5 ms·

We know that octopuses and many other animals are intelligent. We don't know for certain if anything nonhuman is sentient. Scientists and activist groups have

• dweinus 3y ago
  Right. Maybe it is hard to prove, but the choice to eat them is a life-or-death decision. I am going to opt for tofu. Given that "sentience" is roughly the ability to have feelings, it seems very hard to believe most animals are not sentient. Spend a day with a cat or on a farm and you will witness emotions. Do octopuses have feelings? The paper is pretty confident: "There is very strong evidence of sentience in octopods". It seems likely to me that animals that are distant from humans are harder for us to understand, but still sentient.
• PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  > We know that octopuses and many other animals are intelligent. We don't know for certain if anything nonhuman is sentient. You are mixing up terms. All animals are sentient. Not all animals are intelligent. Only very few animals appear to be sapient. Octopuses are certainly one of the few animals that appear to be beyond a reasonable doubt.
  • shaneofalltrad 3y ago
    The confusion is how Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 determines this, with the wrong definition of sentient to determine legalities, even seeing news articles describing it as so, for example https://www.gov.uk/government/news/animals-to-be-formally-recognised-as-sentient-beings-in-domestic-law https://www.gov.uk/government/news/animals-to-be-formally-re...
  • efitz 3y ago
    The lay definition of sentience involves the ability to respond to stimuli, as you point out, but people involved with animal rights activism use the term sentience to refer to the capacity to suffer, which implies a sense of self. Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge- reasoning, problem solving, etc. This is readily observed in many experiments with octopuses.
    • PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      > but people involved with animal rights activism use the term sentience to refer to the capacity to suffer, which implies a sense of self. Yes, I always have had a problem with that. They use it incorrectly, and most don't even consider the idea of a sense of self as relevant, only the ability to suffer, although the latter is only relevant in the context of the former IMO. > Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge- reasoning, problem solving, etc. This is readily observed in many experiments with octopuses. Intelligence can be a property of 'dumb' systems though, e.g. slime mold and plants. Octopuses don't just exhibit intelligence, but rather metacognition. They can think about themselves in relation to their environment and manipulate their environment to suit their needs, willfully and deliberately, and not in any replanned way. They also are capable of mental time travel, the ability to beware of and plan for the future, not in an instinctual way such gathering nuts but on a short term basis in reaction to their environment and stimuli. There are very few animals who exhibit these traits, and these traits are generally a strong indicator of self-awareness and intelligence to the level of at least a toddler.
  • tiberious726 3y ago
    Octopus' sapience is absolutely not beyond a reasonable doubt: many consider passing the turning test, or an even stronger form thereof to be required for sapience
    • PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      > Octopus' sapience is absolutely not beyond a reasonable doubt: I mean, for the standard definition of sapience it is. > many consider passing the turning test, or an even stronger form thereof to be required for sapience Those many are wrong. There is nothing in the definition of sapience that would tie to to something as specific to humans as the Turing test.
      • tiberious726 3y ago
        The question the turning test was posed to solve is when does a sufficiently smart computer become sapient. What on earth is your "standard" definition of sapience?
        • PrimeMcFly 3y ago
          > The question the turning test was posed to solve is when does a sufficiently smart computer become sapient. Yes, but it's a test for humans to interpret and judge. What kind of nonsense is it to think it should be used for an animal? A possibly sentient computer is going to be programmed to communicate in one of the human languages for obvious reasons, and animals don't have that luxury. I can't see why you would think a Turing test would be relevant to a discussion of animal sapience at all. > What on earth is your "standard" definition of sapience? Whatever Merriam-Webster or Oxford give.
          • tiberious726 3y ago
            Yes, we are homo sapiens, sapience is fundamentally a human question. This is why we even care about it in the first place: it boils down to "are some animals human too?" That's why we care about it so much. Hilariously, this is the result I get from Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sapience https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sapience did you even look?
• tiberious726 3y ago
  Technically, all animals are sentient, and many plants are too. Sentient means capable of responding to sensation. Sapient means what Issac Asimov incorrectly called sentient. I can't even tell what that first footnote is trying to prove: sentience is provable with much less than their criteria, and actual sapience requires much more (turing test if you're easy about it, turing test referring to a shared manipulatable world if you buy Davidson's arguments)
• sterlind 3y ago
  For that matter, I don't know that any human besides myself is sentient. You could all be philosophical zombies. Science fundamentally can't answer this question, since sentience (i.e. experiencing qualia) is a subjective, first-person phenomenon, and science can only test objective, third-person reality.