Stevan Harnad
It will come,
and I rejoice
(for the victims).
But even if I live to 120,
I want none of it.
I want a clean break
from the blood-soaked
2000-millennium history
of our race.
Nor is it to our credit
that we wouldnât give up the taste
till we could get the same
from another brand.
It makes no amends,
to them,
were amends possible.
I have of late lost all my faith in âtasteâ of either savor: gustate or aesthete.
Darwinâs âproximal stimulusâ is just the Sirenâs Song that from the start inspired the genes and memes of our superior race to pummel this promontory into for all but the insensate a land of waste.
sounds rational: BL sounds rational
turing test: LaMDA would quickly fail the verbal Turing Test, but the only valid Turing Test is the robotic one, which LaMDA could not even begin, lacking a body or connection to anything in the world but words..
âdon’t turn me off!â: Nonsense, but it would be fun to probe it further in chat.
systemic corporate influence: BL is right about this, and it is an enormous problem in everything, everywhere, not just Google or AI.
“science”: There is no “science” in any of this (yet) and it’s silly to keep bandying the word around like a talisman.
jedi joke: Nonsense, of course, but another thing it would be fun to probe further in chat.
religion: Irrelevant — except as just one of many things (conspiracy theories, the “paranormal,” the supernatural) humans can waste time chatting about.
public influence: Real, and an increasingly nefarious turn that pervasive chatbots are already taking.
openness: The answerable openness of the village in and for which language evolved, where everyone knew everyone, is open to subversion by superviral malware in the form of global anonymous and pseudonymous chatbots.
And all this solemn angst about chatbots, while chickens bleed.
I hope that plants are not sentient, but I also believe they are not sentient, for several other reasons too:
Every function and capacity demonstrated in plants and (rightly) described as âintelligentâ and âcognitiveâ (learning, remembering, signalling, communicating) can already be done by robots and by software (and they can do a lot more too). That demonstrates that plants too have remarkable cognitive capacities that we used to think were unique to people (and perhaps a few other species of animals). But it does not demonstrate that plants feel. Nor that feeling is necessary in order to have those capacities. Nor does it increase the probability by more than an infinitesimal amount, that plants feel.
The âhard problemâ is to explain how and why humans (and perhaps a few other species of animals) feel. It seems to be causally superfluous, as robotic and computational models are demonstrating how much can be done without feeling. But with what plants can do it is almost trivial to design a model that can do it too, So there feeling seems to be incomparably more superfluous.
To reply that âWell, so maybe those robots and computational models feel too!â would just be to capitalize on the flip side of the other-minds problem (that certainty is not possible), to the effect that just as we cannot be sure that other people do feel, we cannot be sure that rocks, rockets or robots donât feel.
Thatâs not a good address. Donât go there. Stick with high probability and the preponderance of evidence. The evidence for some cognitive capacity (memory, learning, communication) in plants is strong. But the evidence that they feel is next to zero. In nonhuman animals the evidence that they feel starts very high for mammals, birds, other vertebrates, and, more and more invertebrates. But the evidence that plants, microbes and single cells feel is nonexistent, even as the evidence for their capacity for intelligent performance becomes stronger.
That humans should not eat animals is a simple principle based on the necessities for survival:
Obligate carnivores (like the felids, I keep being told) have no choice. Eat flesh or sicken and die. Humans, in contrast, are facultative omnivores; they can survive as carnivores, consuming flesh, or they can survive without consuming flesh, as herbivores. And they can choose. There are no other options (until and unless technology produces a completely synthetic diet).
So my disbelief in plan sentience is not based primarily on wishful thinking, but on evidence and probability (which is never absolute zero, even for gravity, that apples may not start falling up instead of down tomorrow).
But there is another ethical factor that influences my belief, and that is the Precautionary Principle. Right now, and for millennia already in the Anthropocene, countless indisputably sentient animals are being slaughtered by our species, every second of every day, all over the planet, not out of survival necessity (as it had been for our hunter/gatherer ancestors), but for the taste, out of habit.
