![]() Usually the term consciousness includes capacities beyond happiness and suffering, such as the experiences of seeing or visualizing a color. This is narrower than the most common definition of consciousness in philosophy, which is “something it is like to be that organism ” (details in the second section of the post). If we had to commit Sentience Institute as an organization to a single definition of sentience, we would say it’s simply the capacity to have positive and negative experiences, usually thought of as happiness and suffering. This suggests that most common definitions and theories of consciousness agree that expanding the moral circle to all sentient beings includes expanding it to farmed animals, with perhaps an exception for the farmed animals with the simplest nervous systems such as shellfish and insects. There also seems to be consensus in the field of neuroscience that there is strong evidence for the sentience of many nonhuman animals. Our survey results suggest that 87% of US adults agree that “Farmed animals have roughly the same ability to feel pain and discomfort as humans.” Presumably an even higher percentage would agree that they have at least some level of sentience. Sentience Institute’s current focus is on expanding humanity’s moral circle to include farmed animals like chickens, fish, cows, and pigs. Most of what we do doesn’t depend on the specifics. We launched Sentience Institute in June 2017 “to build on the body of evidence for how to most effectively expand humanity’s moral circle, and to encourage advocates to make use of that evidence.” Our aim is to expand the moral circle to include all sentient beings, but the term sentience opens up a host of important philosophical and empirical questions about exactly which beings we’re talking about. Many thanks to Oliver Austin, Antonin Broi, Guillaume Corlouer, Peter Hurford, Tyler John, Caleb Ontiveros, Jay Quigley, Jose Luis Ricon, Brian Tomasik, and Jay Quigley for reviewing and providing feedback. Cham: Springer International Publishing.Įdited by Kelly Witwicki. “Consciousness Semanticism: A Precise Eliminativist Theory of Consciousness.” In Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2021, edited by Valentin Klimov and David Kelley, 1032:20–41. The second section of this post on “Tentative Views” has been superseded by a new paper on consciousness, a non-paywalled version of which is available here.
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