The desire to attribute sentience to AI and other new technology, as well as to computers (particularly malfunctioning ones), favourite cars, baseball and cricket bats, lucky pennies and space ships, has in recent years been matched with the acceptance of sentience among the entire animal world.
Now, in the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness (19 April 2024, https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration), a group of recognized names in consciousness and brain studies has declared that “conscious experience” is most likely shared by all mammals and birds, and that there is “a realistic possibility” that this is also shared by “vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).” That’s practically the whole animal kingdom.
The line is drawn at “many invertebrates”, suggesting that there are some invertebrates that do not enjoy a conscious experience. Bearing in mind that, by some counts, 97% of animal species are invertebrates (May, 1988), this might look like a large loophole. However, as “insects” – by far the largest invertebrate group – are explicitly included, the conclusion is that the New York Declaration considers it “a realistic possibility” that well over 90% of living creatures are to some degree sentient, with “conscious experience”.
The signatories to this short declaration go on to make a rather clumsy negative ethical conclusion about animals that possibly have “conscious experience”: “it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.” This has the feel of compromise.
Putting the first sentence of that statement positively, “we should be aware of the possibility that an animal has a conscious experience when making decisions affecting that animal”. We don’t make many decisions before stepping on worms and caterpillars – only Parsis are reasonably aware of the possible sentience of such creatures as they sweep them out of their way. So this looks aimed at the food factories raising and killing animals for our food, where we make many existential decisions on behalf of the animal.
The second sentence is similarly obscure: “We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.” This could have been written by a UN committee. For a start, it is missing a subject for “welfare risks”. Presumably they mean risks to the welfare of the living creature having a “conscious experience”. In other words, in our behaviour and interactions with these living beings, we should consider whether and how we may be affecting their conscious experience. What is more, we should carry out research into this to get further evidence, so that we can avoid causing unnecessary distress to these sentient beings. It doesn’t actually say that we should avoid hurting them, just that we should be aware of what we are doing – or planning to do – to them. Again, this looks like a veiled reference to the factory food industry, not to mention laboratory experiments and kids engaged in the playground torture of anything they can catch.
To be clear, I am not questioning the attribution of some kind of sentience to most of the animal world. I think the many cruelties humans inflict on animals in and out of the food chain reprehensible. A little consideration of the “welfare risks” of sentient beings is surely needed.
So where do we draw the final line? Paco Calvo (Planta Sapient, 2022) insists that plants exhibit a kind of consciousness and may in fact be sentient… Don’t step on the grass? I don’t know.
We will have to be more gentle with the world. In one of his last interviews, Captain Beefheart said, “The way I keep in touch with the world is very gingerly, because the world touches too hard”.
The line? My car, cricket bat and artificial intelligence are not sentient, and never will be. But that’s another blog.
References
How Many Species Are There on Earth?. Robert M. May. 1988. Science. 241 (4872): 1441–1449. doi:10.1126/science.241.4872.1441) (16 September 1988).
Eating Animals. Jonathan Safran Foer. 2009. 341 p.
Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence. Paco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence. 2022. 281 p.