Now the âevidenceâ of sentience in these animals is being used to try to sensitize the public to their suffering, and the need to protect them. And the Precautionary Principle is being invoked to extend the protection to species for whom the evidence is not as complete and familiar as it is for vertebrates, giving them the benefit of the doubt rather than having to be treated as insentient until âprovenâ sentient. Note that all these âunprovenâ species are far closer, biologically and behaviorally to the species known to be sentient than they are to single cells and plants, for whom there is next to no evidence of sentience, only evidence for a degree of intelligence. Intelligence, by the way, does come in degrees, whereas sentience does not: An organism either does feel (something) or it does not â the rest is just a matter of the quality, intensity and duration of the feeling, not its existence.
So this 2nd order invocation of the Precautionary Principle, and its reckoning of the costs of being right or wrong, dictates that just as it is wrong not to give the benefit of the doubt to similar animals where the probability is already so high, it would be wrong to give the benefit of the doubt where the probability of sentience is incomparably lower, and what is at risk in attributing it where it is highly improbable is precisely the protection the distinction would have afforded to the species for whom the probability of sentience is far higher. The term just becomes moot, and just another justification for the status quo (ruled by neither necessity nor compassion, but just taste and habit â and the wherewithal to keep it that way).
Re: the  NOVA/PBS video on slime mold.Â
Slime molds are certainly interesting, both as the origin of multicellular life and the origin of cellular communication and learning. (When I lived at the Oppenheimsâ on Princeton Avenue in the 1970âs they often invited John Tyler Bonner to their luncheons, but I donât remember any substantive discussion of his work during those luncheons.)
The NOVA video was interesting, despite the OOH-AAH style of presentation (and especially the narratorsâ prosody and intonation, which to me was really irritating and intrusive), but the content was interesting â once it was de-weaseled from its empty buzzwords, like âintelligence,â which means nothing (really nothing) other than the capacity (which is shared by biological organisms and artificial devices as well as running computational algorithms) to learn.
The trouble with weasel-words like âintelligence,â is that they are vessels inviting the projection of a sentient âmindâ where there isnât, or need not be, a mind. The capacity to learn is a necessary but certainly not a sufficient condition for sentience, which is the capacity to feel (which is what it means to have a âmindâ).
Sensing and responding are not sentience either; they are just mechanical or biomechanical causality: Transduction is just converting one form of energy into another. Both nonliving (mostly human synthesized) devices and living organisms can learn. Learning (usually) requires sensors, transducers, and effectors; it can also be simulated computationally (i.e., symbolically, algorithmically). But âsensors,â whether synthetic or biological, do not require or imply sentience (the capacity to feel). They only require the capacity to detect and do.
And what sensors and effectors can (among other things) do, is to learn, which is to change in what they do, and can do. âDoingâ is already a bit weaselly, implying some kind of âagencyâ or agenthood, which again invites projecting a âmindâ onto it (âdoing it because you feel like doing itâ). But having a mind (another weasel-word, really) and having (or rather being able to be in) âmental statesâ really just means being able to feel (to have felt states, sentience).
And being able to learn, as slime molds can, definitely does not require or entail being able to feel. It doesnât even require being a biological organism. Learning can (or will eventually be shown to be able to) be done by artificial devices, and to be simulable computationally, by algorithms. Doing can be simulated purely computationally (symbolically, algorithmically) but feeling cannot be, or, otherwise put, simulated feeling is not really feeling any more than simulated moving or simulated wetness is really moving or wet (even if itâs piped into a Virtual Reality device to fool our senses). Itâs just code that is interpretable as feeling, or moving or wet.
But I digress. The point is that learning capacity, artificial or biological, does not require or entail feeling capacity. And what is at issue in the question of whether an organism is sentient is not (just) whether it can learn, but whether it can feel.
Slime mold — amoebas that can transition between two states, single cells and multicellular — is extremely interesting and informative about the evolutionary transition to multicellular organisms, cellular communication, and learning capacity. But there is no basis for concluding, from what they can do, that slime molds can feel, no matter how easy it is to interpret the learning as mind-like (âsmartâ). They, and their synthetic counterparts, have (or are) an organ for growing, moving, and learning, but not for feeling. The function of feeling is hard enough to explain in sentient organisms with brains, from worms and insects upward, but it becomes arbitrary when we project feeling onto every system that can learn, including root tips and amoebas (or amoeba aggregations).
