292 | Jonathan Birch on Animal Sentience

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2024

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's not immoral to kick a rock; it is immoral to kick a baby. At what point do we start saying that it is wrong to cause pain to something? This question has less to do with "consciousness" and more to do with "sentience" -- the ability to perceive feelings and sensations. Philosopher Jonathan Birch has embarked on a careful study of the meaning of sentience and how it can be identified in different kinds of organisms, as he discusses in his new open-access book The Edge of Sentience. This is an example of a question at the boundary of philosophy and biology with potentially important implications for real-world policies.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/10/14/292-jonathan-birch-on-animal-sentience/

Jonathan Birch received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Philosophy Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is one of the authors of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, and has advised the British government on matters of animal cruelty and sentience.

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Transcript

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0:35.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:38.0	I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:39.0	Sometimes on the podcast I will refer to our two cats aerial and caliban. They are born at the
0:46.7	same time, you know twins I guess if you can say but they're of course part of a bigger
0:50.4	litter. Brother and sister with very different personalities.
0:55.2	If you met Ariel and Caliban and interacted with them, even if you didn't see them, you
1:00.2	would instantly know which one was which.
1:03.0	There's a danger there though if we want to be a little bit more careful, a little bit
1:06.5	more rigorous in using a word like personality, right?
1:10.5	We tend to anthropomorphize our pets, other objects in the world.
1:15.5	We anthropize our GPS Google Maps system.
1:18.7	I feel bad when I drive in a way other than what Google Maps tells me to do and it seems to be upset with me, right?
1:26.2	So if we're thinking about it very, very carefully, we can have fun using words like personalities
	...

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