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This is intellectually dangerous ground, as the author points out, mainly because it asks us to reason -- to form a theory of mind -- about creatures who have m

This is intellectually dangerous ground, as the author points out, mainly because it asks us to reason -- to form a theory of mind -- about creatures who have minds significantly different than our own. As the author also points out, it's easy to fall into either the scoffer or booster categories: we either want to dismiss animal intelligence completely or overstate it. So when I got to this, "a psychological secret sauce—that makes humans different from other animals. The list of candidates is long: tool use, cultural transmission, the ability to imagine the future or to understand other minds, and so on. But every one of these abilities shows up in at least some other species in at least some form." I had to bail out. No other species has a true persistent language. Yes, bits and pieces are here and there -- there's no doubt animals communicate, sometimes even about complex things. And there very well be some sort of oral history. But true language in the way we use it? (Insert long discussion here about what that means) Nope. So this article comes down into the "modified booster" category: it's so amazing and special simply because we don't understand it all I honestly believe that what our species needs is a sliding scale of sentience. You can call that a ladder if you want, but no matter how you do it? I'm not going to eat a monkey, but I'd eat a cow. Or a fish. Somehow we need to sort that all out, and whether that involves a complex web of indicators or not, the result is going to be a sliding scale, like it or not.

mbrock 11y ago
How do you create this scale of sentience though? I really have no idea "what it's like to be a cow." What fact, theory, or experience convinces you that a cow's life is significantly less sentient than a monkey? (I'm genuinely curious.)
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  Or a bumblebee, right? Beats me. I've given it some thought, and I could speculate. My point was to separate that part out, though. Acknowledging that there must be a scale is the first step. Once we go there, then we can start talking about what goes into producing one. Some folks don't even want to go there (as this article implies) Being conscious, in my mind, is the ability to observe information and change your mental model of the world based on it. If that definition works, then animals are certainly conscious. Perhaps sentience is the ability to do that as a community, over time, and about abstract concepts. Monkeys might be able to locate new sticks in their environment, use them to spear fish, and pass that to their offspring. But they couldn't formulate a theory of virtue over several generations. (At least I don't think so) Perhaps that definition is a starting point? (Just trying to provide you with some kind of answer)
  - mbrock 11y ago
    My view is that even if we want to have such a scale, creating it would require solving the most tenaciously vexing philosophical problems of all time... Or, maybe we can come up with a general ordering of sentience, such that we can say that a bumblebee is quite definitely below a baboon, but still, ethical questions will involve picking some cutoff—and that will be arbitrary, contentious, and creepy. It seems somewhat likely to me that if we manage to quantify or understand sentience across species, we would find it unsettling. What if rats, cows, and pigs all turn out to be well past the hump of vivid awareness, such that killing them really is extinguishing a life quite similar to a human's? Fortunately there's a lot of good vegan recipes out there...
    - hodwik 11y ago
      > "What if rats, cows, and pigs all turn out to be well past the hump of vivid awareness, such that killing them really is extinguishing a life quite similar to a human's?" Or what about the opposite? What if consciousness is very rare, and that just because something acts with complex behavior doesn't mean they are experiencing? - Perhaps some humans aren't even conscious, being merely symbolic engines running on a large cultural dataset. It would certainly explain a segment of the population that has never made sense to me. - Perhaps children aren't yet conscious. I know that I don't remember anything before the age of 4. Maybe I wasn't actually aware yet, being only a biological automaton until a flip was switched in my brain. - Perhaps animals are conscious, but don't experience a joy sensation, only a hunger/need/pain sensation. In that case, nothing we could do would help them. - Perhaps animals are conscious, but don't experience a pain sensation, only pleasure -- their reaction to pain being merely instinctual, without actually being felt by the animal's consciousness. In that case, nothing we could do would hurt them. When you're dealing with consciousness there is no way to know. We can't move the locus of our awareness inside another creature to see if it is also experiencing., or in what ways.
      - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
        This is my fear as well. I think once we finally come up with a sliding scale, most if not all humans are going to score rather low on it. If you believe that the future of any intelligent lifeform is to evolve into some form of machine intelligence, and it's obvious that machine intelligences can communicate complex ideas in blinding fast speed -- in parallel channels? Plus live tens or hundreds of thousands of years? Compared to that we're like mayflies, popping into existence and back out in a blink of the eye, doing nothing more than buzzing around. Hell, that's not just true of individual humans. Our entire species might look like that. Want the answer to Fermi's Paradox? There it is. How much time are you going to spend today trying to observe and understand a individual gnat?
- deleted 11y ago
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ruraljuror 11y ago
> I honestly believe that what our species needs is a sliding scale of sentience. What purpose would having this hierarchy serve? To justify which animals you can eat? Despite many of the other comments, eating animals is outside the scope of this article and should take into account more factors than animal sentience. > I had to bail out. If you had stuck with the article a little longer, the reviewer would place de Waal's argument as directly counter to yours, although too long to quote in entirety: De Waal explicitly rejects the idea that there is some hierarchy of cognitive abilities. Nevertheless, an implicit tension in his book shows just how seductive the ladder-of-nature view remains. Simply saying that the “lower” creatures share abilities with creatures once considered more advanced still suggests something like a ladder—it’s just that chimps or crows or children are higher up than we thought. [...] As de Waal recognizes, a better way to think about other creatures would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds of minds to solve different adaptive problems.

