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

Episode Date: August 10, 2025

Peter Godfrey-Smith is an Australian philosopher of science and writer, who is currently Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. Buy his books here. Timestamps: 0:00 How Many Times Has the Brain Independently Evolved? 4:36 What is a Nervous System? 7:12 The Differences Between the Human and Animal Brains 13:40 What Does an Octopus Brain Look Like? 25:21 What is it Like to be an Octopus? 35:48 Are the Mind and Body Distinct? 42:46 Panpsychism: Is Everything Conscious? 55:53 How Do Experiences Combine Into One Consciousness? 01:05:08 Which Animals Feel Pain? What is it Like? 01:16:51 Should We Make Shrimp Farming an Ethical Priority? 01:29:22 Animal Science and Animal Foods 01:35:59 The Ethics of Killing Animals 01:52:13 Are Octopuses Playful? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How many times did the brain independently evolve? It depends what counts as a brain. Nervous systems themselves probably evolved just once, although it's not completely clear. It may have been twice. There's a huge collection of animals that includes us and insects and octopuses and earthworms and almost everyone

who have a nervous system that comes from a single invention of that thing probably sometime around 600 million years ago or so. Now, it may be that there was a second invention of the nervous system, whose descendants we only see today in comb jellies,

those little light bulb-like jellyfish that have beautiful, colorful filaments that glow, really, along their sides. They look like jellyfish, but they're not ordinary jellyfish. They're quite far from other jellyfish and other animals, it seems, and it's not impossible that they invented the whole thing, the nervous system, separately for themselves, and that there were two origins. Now, that's still a minority view, as I understand it. And let's just proceed

by talking in terms of the invention of the nervous system. Probably about 600 million years ago, probably in a jellyfish-looking creature, radially organized rather than left-right symmetrical like us, certainly marine. And that wasn't a brain. Brains themselves come on the scene later. I mean, as I say, it depends what counts as a brain. Let's talk about a brain as a significant concentration of neurons in a sort of head-like or front region of the animal that has a kind of central centralizing control.

I'm not sure even quite what the right number is for that. It would be several times, maybe three, maybe half a dozen, something like that, again, depending on the boundaries. A moment in this evolutionary story that's particularly important is the moment at which left-right symmetry evolved in some marine worm-like. animals and they probably had some concentration of nerve cells in their front and may have had eye spots and some people provocatively have referred to what was present in in those early left-right symmetrical animals as an executive brain that's quite a dramatic way of describing it and

I think most people wouldn't think of that thing as a brain just a little cluster and that was a pivotal moment because the evolutionary branching that occurred sometime around then from a small left-right symmetrical flatworm-like creature with a nervous system. An evolutionary branching that took place then initiated the long road that led to us and initiated the long road that led to the neurally complex invertebrates and lots of other invertebrates, including the octopus, including honeybees, there was a line, the Deuterostom line, that ends up in us and starfish and a couple of others. And there's a line, the protostome line, that ends up in the familiar invertebrate animals like octopuses and bees and so on. They're all like a cluster. And probably,

I've seen numbers as high as 12 for the evolution of a centralized brain in this, you know, later series of events, I've seen numbers as small as three or four, certainly not once, unless you think of that very, very early case as counting as a brain, which I think is a little bit, in some ways, a little bit artificial. So what I'm trying to emphasize is the idea that nervous systems are a common inheritance across lots of animals. You get lots of ways of concentrating them into a brain-like controlling cluster in us, in honeybees, in octopuses, in some others, in spiders. And I don't think brain itself is a kind of natural, well-demarcated kind, because there are many ways of, many different ways of centralizing some control machinery.

So what is a nervous system? Like, how would we define what that is? That turns out to be an interesting question, because people have a sort of picture. in their mind where there are some cells that make other cells respond electrically. Neurons fire and their firings either excite or inhibit the firings of others. There's a paper that I was a co-author on some years ago with Gaspar Yeckley and Fred Kaiser where we had to actually ask ourselves, you know, what does count as a nervous system? because excitability of cells is seen in lots of cases that aren't usually seen as nervous system-type cells.

