidence and also Brave to stand up and say you know I'm not perfect we don't need Perfection but we want to face these things head on and in this world it can feel so overwhelming the crushing despair especially for people like us who are sensitive to these kinds of issues I know myself I've cried myself to sleep many and night's just thinking about all the animal suffering in the world all the human suffering in the world so it can become

2:28:55 incredibly like depressing and mind numbing um to to be surrounded by people who think all this stuff is normal and to have people like you who are cheery optimistic and trying to make a better difference in the world I just find it very inspiring and I just want to say thank you for that thank you so much yeah likewise means a lot to me so uh hang around for one second I'll say bye off the air but other than that I just want to say thank you again for joining me it's such a pleasure and the only other thing I'd say is if you're feeling

2:29:27 that despair or even if you're curious about the things we talked about yeah just reach out because there are building communities of people who yes feel this way or at least interested in these ideas there are communities there's the podcast there's the YouTube there's all sorts of forums we're pretty much everywhere if you just search for sentientism anywhere you'll find us and reach out and the more of us there are the stronger the solidar will be and I will say that it's not you know one of the just you know the the continue keeping the Praise on you one of the other admirable qualities that you have is that you actively seek out people who don't agree with you you're not just looking for an Echo chamber of people

2:30:00 who who are saying the same thing as you so being part of the sentien community doesn't mean you you agree with everything you can go there and try and argue against everything that you're talking about and you accept those people just as much so I I think that that's as equally important part of what you do is that you want to welcome everybody every point of view and then you want to talk with them why is it that you have these views as opposed to just saying you know Screw you you're a bad person you don't agree with me um I'm in my tribe you're in your tribe I think that that is such a rare thing to find someone who really wants to meet

2:30:33 people where they are and find out like how to go to the next step with them so um by by inviting people to the santias community I just hope that they realize you're that it's open to the centers as well um it's open to everybody absolutely absolutely and I think it's it's it it's important because there's a real danger with ideas like veganism and sentientism and humanism right that they become their own dogmas and it's intrinsic to sentientism it has to be an anti-dog if you're committed to evidence reason you cannot get slip you cannot slip into Dogma however convincing it

2:31:06 feels and the other thing is that even people who disagree with us on Twitter are sentient being so we have to engage with them with compassion it's hard to remember that sometimes on Twitter that's tough to do it's tough to do but yeah I aspire to it at least well you aspire to it I I'd say you go a long way towards actually meeting that aspiration so um once again thank you for joining me hang around for one second I'll say bye off the air but other than that