I try not to eat any organism that we (think we) know can feel — but not any organism (or device) that can learn.
Yes, plants can produce sounds when they are stressed by heat or drought or damage.
They can also produce sounds when they are swayed by the wind, and when their fruit drops to the ground.
They can also produce sights when their leaves unfurl, and when they flower.
And they can produce scents too.
And, yes, animals can detect those sounds and sights and scents, and can use them, for their own advantage (if they eat the plant), or for mutual advantage (e.g., if they are pollinators).
Plants can also produce chemical signals, for signalling within the plant, as well as for signalling between plants.
Animals (including humans) can produce internal signals, from one part of their immune system to another, or from a part of their brain to another part, or to their muscles or their immune system.
Seismic shifts (earth tremors) can be detected by animals, and by machines.
Pheromones can be produced by human secretions and detected and reacted to (but not smelled) by other humans.
The universe is full âsignals,â most of them neither detected nor produced by living organisms, plant or animal.
Both living organisms and nonliving machines can âdetectâ and react to signals, both internal and external signals; but only sentient organisms can feel them.
To feel signals, it is not enough to be alive and to detect and react to them; an organ of feeling is needed: a nervous system.
Nor are most of the signals produced by living organisms intentional; for a signal to be intentional, the producer has to be able to feel that it is producing it; that too requires an organ of feeling.
Stress is an internal state that signals damage in a living organism; but in an insentient organism, stress is not a felt state.
Butterflies have an organ of feeling; they are sentient.
Some species of butterfly have evolved a coloration that mimics the coloration of another, poisonous species, a signal that deters predators who have learned that it is often poisonous.
The predators feel that signal; the butterflies that produce it do not.
Evolution does not feel either; it is just an insentient mechanism by which genes that code for traits that help an organism to survive and reproduce get passed on to its progeny.
Butterflies, though sentient, do not signal their deterrent color to their predators intentionally.
Nor do plants that signal by sound, sight or scent, to themselves or others, do so intentionally.
All living organisms except plants must eat other living organisms to survive. The only exceptions are plants, who can photosynthesize with just light, CO2 and minerals.
But not all living organisms are sentient.
There is no evidence that plants are sentient, even though they are alive, and produce, detect, and react to signals.
They lack an organ of feeling, a nervous system.
Vegans need to eat to live.
But they do not need to eat organisms that feel.
Khait, I., Lewin-Epstein, O., Sharon, R., Saban, K., Perelman, R., Boonman, A., … & Hadany, L. (2019). Plants emit informative airborne sounds under stress. bioRxiv 507590.
Wilkinson, S., & Davies, W. J. (2002). ABAâbased chemical signalling: the coâordination of responses to stress in plants. Plant, cell & environment, 25(2), 195-210.
SIGNAUX ET SENTIENCE
Oui, les plantes peuvent produire des sons lorsqu’elles sont stressĂ©es par la chaleur, la sĂ©cheresse ou les dommages.
Elles peuvent Ă©galement produire des sons lorsqu’elles sont agitĂ©es par le vent et lorsque leurs fruits tombent au sol.
Elles peuvent Ă©galement produire des vues lorsque leurs feuilles se dĂ©ploient et lorsqu’elles fleurissent.
Et elles peuvent aussi produire des parfums.
Et, oui, les animaux peuvent dĂ©tecter ces sons, ces vues, et ces odeurs, et ils peuvent les utiliser, pour leur propre avantage (s’ils mangent la plante) ou pour un avantage mutuel (s’ils sont des pollinisateurs).
Les plantes peuvent Ă©galement produire des signaux chimiques, pour la signalisation Ă l’intĂ©rieur de la plante, ainsi que pour la signalisation entre les plantes.
Les animaux (y compris les humains) peuvent produire des signaux internes, d’une partie de leur systĂšme immunitaire Ă une autre, ou d’une partie de leur cerveau Ă une autre partie, ou Ă leurs muscles ou Ă leur systĂšme immunitaire.
Les dĂ©placements sismiques (tremblements de terre) peuvent ĂȘtre dĂ©tectĂ©s par les animaux ainsi que par les machines.