And influencing other cells and influencing their electrical properties is also pretty widespread. So we ended up saying this is a little bit stipulative, but let's think of a nervous system as a collection of cells where there's this excitation of one cell by another and where there's a particular, morphology or form where you have projections, specialized projections, where this cell is going to signal to that cell, so it, you know, it sends a physical, it sends a physical branch towards it rather than just a cell being a kind of blob that emits chemicals and those chemicals will affect anyone who hears them. So we think of a nervous system as a collection of cells that have this mutual excitation feature and a particular form, the form of these branching targeted

projections. Okay, and then a brain is something like a highly concentrated version of that in one place that controls centrally an organism's movements. Yes. Something a bit like that. Yeah, yeah. And given that this has evolved numerous times, like the brain, that collection of neurons in different ways, like, what is the kind of, what can we ascertain about like the evolutionary

pressures in that they will have evolved slightly differently in different animals, but they all did essentially the same thing, which is to evolve something akin to a brain. So there's obviously an almost evolutionary inevitability to neurons forming into a brain, but it's not inevitable the way in which it happens. I mean, we end up with our two hemispheres, we end up with our very particular brain structure, octopuses end up with half their brains in their tentacles and behind their eyes and stuff. And so, like, yeah, what is the sort of difference in the way that the brain evolved in some of these other animals, particularly cephalopods, which I think most people are probably primarily interested in? I think it's probably good to approach that

question through a series of historical stages, or almost vignettes. So if we ask which were the very first animals to go from merely having a nervous system toward having active motion, targeted behaviours, and the sorts of things that we might think call on the centralisation that we're talking about here. If we ask who was the first to do that, it was probably some early arthropods, the group that now includes insects and crustaceans, in the early part of the Cambrian period. So if we think about the history of animal life, there's a period called the Ediacaran before the Cambrian where nervous systems probably came to exist for the first time, but it was a low oxygen, low activity regime. There's no, almost no evidence in this pre-Cambrian period

from fossils of one animal predating on others or chasing others or having directed motion toward others. There was a kind of ships that pass in the night vibe, we think, to animal life. Yeah, what do they call it? The Garden of Ediacara. Yeah. Right. Lovely phrase due to Mark Meneman some years ago. The idea of a time before aggression, a time, a time before animal sin in a in a sense, that was the time where nervous systems almost certainly came to exist before the Cambrian. Then around 540 million years ago, that's the beginning of the Cambrian, more oxygen around, probably, and just a co-evolutionary process beginning where some animals begin to make a living by going after others. And these were very likely early astropods, you know,

trilobite type creatures and things like that. Now, once you're doing that, you've got left-right symmetry, you're targeting your behavior, you've got eyes and other senses. So it makes a lot of sense to put some control machinery in that front region, near the eyes, in a position where centralized control can be achieved. And they became probably the first predators. Other animals, including our very early ancestors, became more nearly complex to get away. from those guys. That's quite a plausible story. So if you look at a fossil record of very, very early cordates, animals in our group, they look like little tiny slivers. They don't have the kind of weaponry that early arthropods have with claws and spines and things like that. They look like

they're built to get away. But that itself requires that you have quite a lot of control machinery. You've got to control the whole body. So we could, we could, we could think about this in terms of the early evolution of two kinds of motion, both of which have a kind of information processing demand that they put on the animal, chasing and getting away. So, arthropods sort of calling the shots for a while. Then, interestingly, you have a period where some early cephalopods became large predators in the seas, you know, after the Cambrian, in the some years after that and you might think to yourself all right this looks like this is the beginning of the sort of rain of the octopuses and the squid not sort of really because they were

vanquished in turn by fish by early what once vertebrates became um somewhat bigger and fish evolved the jaw in particular jawed fish they became the um they became ecologically dominant it looks like. So you could think of this as a sort of, there was an era of zeppelins, the early cephalopod predators, and they were vanquished in an era of airplanes, the vertebrates.

Yeah, yeah. And most of the cephalopods of that time sort of vanished without, most of the large ones vanished without much trace, except for a few that made it through. And then you have the evolution of modern cephalopods like octopuses much later. So putting all that together,

If we ask, you know, why do some animals get a centralized control structure that's located in, you know, well located in relation to good senses and so on? Ecological relationships like predation look like a very natural form of explanation. And that has its flip side. There are the early predators and there are the early, you know, the ones who don't want to be prey. then cephalopods evolve, some cephalopods evolve a somewhat similar lifestyle. When octopuses, modern cephalopods evolved really complicated brain structures. It's not clear why that would have been. I mean, why they got quite such big brains?

