Jonathan Birch: The Edge of Sentience

Species Unite

elizabeth novogratz

Society & Culture, Philosophy

5 • 911 Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“I mean, organoids in general are very exciting replacements for animal research because you could model a kidney or a liver or a or a heart without taking them from a real animal, which it’s very important to support that kind of thing. But yes, when it's the brain, there's this fear that you might end up creating another sentient being. And then and then you've just replaced one sentient being with another and maybe not made things better at all. So it seems really, really important to guard against that risk.” – Jonathan Birch

Dr. Jonathan Birch is a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and is Principal Investigator on the “Foundations of Animal Sentience” project, a European Union-funded project to develop better methods for studying the feelings of animals and new ways of using the science of animal minds to improve animal welfare policies and laws. In 2021, he led a review for the UK government that shaped the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. In 2022-23, he was part of a working group that investigated the question of sentience in AI.

Jonathan is here today to talk about his most recent book, The Edge of Sentience Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI.

The Edge of Sentience is an open access book published under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, meaning it can be distributed for free in any format.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Species.
0:01.0	Species.
0:02.0	I mean, organoids in general are very exciting replacements for animal research,
0:18.0	because you could model a kidney or a liver or a heart without taking them from a real animal,
0:24.9	which is very important to support that kind of thing.
0:30.0	But yes, when it's the brain, there's this fear that you might end up creating another sentient being.
0:37.2	And then you've just replaced one sentient being with another,
0:40.3	and maybe not made things better at all.
0:43.3	So it seems really, really important to guard against that risk.
0:50.3	Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novagrats. This is Species Unite.
1:01.5	This conversation is with Jonathan Birch. Jonathan is a philosopher and a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also a writer,
1:14.1	and his most recent book is The Edge of Sentience, Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and
1:22.2	AI. Hi, Jonathan.
1:38.1	Hi, Elizabeth.
1:39.0	Thanks for inviting me.
1:40.1	Thank you for being here.
1:41.9	We're here to talk about your latest book, The Edge of Sentience.
1:47.3	Before we get into it, will you just talk about sentience itself and how you define it?
1:53.7	I think like a lot of people, I came to the topic of animal sentience through pain
1:58.3	and asking questions like, does an octopus feel pain? What about a crab? What about an insect? How are we supposed to tell?
2:07.4	But I came to the view that pain is rather too narrow a concept here
2:12.4	because we don't want to exclusively focus on pain. Certainly other kinds of negative experience like frustration,
	...

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