#116 Peter Godfrey Smith - Animal Consciousness: What Can We Know?

37:13You know, it's a bit like how a lot of people imagine a a computer screen displaying a triangle when really it's just zeros and ones. It's to say the triangle really is just zeros and ones. But you need the monitor to project the triangle. It would be as if somehow, like when someone says conscious experience is just the brain, it sounds to me a bit like saying there's just a computer without a screen, just the computer itself that has all of the coding for what would produce a triangle. But somehow they're like, just is a triangle inside of that computer somewhere, even if I cut it open, I don't find it anywhere, that somehow these zeros and ones could, if put together in the right way, just turn into a triangle or turn into redness.

37:56That seems really strange to me in the same way that putting a bunch of atoms together into neurons and putting the neurons in a particular order and organization just produces redness and triangles. I find that very difficult to comprehend. I think the triangle is a good one to press on too. In these discussions, people often go on and on about redness and just the kind of irreducible, undefinable quality of redness. But if we're going to pick problem cases, I think your case with the triangle is spatially organized forms of experience are probably better because there's such a temptation to say, you know i know there's nothing in the computer that's like that's red it wouldn't help that well maybe there is but that wouldn't be relevant if it was but the spatial organization you would think is something that must exist somewhere and on a physicalist view right there's lots of spatially organized processes going on there but you know literal spatial triangularity triangularity that's not how it's done yeah it's going to be a different a different kind of story involving mathematical projections and things like that yeah like you could imagine two different lines in your head one slightly longer than the other and like the lines i'm imagining in my head one of them is longer than the other one but i don't i'm not even sure if like thinking of that second line requires like more neural activity i don't really know how that all works but i doubt that it's like you know the the chain of neurons is longer than the other like there is no increase in length inside the physical aspects of my brain, and yet the lines are of different lengths, you know?

39:39It's, yes, I'm hesitating a bit because, right, how strongly should the negative case be made? One of the bodies of research that I think has been most startling in this area has been around spatial maps in the cells of rats, you know, some Nobel Prizes given out recently for discoveries concerning the way that rats navigate using, you know, what way back before this had been really worked out very well, were hypothesized to be cognitive maps. And when Tolman in the 1940s began talking about cognitive maps, people thought, well, rats navigate. They learn to get through mazes, learn to find the food, but there probably isn't really a literal map in there.

40:27And then in the 1970s, a second round of work showed, well, no, there are cells in the rat hippocampus, which were called place cells, which, I don't know, they do seem organized in a map-like way. And the picture has become a bit more complicated now with a sort of third round of work. But, right, the reason I'm raising this is if a person said, look, it'd be crazy to think that there was something in a brain that had anything like the literal spatial organization of the landscape that the rat was dealing with, that would be, and someone said that would be fallacious to suppose such a thing was needed.

41:11The empirical response from recent neurosciences, well, it's not that far away. I mean, it's not that the map looks physically like a ordinary human cartographic map with lengths, mapping to lengths and so on. But it's not so far away. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Nonetheless, I agree with you that the sense we have in experience of spatial organization as a feature of experience, that in a way is, you know, it's very striking, it's very challenging. in some versions at least it might be harder to fight that battle than the sort of redness of the rose and that kind of thing. Yeah, I find it like almost an impossible question to answer.

42:03To me though, I always talk about how there are sort of two problems in either direction. There's the problem of, you know, where is the triangle, where is the redness for the materialists, but for the immaterialists there's the interaction problem. And they also have the same problem as well, which is, I mean, suppose you believe in immaterial souls of a Cartesian kind or something. Where are the triangles there? It's not as if they make this dramatic move, this radical move on the metaphysical side and thereby solve the problem of the mental triangles. They're then going to have to grapple with the damn thing themselves.

42:41What do you think of panpsychism? the idea that fundamental reality is just made of consciousness, like atoms, when you fundamentally most break them down, their substance just is consciousness? I don't take it seriously as an option, partly because I take it to be a view that is motivated almost entirely by the difficulties of the other positions. People think to themselves, I just can't see how a physicalist view could be right. I can't see how an interactionist dualist view could be right. I'm being forced to the idea that mentality or experience is both fundamental and ubiquitous. It can't come from something other than itself.

43:32So it must be permanent and everywhere. Panpsychism is a view that you're forced to by the difficulties of other options. Yes. And then you have to start worrying about whether the road you've taken is too radical. Now, if you don't find a physical issue so difficult to entertain, and I really don't. Yeah, right. I don't think this is just ideology instructing imagination here. When I think about what a brain is like, what brain activity is like, in the particular way that I do. Maybe we should talk about the nature of brain activity at some stage. And I ask myself, is it mysterious that it feels like something to be one of those things?

44:19I think, no, it's not mysterious at all. And they're special. Grains of sand are nothing like this. The combination of activities that you find in a nervous system with the targeted information processing, network connections, and also the more diffuse, holistic, electrical activity. And that's something I would emphasize here. When you think about what's there, I think it's reasonable to say, nothing like this exists in the inanimate world. So there's no reason to think that there's much kinship between what it's like to have a brain. And there's no reason to think there's something it's like to be a grain of sand or a rock or a glass of water.

45:10And once the difficulties of explanation for a physicalist don't loom quite so large, what one should say to a panpsychist is, well, is there any positive motivation? Right, sure. Anything other than just the difficulties of the other views? Now, there are some people who would make an appeal to quasi-religious ideas or ideas about meaning and value as perhaps having an easier, you know, questions of that nature having an easier road for the panpsychist than for the physicalist. And that at least is an attempt to sort of, you know, set out another argument. but i i think most contemporary panpsychism is just driven by the difficulties experienced in other parts of the logical landscape and if you think that sensations are rain processes and that's not so it's not so implausible really then the then panpsychism looks like a absurd overreaction to medium-sized problems yeah i definitely get that impression i've spoken to a few i've spoken to philip goff on the show years ago he's a big panpsychist um i'm not sure how that fits into his recent like conversion to heretical christianity actually i'll have to ask him about that when you talk to him did he offer positive reason you know starting from scratch not starting from difficulties of other views but you know suppose you started from scratch he of why panpsychism looks like it not so much not that i remember right and i remember what captured me about it uh and and i was so interested in at the time was that it was the first time I'd come across really this idea of the problem of science being ultimately like descriptive or functional.

46:55That is, science tells you what stuff does. Most fundamentally, if you ask like, you know, about, I mean, famously when Newton discovers gravity, what he really does is he realizes that the same force that makes cups fall makes the moon stay in orbit around the earth and the planets move around. And so he eloquently describes and comes up with mathematical system for describing the motions of the planets, but in the Scolium to the Principia Mathematica, he says, as for what gravity actually is, why this force exists and what it's actually made of, hypothesis non-fingo. I frame no hypothesis. I've got no idea, is what he says.