It's still very unclear. There are certainly some stories you can tell. The modern octopuses that have really large nervous systems tend to inhabit. at these complex reef type environments. They're opportunistic foragers. They're always chasing different kinds of potential food and being chased by a great variety of predators. They've got soft bodies, so they're very vulnerable. They have to be sort of very, very on the ball. What I'm trying to get across is the idea that in different circumstances, different historical periods, different ecological settings, there are certain kinds of demands on targeted

behavior and on controlling behavior with sensing, becoming able to learn and remember. And those are the sorts of things that we think took some animals from merely having a nervous system, which you need for all sorts of things, to having a more brain-like nervous system. And what did, this is something I know a lot of people are interested in, and you've talked about ad nauseum, but what does, say, an octopus brain end up looking like? People are quite familiar with the human brain. How different are we talking here? Very, very different. They're so different. I mean, even just describing the general form of them, it sounds so unlikely. I mean,

quite a bit of it is shaped a bit like a donut with the esophagus going through the middle, the whole of the donut. As in the esophagus goes through the brain. Yeah. So if an octopus gets a sharp, something sharp stuck in its throat that's extremely dangerous because the brain is right there. So you've got that structure, which is a sort of old structure. In an octopus, there's a big cluster of neurons behind each eye, the optic lobes, you know, really big and conspicuous. And there's a thing that's between the eyes, not paired in a way that the human hemispheres are, an unpaired structure called the vertical lobe, which is thought to be the seat of quite a lot of the more advanced cognitive stuff that they do. So, yeah, it's, I mean,

the things that look a bit like hemispheres but aren't other things behind the eyes. There's an unpaired thing that looks like one of the sort of smart controller parts and a whole bunch of stuff that looks like a donut surrounding an esophagus. And then a great deal of the brain matter is also in the tentacles? A great deal of the nervous system. The nervous system. Right, is in the arms themselves. Yeah.

Especially in the upper parts of the arms. So I'm just trying to, you know, you're the octopus, you've got your central brain. Yeah. And there's these networks that come into the upper parts of the arms and that have more than half of the total number of neurons in the animal. Now, it's not usually described. by saying that's where the brain, you know, the brain's there, but that's just where much of the nervous system is. There is a central brain and there's the peripheral

structures as well. And the question of the relationship between the two, you know, for a long while has been intriguing and is very much unresolved. I could, perhaps I could just tell this with a phrase from the literature that part of what sent me down this whole road. there's an old textbook called Cephalopod Behaviour by Roger Handlin and John Messenger, which was the textbook for many years. And there's now a new edition, but I'm talking about the first edition, about over 25 years old now. And they're talking in one of the later chapters about the relationship between the central

brain and the peripheral nervous system structures. And they say, it looks like, it looks like some of the peripheral nervous networks. It looks like they're curiously divorced from the central brain, curiously divorced. And I thought, okay, that's very intriguing. Yeah. How, what is meant by saying there's a curious divorce between the central brain

and the rest of the nervous system? How do we know that? What does it mean? Now, at the time, the main reason, that people said things like that was the physical connections were pretty slender and slim. There wasn't, you know, massive, obvious conduits between the central brain and the peripheral networks, which was intriguing. And there's also for a long while been anecdotes of individual severed arms of an octopus being able to act in sort of somewhat competent ways,

you know, crawling around for a little while. Really? Yeah, yeah, fairly gruesome anecdotes. And that raised the question of whether the octopus bothers to control the details of what the arms are doing much of the time, whether the arms have a kind of partial autonomy. Now, this is sometimes described by saying an octopus has nine brains, and I think that's going too far. there's a central brain and there's a lot of control machinery in a way that's it's not clearly sometimes people say it's a second system like there's like one here and one here it's not quite right sometimes people say there's one here and there's eight that's not quite right it's

sort of somewhere between those there's a there's a partial integration between the systems in the arms themselves and a partial integration between that peripheral hole and the central brain. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, do you struggle to focus? I know I do sometimes, and especially given my line of work, it can be incredibly frustrating when my brain just seemingly isn't able to get on with whatever it's trying to get on with. Luckily, people like me are exactly who today's sponsor, Brain FM, was created to help. Brain FM is an app for professionals seeking productivity boosts. They create science-backed music, which helps you to relax easier, sleep deeper, and focus better.

Opening the app, I've got four options. Focus, relax, sleep, and meditate. I tend to use Brain FM while I'm reading, so I'll tend to choose focus, and then either deep work or learning. Whatever I choose, Brain FM will give me some music specifically designed for the task. And you can customize the music, either by choosing from different musical genres or selecting the different natural sounds that will play alongside the music. and you can even customize the level of neural effect of the music. So you might want to pick low if you're sensitive to sound or easily get headaches, or high if you have attention difficulties like ADHD.

And Brain FM is the only music company supported by the National Science Foundation to improve people's focus. So help unlock your brain's full potential free for 30 days by going to brain.fm. forward slash within reason. That's brain.fm. forward slash within reason for 30 days free. And with that said, back to the show. Yeah, that's fascinating. It does make me think of Spider-Man too being more correct than it might have known in having these sort of arms with a mind of their own. I have not seen Spider-Man. How do they do that with Spider-Man too?