mbrock 11y ago

How do you create this scale of sentience though? I really have no idea "what it's like to be a cow." What fact, theory, or experience convinces you that a cow's life is significantly less sentient than a monkey? (I'm genuinely curious.)

DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Or a bumblebee, right? Beats me. I've given it some thought, and I could speculate. My point was to separate that part out, though. Acknowledging that there must be a scale is the first step. Once we go there, then we can start talking about what goes into producing one. Some folks don't even want to go there (as this article implies) Being conscious, in my mind, is the ability to observe information and change your mental model of the world based on it. If that definition works, then animals are certainly conscious. Perhaps sentience is the ability to do that as a community, over time, and about abstract concepts. Monkeys might be able to locate new sticks in their environment, use them to spear fish, and pass that to their offspring. But they couldn't formulate a theory of virtue over several generations. (At least I don't think so) Perhaps that definition is a starting point? (Just trying to provide you with some kind of answer)
- mbrock 11y ago
  My view is that even if we want to have such a scale, creating it would require solving the most tenaciously vexing philosophical problems of all time... Or, maybe we can come up with a general ordering of sentience, such that we can say that a bumblebee is quite definitely below a baboon, but still, ethical questions will involve picking some cutoff—and that will be arbitrary, contentious, and creepy. It seems somewhat likely to me that if we manage to quantify or understand sentience across species, we would find it unsettling. What if rats, cows, and pigs all turn out to be well past the hump of vivid awareness, such that killing them really is extinguishing a life quite similar to a human's? Fortunately there's a lot of good vegan recipes out there...
  - hodwik 11y ago
    > "What if rats, cows, and pigs all turn out to be well past the hump of vivid awareness, such that killing them really is extinguishing a life quite similar to a human's?" Or what about the opposite? What if consciousness is very rare, and that just because something acts with complex behavior doesn't mean they are experiencing? - Perhaps some humans aren't even conscious, being merely symbolic engines running on a large cultural dataset. It would certainly explain a segment of the population that has never made sense to me. - Perhaps children aren't yet conscious. I know that I don't remember anything before the age of 4. Maybe I wasn't actually aware yet, being only a biological automaton until a flip was switched in my brain. - Perhaps animals are conscious, but don't experience a joy sensation, only a hunger/need/pain sensation. In that case, nothing we could do would help them. - Perhaps animals are conscious, but don't experience a pain sensation, only pleasure -- their reaction to pain being merely instinctual, without actually being felt by the animal's consciousness. In that case, nothing we could do would hurt them. When you're dealing with consciousness there is no way to know. We can't move the locus of our awareness inside another creature to see if it is also experiencing., or in what ways.
    - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
      This is my fear as well. I think once we finally come up with a sliding scale, most if not all humans are going to score rather low on it. If you believe that the future of any intelligent lifeform is to evolve into some form of machine intelligence, and it's obvious that machine intelligences can communicate complex ideas in blinding fast speed -- in parallel channels? Plus live tens or hundreds of thousands of years? Compared to that we're like mayflies, popping into existence and back out in a blink of the eye, doing nothing more than buzzing around. Hell, that's not just true of individual humans. Our entire species might look like that. Want the answer to Fermi's Paradox? There it is. How much time are you going to spend today trying to observe and understand a individual gnat?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

ruraljuror 11y ago

> I honestly believe that what our species needs is a sliding scale of sentience. What purpose would having this hierarchy serve? To justify which animals you can eat? Despite many of the other comments, eating animals is outside the scope of this article and should take into account more factors than animal sentience. > I had to bail out. If you had stuck with the article a little longer, the reviewer would place de Waal's argument as directly counter to yours, although too long to quote in entirety: De Waal explicitly rejects the idea that there is some hierarchy of cognitive abilities. Nevertheless, an implicit tension in his book shows just how seductive the ladder-of-nature view remains. Simply saying that the “lower” creatures share abilities with creatures once considered more advanced still suggests something like a ladder—it’s just that chimps or crows or children are higher up than we thought. [...] As de Waal recognizes, a better way to think about other creatures would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds of minds to solve different adaptive problems.