47:31Which was very sensible of him, given the picture that was in place and what he'd done, to know when it would be too much to push further. Now, arguably, you know, sort of Einsteinian gravity gets us closer to thinking about what gravity like actually is. But Philip Goff at least opened my eyes to this idea that even in those cases, like a great deal of what we think is scientific, like description of what things are is really a bit more like Newton's gravity. in that like you say oh well what's an atom made of it's made of protons and neutrons and electrons okay cool there's our answer but if you ask what's an electron and the answer is oh it's a negatively charged particle or what's negative charge oh it means that it like repels other negative relational description that tells you what it does and so if i ask you what is it when you when you get to the bottom it's very difficult to answer that question now that's why i think it's true that what happens is like we've got this problem we can't answer this so consciousness is a solution but i think you could reframe that as a positive case and the way i've thought about it is like how do we explain the fact that at fundamental reality it seems like there are for want of a better word like preferences you know like you could think of there are kinds of atoms which do one thing and kind of atoms which do another thing you know what i mean there is a better there are better words i think preferences is richer than i mean there's a kind of selectivity of interaction yeah yeah sure okay so so let's say that and i suppose in order to build a positive case of pansoichism I might say something like there is this selectivity of action.

49:03And it seems weird that if we're just dealing with like inert matter, that sort of, you know, and we got down to the real fundamental of what matter is, that there's either like different kinds of fundamental matter or some fundamental matter selects this, you know, I don't want to say behavior, but you know what I mean? Select this way of being and another fundamental matter selects this way of being. And the panpsychist might say, well, the best explanation for that is preference, is conscious awareness and a sort of rudimentary desire to do one thing over another. That would probably be my best crack at like a positive panpsychist case, you know.

49:41And right. And then the question is going to be whether the alternative is able to give a better account of the selectivity of action than the rudimentary desire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where the battle will be fought. I think so. And that at least is a kind of, right, I think of this as a sort of a better place than the usual place where panpsychism is assessed. You know, it's introduced as a response to despair with respect to the mind-body problem. Let me push back a little bit about this view of science that I know Goff and other people have. So suppose we take the chair, which is proper wood.

50:24What's the chair made of? Well, it's wood. What's wood made of? Well, wood's mostly cellulose and lignin. Those are the two main constituents of wood. Cellulose, it's a sugar, surprisingly. It's got a structure that's not much dissimilar from glucose. Cellulose and glucose, they're sugars. and lignin is another carbon-based chemical that plants produce that is a kind of further binding thing that makes wood hard. So you've got cellulose and lignin. What's wood made of? It's made of those two things. That's a bit of science. Now, that wasn't sort of functional, relational. That was what it's made of.

51:04Then a person might say, well, tell me about cellulose. What's cellulose made of? Well, you've got carbon, you've got oxygen, you've got hydrogen, and here's how they're arranged. This is still what it is. It's not just what it does, but it's what it is. And then someone says, okay, now tell me about the carbon that was in the cellulose, that was in the wood. And you'll start talking about numbers of protons and numbers of electrons and neutrons. And that's also still talking about what it is, not what it does. And then they start pressing on the electron. And then I agree, we get to these problems of, you know, that's not the fundamental level, but it's getting to a level at which these questions concerning the natures of things and dispositions do become difficult.

51:55And I don't deny the difficulties there. But a whole lot of science was done in those other stages where, you know, this is what wood is made of. This is what cellulose is made of. This is what a carbon atom is made of. And the people who have the, you know, all science is about dispositions view, I think they don't recognize the realness of that part of science. You know, the part that, you know, if you ask, why does wood burn? Well, here's what it's made of and here's how things that are made of that stuff are going to behave when they get hot and there's oxygen around. So I do want to, I don't want to concede some of that.

52:40Yeah, sure. Here's the nature of science material that not just the panpsychists, but all sorts of people now like to offer. Yeah, I'm quite in line with this functionalist view of science, actually. Two other people I've had that have pressed back, just as you have, are David Deutsch and Brian Green, I also had a conversation with, who similarly wanted to salvage the idea that science does tell you what stuff is, not just what it does. Here's what the chair's made of. It explains, it doesn't just describe. Right. I think that will bottom out in the question of to what degree you think those levels of analysis are separable.

53:18Because when I look at, like, when you say, well, what's this chair made out of? You say, well, the arm of the chair is made out of wood. I've kind of got two options there. I can either say, okay, that's that question answered. And science has explained what something really is. If I wanted to go to a deeper level of analysis, I could. but if i'm happy to just stop there then science has explained what something is or i could view it and this is the view i would take in saying that that is like useful but it's an incomplete answer to the question because i still don't know what wood is and if i then do this thing of asking what's wood and what the answer is some stuff about what wood is and so i don't it's still incomplete but yeah i don't i'd imagine that complete is asking a Oh, yeah, exactly.

54:02Right. And I think your view on, I suppose, what you think science is supposed to be doing and like what counts as like a sufficient scientific explanation will be the determinant force here, because I think it's sensible. you know when people say that like when i touch this this chair arm i'm not really touching it because at the molecular level it's just electrons repelling each other right there is a sense in which i can describe macro phenomena in terms of the movement of uh micro phenomena i can say when i touch this word what's going on is electrons are repelling each other and that's a that's a sensible description of what i'm doing right there and it will and it will be sort of in reference to the most fundamental thing even though i'm not experiencing it on that level and in the same way there's like a out of context a really unhelpful way to answer the question but if you said hey what's this chair arm made out of you know what's your bookcase made out of you say oh electrons it's like that's a really unhelpful in this context but it's not incorrect and in fact that might be a more complete answer you know well that in that case it's close to incorrect or because it's not as if if it was made of metal or plastic it wouldn't be made out of yeah right right thing so it's it's a sort of the uninformativeness of the answer is a very you're quite right because that would miss what the goal of the questioner is if you think well we have to break it down to the electrons to answer your question you'd be like that's not what i'm trying to do and maybe the scientist when they're explaining the chair is made out of wood and you start asking well what's carbon made out of they'll go well you're sort of missing the project of what i'm trying to do here too and so yeah i think it depends on what your view of view of science is abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the nfl and i'm cd lamb wide receiver for the dallas cowboys you know i'm here for abercrombie's cowboys gear that's not a question but i need a whole wardrobe to go with it no shade to the guys but i'm used to having the best tunnel fits.

