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#5681·Dennis Hackethal revised 29 days 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.
The evidential standard seems asymmetric.
You have said that there ultimately cannot be a purely behavioral criterion for consciousness, because what matters is an explanation of the underlying program (#5693). But at the same time, apparently rigid or “blatantly robotic” behavior is allowed to count as evidence against consciousness.
In the other direction, apparently flexible, sophisticated or sentient-like animal behavior does not seem able to count correspondingly in favor of consciousness, because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
If behavior alone cannot establish sentience because we need to understand the underlying processing, I don’t see why apparently robotic behavior should by itself count more readily toward insentience. Unless there is already an independent reason to think phenomenal experience requires universal creativity, the evidential standard seems to favor insentience in advance.