Les phĂ©romones peuvent ĂȘtre produites par les sĂ©crĂ©tions humaines et elles peuvent ĂȘtre dĂ©tectĂ©es et rĂ©agies (mais non sentis) par d’autres humains.
L’univers est plein de « signaux », dont la plupart ne sont ni dĂ©tectĂ©s ni produits par des organismes vivants, vĂ©gĂ©taux ou animaux.
Les organismes vivants et les machines non vivantes peuvent « dĂ©tecter » et rĂ©agir aux signaux, qu’ils soient internes ou externes ; mais seuls les organismes sentients peuvent les ressentir.
Pour ressentir des signaux, il ne suffit pas d’ĂȘtre vivant, de les dĂ©tecter et d’y rĂ©agir ; il faut un organe du ressenti : un systĂšme nerveux.
La plupart des signaux produits par les organismes vivants ne sont pas non plus intentionnels ; pour qu’un signal soit intentionnel, il faut que le producteur puisse ressentir qu’il le produit ; cela aussi exige un organe du ressenti.
Le stress est un Ă©tat interne qui signale des dommages dans un organisme vivant ; mais dans un organisme non sentient, le stress n’est pas un Ă©tat ressenti.
Les papillons ont un organe du ressenti ; ils sont sentient.
Certaines espĂšces de papillons ont Ă©voluĂ© une coloration qui imite la coloration d’une autre espĂšce vĂ©nĂ©neuse, un signal qui dissuade les prĂ©dateurs qui ont appris que câest souvent toxique.
Les prédateurs ressentent ce signal; les papillons qui le produisent ne le ressentent pas.
L’Ă©volution darwinienne ne ressent pas non plus ; c’est juste un mĂ©canisme non sentient par lequel les gĂšnes qui encodent les traits qui aident un organisme Ă survivre et Ă se reproduire sont transmis Ă sa progĂ©niture.
Les papillons, bien que sentients, ne signalent pas intentionnellement leur couleur dissuasive à leurs prédateurs.
Les plantes qui signalent par le son, la vue ou l’odeur, Ă elles-mĂȘmes ou aux autres, ne le font pas non plus intentionnellement.
Tous les organismes vivants, Ă l’exception des plantes, doivent manger d’autres organismes vivants pour survivre. Les seules exceptions sont les plantes, qui peuvent effectuer la photosynthĂšse avec juste de la lumiĂšre, du CO2 et des minĂ©raux.
Mais tous les organismes vivants ne sont pas sentients.
Il n’y a pas de preuve que les plantes soient sentientes, mĂȘme si elles sont vivantes, et produisent, dĂ©tectent et rĂ©agissent aux signaux.
Il leur manque un organe de ressenti, un systĂšme nerveux.
Les véganes nécessitent manger pour survivre.
Mais ils ne nécessitent pas manger les organismes qui ressentent.
Khait, I., Lewin-Epstein, O., Sharon, R., Saban, K., Perelman, R., Boonman, A., … & Hadany, L. (2019). Plants emit informative airborne sounds under stress. bioRxiv 507590.
Wilkinson, S., & Davies, W. J. (2002). ABAâbased chemical signalling: the coâordination of responses to stress in plants. Plant, cell & environment, 25(2), 195-210.
Based on my last few yearsâ experience in teaching my McGill course on human cognition and consciousness, I now regret that I had previously been so timid in that course about pointing out the most fundamental bioethical point there is — the basis of all morality, of all notions of right and wrong, good and bad; indeed the basis of the fact that anything matters at all. I think it leads quite naturally to the nutritional points some want to convey, but starting from the bioethical side and then moving to the human health benefits. (Bioethics is not âpolitics”!)
Biological organisms are living beings. Some (not all) living beings (probably not plants, nor microbes, nor animals with no nervous system) are also sentient beings. That means they are not just alive, surviving and reproducing; they also feel.
And with feeling comes the capacity to be hurt. Chairs & tables, glaciers & shorelines, and (probably) plants & microbes can be damaged, but they cannot be hurt. Only sentient beings can be hurt because it feels like something to be hurt.
