Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

This is Robert Lamb, and today I'm going to be chatting with Jonathan Birch about his new book, The Edge of Sintience,

Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI. It comes out later this week on November 15th

in the U.S. Jonathan Birch is a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics

and principal investigator on the

Foundations of Animal Sintience Project, a European Union-funded project aiming to develop

better methods for studying the feelings of animals and new ways of using the science of

animals' 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 through 2023, he was part of a working

group that investigated the question of sentience in AI. So I'll definitely be asking him about

animals, about AI, and maybe a few surprises

here. So without further ado, let's jump right into the interview.

Hi, Jonathan. Welcome to the show. Hi, Robert. Thanks for inviting me. So the new book is

The Edge of Sentience. Before we get to that edge and start

talking about that, how do you define sentience in your work? And what are the implications and

challenges of agreeing on a working definition? Well, to see why I think of sentience is a really

useful concept. Let's start by thinking about pain,

that I think a lot of us have wondered, can an octopus feel pain, can insects feel pain, can things hurt,

can they have that feeling of ouch? And this is a great question, but I think it's a bit too narrow

because we need to be aware of the fact that other animals might have very different mental lives from us.

And words like pain, they might be a bit narrow for thinking about what the experiences of other animals are like.

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