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56:15But the reason why I'm so interested in panpsychism in relation to your work is because when in the first book of your trilogy, Other Minds, you write about what you describe as potentially the beginning of communication. And you talk about how single celled organisms from which we are all ultimately evolved, sort of floating around in the sea, communicate with each other by sort of releasing chemical signals. And the beginning of communication might have been when single celled organisms began releasing chemicals that had sort of the intention of being perceived. It's not just something that you do as a byproduct or whatever, but you release some kind of chemical in order that another organism will receive that, right?

57:05And that's the beginning of communication. And then you beautifully describe how what an animal is, as opposed to like a single-celled organism, is when a bunch of cells start clumping together, essentially, and working in tandem. And you say, can't remember exactly how you word it, but you talk about how when the cells clump together into animals, what was communication between organisms, becomes communication between cells inside of one organism. And that really made me stop. And I don't know if that was when you wrote that, that was supposed to be some super significant philosophical moment.

57:41But for me, that was eye-opening because I suddenly realized that this difference between why it is that cells communicating in the ocean billions of years ago are individual organisms, all separate, communicating with each other. But once they're like spatially located together in the right way now we consider it as one organism an animal who has lots of cells which are communicating with each other but as part of one individual person and i suddenly thought of panpsychism because panpsychists think that you know fundamental atoms are basically conscious and that as you start putting them together you have this mystery which they call the combination problem of how that eventually turns into a brain which is made up of fundamentally conscious atoms, but seems to be experienced as one entity.

58:31We don't experience ourselves as billions of conscious atoms, but one conscious brain. And I thought, it's sort of an analogy there with the way that single cells communicate with each other, but then if they communicate with each other in a particular arrangement, there's no longer a bunch of organisms, but just one. You know what I mean? It seems like a bit of a mystery to me how that jump is made. like the bird I see the analogy. Forgive me if that's a lot, but I hope you sort of see what I'm saying, you know? I get it. And in the case of, right, I think this brings up some questions about the relationship between the broadly information processing side of the mind and the felt or experiential side of the mind.

59:18Sure. I mean, suppose we're talking about how neurons and other cells within an organism interact and communicate, and we note the history of this in separate organisms, as you say, in the sea, communicating with each other. and we ask ourselves, as an information processing object, what's the relation between a neuron itself and it as a mere part of a larger whole? And the questions of that form, I think, are sort of interesting but not in principle perplexing. complexing. We can say, well, this neuron, suppose it's part of a logic circuit or it's part of what does a certain kind of mathematical processing in relation to other cells around it.

1:00:15We can give it an information processing description at the level of this cell and that cell. And then we can zoom out and say, and once you've got tens of billions of neurons doing this kind of stuff, you wind up with this other information processing. Now, that I think is a very, it's interesting, but it's not perplexing or threatening as a kind of relationship between levels. The combination problem that the panpsychists encounter, which does have an analog within a physicalist view, concerns the relationship between what you might think are the tiny glimmers of selfhood and something not quite experiential, but on the way that a cell can have and the properties of the big collective that you wind up with when there are billions of these things.

1:01:08Now, if you thought that individual cells had a kind of consciousness, which some people think, who are not panpsychist, right? This is a view about cells, not about all of matter. Then you face a kind of combination problem when you think about the consciousness of the brain. And if we just think about this hypothetically for a second, I mean, suppose I thought that individual cells were conscious. I don't think that, but I don't think it's a crazy, I don't think it's a 20th as crazy as panpsychism. Suppose I thought that, and then I faced the question, what's the relationship between the basis for experience in a cell and the basis for experience in the big multicellular organism, I'd say, well, we have to think in terms of a kind of subsumption rather than aggregation to address this question well.

1:02:02It's not that the quasi-experiential things in the cells are still doing their stuff and you add them together to other cells doing their version and you get a big thing by combination. Rather, when you get the cells all packed together and having the animal-type electrical relationships between the parts of the nervous system, the lower-level activities of the cells that might be the basis for something quasi-experiential, if this was just on its own, those low-level activities are subsumed. They're lost. They're no longer there they're replaced by something that exists at the higher level so if i was a panpsychist i'd be looking for a subsumption model within that framework in the same way that i think a subsumption model rather than a combination model is appropriate for a more biologically oriented view i mean now i hope that wasn't too much of a no i think about that a lot like in in the context of panpsychism how do you account for there being individual sort of conscious atoms or whatever and then singular conscious brains made up of those atoms and i guess the two choices are either that they both have individual experience at a different level or that once that singular brain evolves the individual yeah and so i suppose one answer to that question is the plausibility of the idea that say the conscious experience of humanity let's say does like the human species right have a singular conscious experience if you think the answer is yes and if you take enough psychedelics you might think that the answer is yes then you might think to yourself okay well then we're a bit like the atoms that make up a brain we're individually conscious but so are the bits that get put together but i think more plausibly individual that doesn't feel right the gaps between humans are different from the gaps between cells in a brain.

1:04:00I have right now, there's a whole lot of sort of boundary management and cohesion that I have, and there's a whole lot of boundary management and cohesion that you have. Probably less, I would imagine. And there are some ideas about surprising channels that I don't think should be written off, but there's a lot of individuality that we each have, much more so than two neurons in a brain so the idea that there's a simple extrapolation from the neuron to neuron case to the person to person yeah case you know i think there's lots of places to push back there i i certainly think so too and as i say i'm i'm i really feel a bit like stuck in the middle here in that it's like every door that i try to open it just has something that's a bit wrong about it you know like the the physicalist view i still i still struggle to wrap my head around the triangle it's the triangle yeah but then and then then i then i you know think of a dualist thing and its interaction and then i think of you know idealism and that doesn't seem right either and so i love exploring these these ideas but i am very much stuck in the middle but one thing i do know is that conscious experience exists and that i've got good reason to think that it exists across the animal kingdom and we were talking earlier about the brain structures of octopuses and other animals.

1:05:23And I said that we'd come back to this, the experience of pain in particular, because I was talking about, you know, biting my finger or whatever, or don't feel pain at all. I think the idea that they don't feel pain at all is basically, you know, in the dustpan of history now. Well, for which animals? I think it should be in the dustpan for lots of animals. Yeah. Well, there are people who think that there is something so specific and special about human beings than any other. Plenty of people deny it for fish still. Yeah, so people still deny it for fish, certainly for shrimp or more plausibly oysters, for example.

1:06:03I would deny it for oysters. Yeah, I think basically everybody does, right? And so the question is, how do we go about finding a method by which to judge whether another animal feels pain? And the reason I ask that is because you could say well let's look for parity let's look for things that happen in their brains which also happen in our brains and if the thing that happens in our brain brings about pain it probably does for them too and that makes some sense but then a lot of fish just like don't have the same uh brain structures that we do that produce pain in us let alone the octopus with the exactly the donut and the globes and the rest.