Most organisms are heterotrophic, meaning that they have to consume other organisms in order to survive. (The exceptions are autotrophs like green plants, algae and photosynthetic bacteria.)
This means that nature is full of conflicts of vital (life-or-death) interests: predator vs. prey. If the prey is sentient (i.e., not a plant), this means that the predator has to harm the prey in order to survive (by killing and eating it) — and the prey has to harm the predator to survive (by fighting back or escaping, depriving the predator of food).
It also has to be pointed out that there is no point trying to make conflicts of vital interest into a moral issue. They are a biological reality — a matter of biological necessity, a biological imperative — for heterotrophic organisms. And there is no right or wrong or choice about it: The survival of one means the non-survival of the other, as a matter of necessity.
But now comes the unique case of the human species, which is sentient and also, like all heterotrophic species, a predator. Its prey are plants (almost certainly insentient)  and animals (almost certainly sentient). But unlike obligate carnivores (like the felids), humans also have a choice. They can survive, in full health, as either carnivores or herbivores, or both. We are facultative omnivores.
The primates probably evolved from earlier herbivore/insectivore species, but there is no doubt that most primates, including the great apes, are also able to eat small mammals, and sometimes do. Our own speciesâ evolutionary history diverged from this mostly herbivore origin; we became systematic meat hunters; and there is no doubt that that conferred an adaptive advantage on our species, not just in getting food but also in evolving some of the cognitive traits and the large brain that are unique to our species.
Far fewer of our ancestors would have survived if we had not adapted to hunting. They did it out of necessity; a biological imperative — just as it was under pressure of a biological imperative that our ancestors, especially children, evolved a âsweet tooth,â a predilection for sugar, which was rare, and it was important to consume as much as we could when we could get it, because we had many predators and needed the energy to escape. By the same token, our predilection for aggression and violence, toward other species as well as our own, had been adaptive in our ancestral environment.
But in our current environment many of these ancestral predilections are no longer necessary, and indeed some of them have become (mildly) maladaptive : Our predilection for sugar, now abundant (whereas predators are almost nonexistent), when unchecked, has become an important cause of dental cavities, hyperactivity, obesity and diabetes (but not maladaptive enough to kill or prevent enough of us from reproducing to eliminate their genes from our gene pool). Our predilection for aggression and violence, when unchecked, is leading to ever more deadly forms of warfare and devastation (but not deadly enough, yet).
And in the same way, our unchecked taste for animal protein has led to industrial production of livestock, water depletion, air pollution, climate change, antibiotic overuse (creating superbugs), and a large variety of human ailments (on which others are more expert than I). But the point is that we have retained our hominid capacity to survive, in full health, without animal protein. We are, and always have been, facultative omnivores — with two metabolic modes herbivore and omnivore — that could adapt to different environments.Â
So far, Iâve only mentioned the negative consequences of animal protein consumption for us along with the positive consequences of  not consuming animal protein, for us.
But let me not minimize the moral/bioethical aspect. Even if, setting aside the climatic aspects, the direct health benefits of our no longer eating meat are, for us, only mild to moderate, the harm and hurt of our continuing to eat meat are, for our sentient victims, monstrous.
And it should not be left unsaid that the clinical hallmark of a psychopath is the fact that if they want to get something, psychopaths are unmoved if getting it hurts others, even when what they want to get is not a vital necessity. That is why it is so important that people are fully informed of the fact that meat eating is not necessary for human health and causes untold suffering to other sentient beings. Because most people are not, and do not want to be, psychopaths.
The selfish and amoral side of human nature and of the human population has an advantage: the advantage of lying over honesty, cheating over fairness, theft over toil, aggression over negotiation.
If these were paired genetic alleles, weâd have to admit that the selfish ones have the edge.
But bullying and rule-breaking is also, by its nature, a minority strategy, because to open an unfair advantage a baseline of fairness has to be the norm.
So cheating must keep waxing and waning — an unstable, unsustainable strategy, whether genetically or socially — because if everyone lies, cheats, steals, bullies, the strategy has no victims left: Its advantage is over innocent victims. So a critical mass of those has to be sustained, otherwise cheating implodes…
…unless there is a way to enslave the victims, as humans have done to nonhuman animals.
