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#5681·Dennis Hackethal revised about 1 month 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
Dozens of videos compiling and explaining evidence of animal insentience: https://libertythroughreason.com/insentience-in-animals-and-sleepwalkers/
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.
In the reasoning you link in support of animal insentience, you argue that similarities between human and animal nervous systems do not tell us whether the same conscious “software” is running. But humans and other mammals are not analogous to two identical computers on which entirely unrelated programs happen to have been installed. The relevant systems have a shared evolutionary history, with substantial continuity in sensory, affective, nociceptive and learning mechanisms.
A change in that inherited system may indeed have produced the qualitative leap to universal creativity. Since universality is necessarily all-or-nothing in the relevant sense, that leap is unsurprising. But it does not follow that every other aspect of mental life (including pain or other phenomenal experience) must have appeared in the same leap, or even require a comparable leap at all.
Neural continuity therefore seems evidentially relevant even if it cannot by itself prove sentience. The observation that universal creativity is uniquely human still leaves open whether older, shared systems already supported phenomenal experience.