1:06:44Yeah, but then you think about the fact, I've heard you talk about this, the fact that octopuses also don't have the same visual cortex that we do, and yet they can clearly see. And so obviously these brains are functioning in very different ways, but sometimes producing similar or analogous results. How can we even begin approaching this question of trying to understand whether or not pain is felt in the same way for other animals as it is for us. It's definitely difficult, but I certainly wouldn't despair. And the experiment that I mentioned by Robin Crooker a little while ago, that's a kind of model where I think a good way to approach it is to say, you know, we do something to an animal, we inject a bit of acid or we pinch it, or we, in the case of insects now, they use heat mostly as the aversive stimulus because insects don't seem to care much about mechanical damage, but they really don't like heat.

1:07:43We introduce some potentially aversive stimulus and we ask, what reason is there to believe that it's felt and felt aversively, not just felt in a kind of, this is happening to me now. Now, the Crook experiment is a kind of a model because what she does is say, well, if it's felt, There'll be a number of consequences. There's a sort of network of effects. It's not just one kind of effect. There's the combination of, you know, protecting the area, avoiding the place where it happened, and also the fact that the local anesthetic eradicates both of those behaviors. It's not just one effect. It's a kind of network.

1:08:27there's some famous experiments by bob elwood on hermit crabs where elwood introduced a little electrode into the shells of some hermit crabs and gave them a small electric shock and they don't like it and they'll leave the shell if you shock them but not in a simple way and that this is this is why that case is a bit similar to this octopus case elwood found elwood and his collaborators found that if it's a really good shell, they'll put up with more shock. If there's the odor of a predator around, they'll put up with more shock. Sometimes also, and in both those cases, the shell's more valuable.

1:09:12So you'd put up with more than you otherwise would. In some cases, the crab would leave the shell when it had been shocked, and it would kind inspect itself and try to work out what happened there, and would poke its head inside the shell apparently to work out, this shell seemed perfectly fine. Why is it suddenly doing whatever it's doing? Now, you don't have to interpret that as, why is it suddenly making me feel bad? Or why is the shell suddenly inducing this unpleasant experience? It might be something other than that, but you want some story about the network of effects that come from the shock.

1:09:57There's the tending, there's the inspecting, there's the trading off of putting up with more shock if the shell is a really good shell. It's that kind of combination of effects that point towards an internal state that is, well, that's the question. Is it an internal state that's felt or not felt. If someone says it's not felt, then I would say to them, okay, fine, but tell me some effects would expect to see if this was an internal state that was not felt. I mean, if it is felt, then the grooming makes sense, then the inspection makes sense, as well as the trade-off, all those things make sense.

1:10:38They're not decisive as evidence, but in response to that, you want a positive story about what's going on in there such that all those things happen but it's just a little robot that doesn't feel any of this stuff. So I think and what I'm describing now is what's actually happening and especially in the UK which is a real center for this research, the Elwood work, there's a lot of very high quality work on bumblebees being done, there's a whole bunch and what makes the work powerful i think when it is powerful is especially the way that you're able to get a sense of a net as i i'm repeating myself i think this is important the sort of network of effects that come from the from what's happened the stimulus to the animal and that and trying to get a sense of whether the combination or network of effects that come from this thing go more naturally with the hypothesis that it does feel or doesn't feel not enough just to say this is something that bothers me about some aspects of the debate if someone does you know years of glorious experiments very difficult to do they work out and you get uh the sorts of effects that are suggestive of pain a person like a philosopher might say, well, that's all very well, but I can imagine all that stuff being present and feeling being absent.

1:12:10I mean, sure, you can imagine it. I mean, imagining is easy in situations like that, but it's not much of an argument. Well, I can imagine you being a philosophical zombie. I can imagine that you are giving me all of these signs that you're conscious and can feel pain, but you actually don't. You're just some kind of robot, right? That's right. Imagining is cheap in this area. It's not enough. And I mean, actually, this is quite a good time for me to emphasize. When I wrote the book, Other Minds, I thought it was pretty likely that octopuses were yes and insects were no for a lot of these experiential things, including pain.

1:12:48When I wrote the second book in the series, Metazoa, there was starting to be evidence for mood-like or emotion-like states in insects that were quite surprising, but there wasn't the sort of high quality work on pain that has now appeared since then. So when I give talks now, I find myself talking quite differently from how I talked 10 years ago around the time of Other Minds, because I think the evidence for states that are very pain-like or somewhat pain-like in at least some insects. It's good evidence. Evidence for positive, you know, pleasure-like states in bees and flies is growing and there is evidence of that kind.

1:13:38The hermit crab stuff, I think, is very striking. There's lots of observations of invertebrate animals doing that kind of grooming and wound-tending crabs and lobsters and prawns. So the whole picture, I think, has changed. not in a way that's decisive, but in a way that has some real weight to it. And it's changed through, I think, especially work that's shown these kind of networks of effects of a sort of feeling suggestive kind coming out of, arising from aversive stimuli and from, on the flip side, positive events as well. Won't that, particularly the insects idea, given just how many insects there are and just how much of an effect we have on their lives and their suffering through all kinds of behaviors, including the rearing of animals for food, but also driving our cars or whatever, shouldn't this kind of thought or realization perhaps just revolutionize our ethical worldviews?

1:14:47it certainly will be disruptive no question i think we're heading for disruptive uh conclusions not of the simplest kind in a few years ago there was a uh a declaration on the probability of sentience in a number of these invertebrate animals the new york declaration yeah which i didn't write, but I signed. And during the subsequent discussion of that declaration, quite a few people said, well, doesn't this mean insects are going to have to have rights or something like that? And my response was, well, no, it's a separate question. And in the case of insects in particular, the widening of the moral circle has a different character once it includes them, because most of the other organisms who have come to think, you know, I used to think they didn't feel pain, now I think they do.

1:15:49We should at least take that into account. In most of the earlier cases, you know, non-human close relatives like mammals and birds and fish and octopuses, and in most of the earlier cases, we're not at war with these animals. But with insects, at least some of the time, we can't make peace with the mosquitoes. Our relationship with them is very antagonistic. I mean, mosquitoes cause so much harm worldwide as carriers of malaria and other diseases. There's just no way we can make friends with mosquitoes. Well, I hope I speak too fast. We might at least think about ways that we could render them less destructive to human life while taking their interest into account, right?

1:16:41That's not crazy. But to just sort of bring them into the moral circle and say, okay, they're in, they have rights, it's very different in the case of agricultural pests and mosquitoes, other animals that have more of a sort of intrinsically antagonistic relationship to us than others are still people, as you say, who don't think. Who don't think the fish feel pain. But like I say, look at the experiments that people are doing and as best as we can hope to get confidence that there's some kind of experiential pain going on, it seems like it's ticking all of the boxes. But people will look at certain kinds of sea life.

