I’m currently reading Jonathan Birch’s The Edge of Sentience, a book focusing on the boundary between systems that can feel pleasure or pain, and those that can’t, and the related ethics.
While this is a subject I’m interested in, I’m leery of the activism the animal portions of it attract. I have nothing in particular against that activism, but mixing it with science seems to risk questionable results. This is an area where there are often stunning headlines. However I sometimes find that when I follow the citation trail and dig up the actual study, the results are more nuanced and open to interpretation than the headlines imply. Since I don’t have time to do that with every study that gets publicized, I’ve become cautious in accepting the claims in this area.
Birch’s book has an activist feel to it. But he makes clear at the beginning that he’s interested in an evidence based approach. And in an initial review of the science and philosophy in this area, he admits that there is currently a tremendous amount of uncertainty, and a number of “zones of reasonable disagreement”.
The first zone of disagreement starts with how to even define “sentience”. After dismissing very liberal definitions, such as the ability to respond adaptively, Birch covers the concept of affects, which are usually characterized as having a valence (an evaluation of whether something is good or bad) and an arousal dimension. After some reasoning about drugs that could target either the valence or arousal aspect individually, he concludes that valence is the crucial one, and settles on a definition of sentience as the capacity to have valenced experiences.
Of course, that immediately leads to the zone of disagreement on “experience”, which leads to a review of the philosophy and science of consciousness. Birch discusses how epiphenomenal views of consciousness, a view that experience makes no difference to behavior, might make the question impossible to study. But since evolution can only select for things that make some difference, it seems unlikely.
Among materialist views of consciousness, Birch notes a key distinction, whether consciousness is a single unified natural kind, or two or more kinds. He notes that people like Daniel Dennett seem to be in the camp of rejecting a single kind, often characterizing it in an illusionist or eliminativist fashion, although Birch feels like “many kinds” may a better label. (This resonates with my own view, along with the semanticism of Jacy Reese Anthis or semantic indeterminism of David Papineau.)
Often proponents of a particular scientific theory are operating under the single-kind view, but a many-kinds view often takes a pluralistic stance, that many of these theories may be addressing different aspects of the same complex reality. Birch uses an analogy of people in a town working to understand “what it’s like around here”, with some focusing on the economics, others the social aspects, ecology, or other areas. But rather than recognize they’re all working on different aspects of the problem, they see each other’s theories as bitter rivals.
Birch also ecumenically recognizes “radical alternatives”, such as interactionist dualism, panpsychism, biopsychism, and IIT (integrated information theory), as being in the “zone of reasonable disagreement”. Each of these views have their own challenges, such as identifying where the interaction happens between the mental and physical in interactionist dualism, the combination problem in panpsychism, or the metaphysical assumptions of IIT (which Birch characterizes as idealist in nature) and how to test them.
Another question is whether there can be edge cases of sentience or consciousness. In evolutionary history, is sentience a sharp “lights come on” type development, or a gradual one? Are there creatures where the question of whether they’re sentient has no fact of the matter answer?
If it is gradual, are we talking about a sharp start to sentience with gradually enriched contents (shallow gradualism) or a gradual development of sentience itself (deep gradualism)? Deep gradualism seems more likely under some views (such as many-kinds, global workspace, or IIT) than others (such as dualism or panpsychism).
Birch reviews some of the philosophical literature which discusses how hard it is to sympathetically imagine an edge case of consciousness, and so try to use that as a reason to dismiss the conceivability of such cases. But Birch concludes that this isn’t a good reason. Just because we struggle to imagine something doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. (I also think people have a tendency to help themselves to whatever minimalist concept of consciousness they can find in any posited edge case and declare the experience is therefore wholly conscious.)
Birch admits that both many-kinds materialism and deep gradualism complicate his task, and that he would like them to be false. Since I tend to think both of these views are true, I’m going to be interested to see how he treats them as the book progresses.
Birch also discusses the traditional philosophical theories of ethics such as utilitarianism and neo-Kantianism, concluding that they’re compatible with the view he calls “sentientism”, that all sentient systems deserve moral consideration. He also discusses alternate views, such as eco-centric ones, as well as the views of some of the major religions. Most he can see as compatible with sentientism, although he admits that it’s a rough compatibility in some cases.
One interesting view is a consciousness-without-valence one, which could become an issue with artificial intelligence. Consider a PV (philosophical Vulcan). PVs are different from Star Trek Vulcans, who merely suppress their emotions. A PV has no emotions at all, and it could be argued, no sentience. But they are conscious. Are they worthy of moral consideration?
Here I think we see an issue in Birch’s valenced experience definition of sentience. He admits that a PV would likely have preferences about outcomes, and so would reason about those preferences in relation to their perceptions. He makes a distinction between this and “valence”, which I think reveals he’s unwittingly sneaking in more of the affect concept in his notion of valence, such as arousal and motivational impulses. But he concludes that the PVs have found an alternate path to moral significance, so it doesn’t seem to matter. However that seems to put him in the same camp as David Chalmers, who uses the PV concept to argue that it’s consciousness itself rather than sentience that is the crucial issue.
Which brings us back to the possibility of consciousness and sentience being semantically indeterminate, which would seem to make the ethics around them also indeterminate. I’m not a moral realist, so this holds no dilemma for me. But it obviously does for Birch’s project. As I noted above, I’ll be curious to see how he deals with it in the rest of the book. (I’ve currently only read the first quarter or so.)
What do you think about Birch’s overall project? Or about my conclusions of semantic indeterminancy? Are there reasons to think the edge of sentience is sharper than I’m imagining?
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/10/27/the-semantic-indeterminacy-of-sentience/
#animalConsciousness #ArtificialIntelligence #Consciousness #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Sentience #TheEdgeOfSentience
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