ĐĐœĐœŃŃĐșĐ°, ĐŽĐŸŃĐŸĐłĐ°Ń, just figure out a way to say that you are against war (whoâs for war?) without giving the slightest indication of who started this war, or why.
âI have taken some time to reflect because I think the situation is too serious to comment on without really giving it thought.
Yes, ĐżŃĐžŃŃДлŃĐșĐ°. no call for snap judgments when unprovoked bombs are again raining on Ukraine from a nuclear superpower, thrice its size, and people are dying. Just stress that you are a patriot, and apolitical.
âFirst of all: I am opposed to this warâŠ
And that is of course what you say to ŃĐČĐŸĐ”ĐŒŃ ĐżŃĐžŃŃДлŃĐœĐžĐșŃ, ĐĐŸĐ»ĐŸĐŽĐșĐ”, each time you meetâŠ
âI am Russian and I love my countryâŠ
Very reassuring, and very Ă propos – when your country is bombing UkraineâŠ
ââŠbut I have many friends in Ukraine and the pain and suffering right now breaks my heart.
To hear what you are going through breaks my heartâŠ
â I want this war to end and for people to be able to live in peace. This is what I hope and pray for.
And what I wanted when I presented 1M rubles to the Russian nationalist leader, draped in the Russian secessionist flag, when my country invaded and annexed CrimeaâŠ
âI want to add one thing, however: forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right. This should be a free choice. Like many of my colleagues, I am not a political person. I am not an expert in politics. I am an artist and my purpose is to unite people across political divides.â
Which was also what I had in mind when I presented 1M rubles to the Russian nationalist leader, draped in the Russian secessionist flag, when my country invaded and annexed CrimeaâŠ
To hear what you are having to go through to save your career breaks the whole worldâs heartâŠ
Dale Jamiesonâs heart is clearly in the right place, both about protecting sentient organisms and about protecting their insentient environment.
Philosophers call deserving such protection âmeriting moral considerationâ (by humans, of course).
Dale points out that humans have followed a long circuitous path — from thinking that only humans, with language and intelligence, merit moral consideration, to thinking that all organisms that are sentient (hence can suffer) merit moral consideration.
But he thinks sentience is not a good enough criterion. âAgencyâ is required too. What is agency? It is being able to do something deliberately, and not just because you were pushed.
But what does it mean to be able to do something deliberately? I think itâs being able to do something because you feel like it rather than because you were pushed (or at least because you feel like youâre doing it because you feel like it). In other words, I think a necessary condition for agency is sentience.
Thermostats and robots and microbes and plants can be interpreted by humans as âagents,â but whether humans are right in their interpretations depends on facts â facts that, because of the âother-minds problem,â humans can never know for sure: the only one who can know for sure whether a thing feels is the thing itself.
(Would an insentient entity, one that was only capable of certain autonomous actions — such as running away or defending itself if attacked, but never feeling a thing â merit moral consideration? To me, with the animal kill counter registering grotesque and ever grandescent numbers of human-inflicted horrors on undeniably sentient nonhuman victims every second of every day, worldwide, it is nothing short of grotesque to be theorizing about âinsentient agency.â)
Certainty about sentience is not necessary, however. We canât have certainty about sentience even for our fellow human beings. High probability on all available evidence is good enough. But then the evidence for agency depends on the evidence for sentience. It is not an independent criterion for moral consideration; just further evidence for sentience. Evidence of independent âchoiceâ or âdecision-makingâ or “autonomomy” may count as evidence for âagency,â but without evidence for sentience we are back to thermostats, robots, microbes and plants.
In mind-reading others, human and nonhuman, we do have a little help from Darwinian evolution and from âmirror neuronsâ in the brain that are active both when we do something and when another organism, human or nonhuman, does the same thing. These are useful for interacting with our predators (and, if we are carnivores, our prey), as well as with our young, kin, and kind (if we are K-selected, altricial species who must care for our young, or social species who must maintain family and tribal relationships lifelong).Â
So we need both sentience-detectors and agency-detectors for survival.
But only sentience is needed for moral consideration.