1:17:22I mean, I'm thinking particularly of something like prawns or shrimp and they'll start to think to themselves, well what kind of thing do i need to look for in the brain structures of these little creatures to think they might feel pain and do they fulfill those criteria like i don't know and this will of course affect your views on on their inevitable treatment as like bycatch for all kinds of reasons but also eating them directly ordering them at a restaurant like the food that you eat is going to have a big impact on that because you know i know a lot of people who would probably think even if they can't stand the thought of slaughtering cows and pigs like a shrimp you know i could eat a shrimp like i don't know if you have a have a strong view on on how we should think about these animals sure yeah i think the first thing to say is that factory farming of mammals and birds is is the big the number one problem i think i wouldn't want any of the things I say about the invertebrate cases to pull attention away from the awfulness of the way of industrialized farming of pigs in particular.

1:18:31It's very, very bad. And of chickens, pigs and chickens are probably the two cases, the worst cases. And there are special subsets, smaller scale cases like veal and foie gras, but where there's a lot of cruelty, that's priority number one. And everything else I think is secondary. The main thing people could do to improve our relationship with animal life on this planet is to move away from cruel industrialized farming. Now, but right, but now we can, with that on the table, I think talking about cases like shrimp is interesting. One import, I think the case that shrimp have pain-like states is a pretty decent case.

1:19:19I think they're probably going to become fairly clear yes cases before long. One of the important things about shrimp is, I mean, it's something that Elwood emphasizes in one of his papers. You know, if you ate beef every day for the rest of your life, like I'm giving figures now that don't come from the Elwood thing, but these are my own figures. I think a lot about these numbers. You might get through a dozen or maybe two dozen cows max. With shrimp, you get through that in an evening, in a meal. Yeah, we farm, I think, the Shrimp Welfare Project says 440 billion shrimp a year. Really? Yeah.

1:20:04Uh-huh. 440 billion a year. bear in mind that i think and shrimp farming is not very nice uh it's it's awful i think about 100 billion human beings have ever lived in the history of the planet and we kill 440 billion shrimp every single year in fact somebody recently accosted me matthew his name is he's he writes on sub stack bentham's bulldog is his name and he's got this big thing about shrimp right he comes to me and he says you know alex we need to be talking about shrimp and immediately you start thinking like you say he's like okay i think it's really interesting but let's not draw attention away from the most pressing issue which is of course factory farming and he's like i'm not so sure about that he thinks it might be because of the fact that so many shrimp are being killed and i think the way they do it is they essentially put them on ice and they suffocate while freezing and they also take a lot longer to suffocate than humans do so it takes about 20 minutes so the shrimp are often just killed by laying them out on ice and letting them suffocate 20 minutes an excruciating kind of death if they feel anything like the kind of pain that we might feel and the crazy thing is i mean he drew my attention to this shrimp welfare project what these people do is and we'll put a link in the description actually because people might want to donate after this what they do is they provide the producers with stunners on the assumption like on the agreement that they will stun a minimum of however many it is like 120 million shrimp a year or something and so what happens is by donating money and they provide these stunners because we're killing so many shrimp these shrimp are being saved from this pain now because of the sheer numbers involved like this blows my mind so if you donate one dollar to the shrimp welfare project that equals out to preventing one and a half thousand shrimp from undergoing this kind of painful experience like you say you could eat beef for the rest of your life and get through maybe a few dozen cows you can donate one dollar and save one and a half thousand shrimp from undergoing this experience that's that's right and so he's like look man like if you want to have the most practicable and immediate and numerous, most sort of impact, biggest impact.

1:22:25And it's done cooperatively with the producers. Yeah, like do it for the shrimp. But then intuitively, and he knows this, of course, when he tells me this, he's like, obviously, the first reaction people have is like, wow, that's way more shrimp than I thought. And that's crazy. It's only a dollar. But I just kind of don't care as much about a shrimp as I do about a pig and a cow. And I find it actually very difficult to balance out these numbers. But if the numbers are as insane as he's talking about, I don't even know how to begin working out where our ethical priorities should lie. I say this just because you said, as I would say, like, oh yeah, we'll talk about shrimp, that's interesting, but let's not take away from the main issue.

1:23:02But just because of the sheer numbers involved, maybe this is the main issue, you know what I mean? I take the point. I take the point that the numbers are, that's a very weighty comparison. In the case of the cruel kinds of factory farming that I'm making the main issue, it's not the manner of death, it's the fact that the whole life, from beginning to end, just has zero that's positive in a lot of cases. Yes. whereas if you're a shrimp if you're a wild caught shrimp you have a normal shrimp life until you're caught and then an unpleasant death if you're a farm shrimp yeah that's I don't know enough about it but my understanding is it's not great maybe this is not well enough informed but I would suspect the not greatness is not comparable to the factory farm pig case there's something special i mean in the case of pigs and chickens especially the the sort of ease of handling them the dealing with them is such that we can control their lives completely get a lot of meat from them and the form of control can be extremely cruel but nonetheless effective yeah even in the case of cows it's not as bad yeah you know it's just there's no reason to be as awful to them as we are to some other animals it's it's economic to be a bit less awful in in the shrimp case um when we just think about the 20 minutes at the end yeah i i if i was a wild living shrimp and had an unpleasant end very different from being in a factory farm setting yeah and i i imagine again i'm also speaking from from ignorance here and that i don't i don't know what the life of a shrimp is like i don't know to what extent they're farmed or wild caught or whatever uh but they're mostly farmed now and and it's it's it's mostly in asia and we don't i don't think i don't know much about the day-to-day circumstances i imagine that the shrimp welfare project probably has a lot of information yeah i'll make sure that's linked in the description but certainly in terms of like your let's say your monetary impact if you want to be effective with your altruism it does seem to me that like you know one and a half thousand shrimp saved from torturous suffering for one dollar and in this article which i'll link i'll link below from from penthouse bulldog he he talks about how uh there's a there's an organization called rethink priorities who tried to sort of calculate like the relative proportional amount of pain that shrimp feel compared to human beings and they landed on a conservative estimate of like about three percent of the pain experience that's where i think it all gets a bit dubious so yeah i want to i'll link it in the description but just so people know like you know he starts making a comparison as to like you know the equivalent of how much human suffering and whatnot i i in in putting this in the description and endorsing it as a thought i'm not endorsing that line of thinking yeah yeah um but as long as it's a question to ask as long as it's non-zero like we're talking about a a great a great deal of suffering and possibly your highest impact like dollar to individual saved from torturous suffering ratio that that exists but for some people a problem like this kind of works as a reductio ad absurdum in that like it's like yeah okay well if you start worrying about you know fish sentience where does that end up where does that end up with you oh oh you want to take a few dollars and donate it to the against malaria foundation no no no you're far more impact if you give it to the to the shrimp charity yeah yeah sure like surely something's going wrong so some people will take this and go okay we should be saving the shrimp and some people would say we should obviously not be saving the shrimp right so there's something wrong about the way we're thinking about this you know and i wonder which of those intuitions you're like more okay shrimp shrimp are the perfect case for me to yeah reply with in this case because um in my own case i used to eat shrimp very readily, and I'm phasing them out more or less completely, partly because of this scientific stuff, but partly because, I know this sounds a little crazy, but hanging out with shrimp while diving.

