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#3039·Dennis Hackethal, 12 months agoI don’t think animals are sentient.
I realize this view sounds outlandish to most but it’s a considered, researched conclusion.
There’s lots of evidence of insentience in the way animals behave. If they were sentient, they would not behave the way they do: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/evidence-of-animal-insentience
Additional reasoning:
Animal-Sentience FAQI answer the most frequently asked questions, and address the most commonly raised objections, about animal (in)sentience.Konrad Lorenz Hacked AnimalsLorenz showed how easily animals like geese can be hacked – they imprint on the first thing they see, revealing how robotic and uncritical their behavior is.Animal-Sentience Discussion TreeHow I use Twitter discussion trees and Treeverse to track, address, and resolve criticisms on animal (in)sentience, making my position stronger.The ‘Animal-Rights’ Community Is Based on Fear and IntimidationAnimal-rights activists often rely on fear and intimidation over reasoned debate. This post breaks down common tactics used to silence dissent.
You propose in your writings that universal creativity can emerge from lower-level, mindless computation, and that consciousness is among the emergent properties associated with creativity. But why must phenomenal experience emerge only together with universal creativity?
The fact that simple execution-only systems are not conscious does not show that no noncreative computation can have phenomenal properties. For example, pain could in principle have emerged from a different kind of lower-level computation long before that system acquired universal creativity.
So unless there is an explanation for why phenomenal experience cannot emerge from noncreative computation, the inference from “animals are noncreative” to “animals are insentient” does not seem to follow.
The inference would seem more natural in the opposite direction: evidence that animals lacked phenomenal experience might support doubts about more general mental capacities, but the absence of universal creativity does not by itself explain why even pain or color experience should be absent.