1:27:23I wrote a blog post about this about a year ago. If people go to my blog, Metazoan, there's a post about this, where there was a particular kind of shrimp called banded shrimp who are friendlier than normal shrimp now that sounds weird but it's not weird because our banded shrimp are cleaner the cleaner shrimp they approach larger animals like fish and eels and clean parasites off their skin in the same way that various small fish do so they're cleaners and they live in these kind of um you know quite delicate quasi-symbiotic relationships or cooperative relationships with larger animals now if you hang out with banded shrimp uh they're quite curious about people sometimes they like to touch you they like to touch you with your if you have a diving glove off but they don't like that they're like octopuses yeah they can feel the skin and they prefer the skin and they'll they'll interact in that way now as i'm doing it with them i know they're not my friends i know that this is a cleaner animal and they have a disposition to you know probe larger animals who might be potential clients in in the cleaning role but they're a lot more complicated than i would have thought shrimp would be.

1:28:48They have a kind of a wary, curious engagement with a patient diver. This is a shrimp. You know, this is not an octopus. This is a much simpler animal. So if someone says, this is a reductio, you're going to spend your money saving the shrimp. One reply I would make is you should hang out more with shrimp. You should spend some time spend some time seeing how complicated they are. And a few years ago, I would have felt weird saying this. I no longer feel weird saying this. I think a lot of these invertebrate animals, they have a lot more going on than it appeared even a few years ago. Mint is still$15 a month for premium wireless.

1:29:27And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. One, it's$15 a month. Two, seriously, it's$15 a month. three no big contracts four i use it five my mom uses are you are you playing me off that's what's happening right okay give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch a front payment of 45 dollars for three-month plan 15 per month equivalent required new customer offer first three months only then full price plan options available taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com and i mean the implication you're making and what you've said is that your assessment of the conscious experience of these animals is like directly tied to your decision as to whether or not to purchase and eat them.

1:30:08In the shrimp case, as in the octopus case, it's partly a kind of sentimental reaction on my part. Okay. Yeah. I just, you know, I don't think eating octopus is a particularly bad thing. I think it's nowhere near as problematic as eating factory farm pigs, for example. But octopus, I just have too much affection for, for them to be, you know, in the food category at all. And surprisingly to me, shrimp and other crustaceans are sort of making their way into that category. And I think it's fine to have a kind of sentimental response, but one should also think about the rational side as well. I think just purely non-sentimentally, in the shrimp case, there's decent evidence of pain as seeding grooming, wound tending, and things like that.

1:31:04There might be more evidence a few years from now. It's hard with some animals because they have more limited behavioral repertoires than octopuses and some others. But there's a scientific side which points towards some decent probability of pain-like states. And there's just more complexity. There's just more going on in their behavior than I would have expected. And those two things, I think, in a non-sentimental way, they should have some force. And then each person's going to be sentimental about some animals and not others. And I think it's kind of healthy as a human to have sentimental responses to particular animals.

1:31:48I think that's entirely appropriate. Yeah. Well, as an ethical emotivist, I think that ethics a lot of the time just is sentimentality. You're an emotivist? Yeah. Again, sort of non-committally. You're a pan-psychist, sympathetic emotivist. It's a very unusual combination. Yeah, I suppose it is. But such is the disparity of my philosophical thought. I find it very, very difficult actually to commit myself to basically any philosophical position because especially since doing the podcast and talking to people, like I'll talk to somebody who will passionately like explain to me why consciousness is foundational and how that changes everything.

1:32:26And then I'll speak to someone next week who says that's all BS. And I'm constantly just amazed at how difficult it can be to pin something down. But, you know, when it comes to animal suffering, the idea that animal suffering matters and that like factory farming is bad is something that I just think is unshakably the case. Of course, you know, caveat, I'm an emotivist. So you have to understand what I'm saying there through that lens when I say the word bad. But there is this interesting question of the of the link specifically between just saying this animal suffers and this industry treats them really badly.

1:33:08therefore i'm just not going to buy that uh product or saying something like you know there is this problem of collective action and that my individual contribution doesn't make much of a difference and so i'm still happy to engage in this but i'm going to lobby for uh you know government regulation or i'm going to lobby these companies somehow and i wonder where you fall down on that line because you still eat some forms of animal products and i wonder if your decision as to which ones you actually eat in practice are more guided by sentimentality, just rational considerations of the pain of the animal, or also taking into consideration the impact that your purchase will have.

1:33:48Maybe all three, I don't know. The main thing I think about is whether the animal had a life worth living. That's the concept that I use to assess choice in a lot of these ways. I eat quite a lot of humanely farmed beef back in Australia when I'm not traveling. You know, there's a farm near me where I know the guy. I buy quite a lot from him. And there's also the obsessive, expensive butchery in town where I get the rest. And I feel completely fine. But what does humanely farmed mean in that context? It means that the animal lived a sort of a not very constrained, but well-protected, fairly natural life, not too much separation of generations.

1:34:40The farmer near me tries to keep families essentially together in the herd setting for much of the animal's lives. So you're doing the cow thing. You're sort of roaming around, hanging out with your friends and family. You're eating. You're looked after. And then after a certain amount of time, you are killed for food. So the way it's put by one of the American pioneers of this kind of farming is, it's a good life and one bad day, basically. I think that's how Joel Salatin describes it. And when the life is clearly what could be called an enviable non-human life, I think it's fine. One that you would rather live than not live at all.

1:35:30right a test i apply in all these cases is a kind of reincarnation test yeah where i think um would i rather come back as a cow on this farmer's farm or not come back at all definitely rather come back as a cow here would i rather come back as a factory farmed pig in one of those sort of warehouse type operations or not come back at all i would definitely not want to come back at all. So there's a, that's, I think it, you know, it's very much a thought experiment, but it's, I find it a very useful one. And in the case of humane beef farming, which I think is done extensively in the UK, um, there's a good case and the, the gap, the difference between that and the worst practices, especially around pigs and chickens is just so enormous.

1:36:25It's such a gap. So I apply the sort of life worth living test in the case of food. Also animal experiments, which is something I've been thinking about recently, paper about that some years ago. You know, do you want to use rodents in experiments? Fine, but make the overall life of those rodents in the experiments superior to the wild analog. And then continue, go ahead. But if you're not doing that, then you should feel bad about it. I think this is a good argument. So I think the life worth living criterion is one that it's not purely sentimental because there's a role for reason and considerations of non-arbitrariness and factual information here.

1:37:11It's not just a kind of gut response. The way I would describe it is it's an attempt at reasoned valuation. so there are a few things which jump out at me from what you're saying there and i mean the first thing is when people talk about humane butchering humane farming uh like vegans often will hear something like that and nothing like obviously i literally understand what you're saying but there's no humane way to kill an animal who doesn't want to die right now the answer to that might be to say something like okay as you say it is one bad day you know it's a good life but it is a bad day and we admit that that's a bad day but wouldn't you rather have that life than no life at all and the answer is yes and jeff mcmahon has written about this yeah and at the end of his you know investigation at least in whatever paper it was i read a while back i don't remember very well he says yeah like i i do think that it is better that those animals lived even if they had to die than that than that they didn't live at all because if we weren't going to kill them they wouldn't have come into existence at all and yet like when i think about this i'm like, and Jeff McMahon has a similar kind of thought, I'd say the same thing about a human life, right?

1:38:25If there was this human life that I could live, like say it's my life right now, I'm living a nice life, I'm enjoying my time here, and suppose that when I'm, you know, 30 years old or something, I'm going to get shot in the head, and it will be done relatively painlessly, I might not even see it coming. Would I rather live that life than no life at all? i'd rather live that life you know and yet it still would feel wrong to like breed human beings into existence kill them painlessly at the end of their life and raise them for that reason even if you apply this would you rather have lived criterion and say yeah i would rather live that life than none at all it still feels like it would be wrong and so i think and jeff mcmahon has this problem where he's like i think it's good that these animals exist rather than they don't but I have no really good way of explaining why I'm okay with that for cows, but not for human beings.

1:39:21Yeah. I think it's okay in this setting to separate the human and non-human cases, you know, presumptively pretty far apart. And then one might get pushed to think about them in combination in this way. And I don't mind it, but one thing I'd want to say is that I very much resist the idea that any reasonable policy in the case of non-humans has a sort of natural carryover to the human case. I also want to pick up something you reminded me of in the first part of what you were just saying. When I have had discussions and arguments with vegans and the like. And there was a flurry of this online a couple of years ago.

1:40:08I wrote an article called, if not vegan, then what? And a lot of the vegans said, well, vegan is the answer to that. Something that became a strong impression to me, and I do mean this critically, but I don't want to make it sound very critical, is that there are some people who are just, more, they're unwilling to admit that all lives end, that death is a part of the picture, no matter what else is going on. So I look at my own life and I think of it as having a certain span, beginning and end. I'm not intensely distressed by the fact that I will die. And I think that carries over to my attitude in some of these farming questions.

1:41:03I think death is a part of life. Everyone dies somehow. And although dying at our hands, the bad day is a bad day. Well, it doesn't have to be. I mean, one thing we didn't talk about is on-farm slaughter in the case of humanely farmed cattle, which is too difficult and expensive in some circumstances, but is done in others. where there's no transport, there's no bad day, there's just an end. That's not an impossible thing. And, right, that's a good case to think about. There are some people who are making the vegan case who say, you know, this is an abomination, this is a terrible thing. And one response I have to them is, is there a better end?

1:41:48Everyone has an end. Yeah, sure. Is there a better one than this? And, well, you know, you might go on for longer, that's certainly true but as far as the intrinsic properties of the the ending are concerned there are some decent there are better and worse options yes and the idea that all options have to be thought of as sort of comparable um i i resist that so there's there are lives worth living and lives worth living and somehow i don't feel that as pressure on humane farming when you have something that passes the kinds of tests that I would want to impose.

1:42:32And in the human case, I think things are somewhat different. If someone directly carried this over to sort of, we could just raise these humans and use them for transplants or something like that. Yeah, right. I resist the simple extrapolation because what I would call reasonable valuation in the context of human political affairs and social life, I think is somewhat different from what counts as reasonable valuation of options in the non-human case. Yeah. So the idea of it as a sort of direct extrapolation, I resist. I definitely agree with you. I'm just trying to figure out why that's the case, right?

1:43:10And I've thought a lot, maybe it's got something to do with human concepts like dignity and autonomy and self-actualization. self-actual and the kinds of projects self-conscious pursuit of projects yes that are characteristic of human life which in order to actually think of as a good thing you would need to be aware that you're that you're doing but there's always going to be a name the trade argument that you can run like what is it that's that's true of a human being that's not true of a pig that makes it okay to do this with pigs but not to human beings i mean like obviously in the case of factory farming it's a very difficult thing to justify in either circumstance but if we're talking about something like i think it's important to note that yeah like something can be bad but not as bad as something else right so i think a vegan would likely say of course there are better and worse ways to die and of course everybody dies at some point that doesn't mean that we need to intentionally bring about premature deaths for animals i think jeff mcmahon basically says that once now that i'm remembering it like it is true that it'd be better for them to exist and necessitate them dying than not.

1:44:15But the act of bringing something into existence infers responsibility. So before that animal exists, it would be better for them to exist and then be inevitably killed than not exist at all. But once that animal does exist, you now have a duty not to prematurely kill it. That's what McMahon says. I have a feeling he at least toyed with that idea. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I'm sure I remember this from a while ago. It's been a while since I've read his work. it's interesting thoughts and so yeah and they might say a similar kind of thing it's like yeah of course it makes sense to say i'd rather live that life than not live that life at all but intuitively we just it's not just like oh i kind of want to resist this extrapolation we say like if you were raising human beings in order to harvest their organs and gave them a good life but you killed them when they were 30 we would say unambiguously like that is almost trivially unethical and but i share your intuition that like for a cow that doesn't seem as bad but what I'm looking for is what it is that's true of a cow that makes it not bad, that if true of the human being would also make it okay to the human being, you know what I mean?

1:45:21That to me is a very, very difficult question to answer. I don't know if you have any kind of thought on that.

1:45:33You know, like when I was a vegan, I used to run this name the trait argument, and I still run it today is a philosophical idea but i would literally imagine taking a human being in a gas chamber as we kill pigs and saying okay like we're gonna like or maybe you start with the pig so there's a pig in a gas chamber and that's how we kill the majority of pigs in this country and then you sort of say okay well let's like give that pig a different number of legs yeah yeah absolutely not and so for people who think that it's like okay i start sort of saying if you had a human being in the gas chamber, let's say that you gave that human being four legs instead of two, is it now okay to put them in the gas chamber?

1:46:12No, it's not. Well, what if I gave him pink skin? Well, what if I lowered his intelligence? And there's no point at which you go, okay, now it's okay. And so what I'm saying is, let's do the same thing. Let's give that human being pink skin. Can I now raise them with the intention of intentionally killing them? Yeah. It's this kind of simple mapping between the human and non-human context that I do find problematic. Yeah. Not just because it's easy to say something that can, out of context, sound appalling. Yeah. Because I think that there's such a thing as being part of the human community. And there are forms of valuation and policy choice that go with that and are deeply embedded with that.

1:47:04And there are different forms of evaluation and policy choice that we as the human community properly apply to other beings. Now, there are moral pictures like utilitarianism that would very much kind of smooth over the differences and assert as much continuity as possible between the two cases. I don't think that's compulsory to emphasize the continuities across the two cases. I think it's, I'm not an emotivist, but I am a kind of, Simon Blackburn has a phrase, which I think of as a sort of umbrella term for various views, non-representationalist functionalism about morality. That's a term I would use of myself.

1:47:56I'm a functionalist about valuation, including moral valuation. I don't think we're representing discrete moral facts when we do this, but there are reasoned forms of valuation, and that means there are less reasonable forms of valuation. I'm striving for reasoned and reasonable forms of valuation. and i think at least provisionally at the moment that part of this could include a kind of unwillingness to sort of directly sort of you know easily shift between the human and non-human cases so i resist the i resist the kind of the thought experiment path that you're taking us down i i think also nowadays in terms of the fact that when you put it in those terms like taking a human being and giving him four legs and pink skin and a curly tail, it does make you think, huh, like actually, it is really difficult to draw a line between humans and pigs.

1:48:51But my regular listeners will know that I also love talking about this idea called myriological nihilism, which is the view that there are sort of no proper parts to objects, and objects really are just arrangements of the same physical matter that we just put labels on, to the extent that this isn't just true of ethics and the treatment of animals and human beings. If I took this chair and I removed the arms, is it still a chair? If I give it three legs instead of two, what if it's only got two legs? I'm not following how this relates to the thought experiment. I think that there is a difficulty in just defining the boundaries of any object.

1:49:32I think it's very difficult to define. I mean, the famous example is a cloud, like where a cloud begins and ends and what what counts as part of the cloud or part of another cloud any any object questioned or interrogated in terms of like what is the trait about this object that makes it count as this object and not that object is an impossible task in all areas of philosophy and i think that when you do it with a chair or the cloud people go oh that's really difficult but when you do it with a pig or a human it's it's similarly difficult but it's not uniquely difficult to that case. And yet we still want to talk about individual clouds and chairs as being distinct from tables.

1:50:10So I think we can still meaningfully talk about pigs and humans being meaningfully different, even if we can't precisely point to what the differences are. I resist the meteorological nihilism across the board. But also just more directly, there's a whole network of psychological and other features that makes a human being very different from a pig and um a bunch of those are morally relevant so the superficial leg number skin type stuff i don't think it has much it has much weight if we're not supposing a psychological profile and a kind of cultural and social embedding of a human-like kind yeah well what i mean to say is that another argument i would use particularly in my vegan advocacy back in the day would be to like imagine you're here and a pig's over here and you have this evolutionary tree which connects you to a common ancestor right imagine if you took the line of your ancestry down to that common ancestor and you took every single one of those animals along that tree and you resurrected them and stood them all in the line on one end you've got a human on the other end you've got a pig and you've got this line in between of gradual change right that would probably go to a simpler life form than a less simple life form and at some point you'd have to sort of draw this line as to where this thing becomes relevantly human morally different to this creature like further down the line and it becomes very difficult to draw that line as what i mean say is even if there are important psychological distinctions in principle it's very difficult to define like exactly what it is that we think is morally relevant and exactly what counts as having that thing and not having that thing but the reason i'm bringing it up is i suppose to offer my response on air to this like problem of naming the trait which is that name the trait is not just a unique moral phenomenon for animal treatment it is a fundamental difficulty in all of philosophy to the extent that philosophers can't agree on what a chair is.

1:52:23That would be how I would approach sort of answering that issue. But I just wanted to flag for the listeners that that's the approach that I would take. It would be different to your generalization to the general myriological questions. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs. Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast.

1:53:03Terms and conditions apply. Well, clearly we've identified some areas in which we disagree, at least in our sort of where our basic intuitions point us with me sort of taking panpsychism kind of seriously you thinking it's ridiculous uh so it sounds um our different approach to dealing with like the name the trait argument and stuff like that but an undeniable point of agreement between us is the the amazing reality of the way that different brains are functioning in different animals and the extent to which we need to take seriously even these most sort of unintuitively moral agents like shrimp you know you look at a shrimp and you find it very difficult to empathize with such a creature that it still is until you hang out with them indeed i mean when you said earlier like oh i like hang out with an octopus or something like that it was it's the kind of that might make someone be like, oh, are you just having a laugh?

1:54:10Are you using that phrase in the way that you might talk about hanging out with a shrimp because you're just being funny? Or do you really feel as though you're having fun with these creatures? Do these creatures have fun? Do they play? Does it ever feel like, or do we observe behaviors in animals that just seems like messing around essentially yeah yeah with octopuses i think lots of what they do is is messing around they're exploratory animals they're always looking for new angles on what's around them and they like new objects they they like novelty and yeah they play that when they climb on your gear and things like that which a lot of octopuses like to do i think that's that's a play-like exploratory behavior and they just seem to enjoy it.

1:54:58I wouldn't try that in the shrimp case. I think that the striking experiences I was talking about there, that was probably a kind of exploration that makes a certain kind of sense ecologically, given how the animals live. It's not undirected play-like behavior. Perhaps, I'm not completely sure. But right, I think you can hang out with all sorts of surprising non-human agents yeah well we definitely just don't know what's going on in there right like all the science in the world can hardly give us an insight into what that experience must be like and i think we'll get i think we'll get there i i don't think that's always going to be the case you think yeah yeah well one can hope i think that lines of evidence, pieces of the puzzle can come together in ways that could show us things that we currently find hard to imagine being shown.

1:55:53That would be cool. I would love to know what it's like to be an octopus one day. And perhaps with philosophical investigations like yours and some of the scientific research that we've already been talking about, we might one day get there if all goes well. But anyway, Peter Godfrey-Smith, thanks for coming on. The books are Other Minds, Metazoa and Life on Earth. Living on Earth. Living on Earth, excuse me, a three-part trilogy of books covering everything we've been talking about. I'll make sure they're linked in the description. But yeah, thanks for coming on. It's been fun. Thanks, Alex. I've really enjoyed it.