He has this, you know, Dr. Octopus with the metal arms, and he sort of attaches it to himself, but there's this little chip that means that he's still ultimately in control, and then it gets smashed, and they sort of develop this mind of their own and start sort of affecting his behavior. And I imagine like for an octopus, this might mean it sort of opens the door to the idea that you're sort of hanging around and you're an octopus. And then before you even really realized it, your arm has just gone over and like felt something and then you become aware of it. Whereas we would go, I think there's quite likely. I see that thing over there. Let me grab it and see what it's like. Like it would be as if I just suddenly realized that my hand was, you know, fiddling with something over here and going like, oh, right, what's going on what's going on there? I think there's quite a...

We don't know. We don't know. We're speculating here. But of the speculative possibilities, I think that's quite likely. And also, I didn't know this tale about the switch between central control and a loss of central control in the Spider-Man story. Again, being speculative, I think there might be something loosely analogous to that in octopus life. So if you're hanging out with an octopus behaving normally in the sea, maybe it's foraging, maybe it's just sort of messing around, it often looks like the arms are doing just something

like what you said, which is that the arms will wander off and sort of feel around and they might find something interesting. And the central, you know, the octopus as a whole has to kind of, is not controlling this in detail. It's, it has to be, become aware of what this arm has gotten up to. Now, there are, you know, there are eight of these arms, so it would be very hard to sort of control them all at once. And when you watch an octopus, you often have a sense that when things are sort of, you know, low stress, no big deal, the arms are allowed to kind of do a bit of what they, whatever they feel like doing. But then the animal can pull itself together sometimes.

If something problematic appears, it suddenly looks like the animal is quite a lot more integrated. You know, an octopus can move by jet propulsion. It can turn itself into a missile. Yeah. All the arms are stretched out, you know, in quite an sort of exact way. It looks like a missile, and it has to be like that for the jet to be effective. Yeah. There are other behaviors it does that require the whole animal to really act in a unified way.

So a picture where there's a transition between semi-autonomy and much more centralisation, where the chip's been put back in. It's like devolved powers. It's like how, like in the UK where you've got the Westminster government and it says, okay, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, they can all have their own governments. But if it wanted to, Westminster could suddenly say, actually, you know, we're in control. but as long as it's sort of okay for them to do so, it sort of lets them get on with their own business and be their own authority. Yep.

And Octopus's work potentially a little bit like that. Yeah, an analogy I do use in one of the books is, you know, you've got a conductor and an ensemble of some sort. Yeah. But the people in the ensemble are jazz musicians. They're not ordinary classical musicians. So they'll wander off, you know, given half the chance. And a lot of the time you might think, well, that sounds fine.

And every now and then, you're like, no, you know, we're going to do it. Yeah, put it together. Right. So a political analogy, a musical analogy, the sort of mixture of autonomy and non-autonomy or centralization. It's, it's, it's, I want to emphasize again, we don't really know. There's one interesting experiment that bears helpfully on this. Tamar Gutnik and her colleagues working at Hebrew.

University in Jerusalem. If I did a good experiment designed to ask, can an octopus visually control a single arm? Can it send the arm down a somewhat unobvious road with its eyes to get food? Now, what made it especially useful here is for the octopus to do what it needed to do, the arm had to leave the water and come back in. So it couldn't just follow a kind of chemical trail or scent in, you know, the arms have a chemical sensing capacity. So she wanted the arm to have to come out and back in, and the octopuses could learn to direct an arm to a target in that way. But as the paper says in one of those lovely, intriguing moments, when the animal is sort

of doing some of this, it often looks like the, when it's not doing the sort of crucial targeted bit, arm often looks like it's just sort of messing around, you know, in its own perhaps more autonomously controlled way. Yeah. The thing that's really impossible to imagine is what it's like to be an octopus, because our brains are centralized. And I'm also really interested in the extent to which it feels like I am up here in my brain, right? Because to me, there are two competing hypotheses as to why it feels like, if you ask me, where am I located in my body, I'd say I'm in my skull. That could be because that's where my brain is and the brain is the center of my consciousness. Or maybe it's just because my eyes are up here.

And my ears are up here. And so it kind of feels like I'm here for that reason. I think that's, you think that's more likely. Yeah. I've always wondered if you took like a, Anil Seth gave me this idea. You know, you take like a VR headset and you wear it all day long and you put some cameras like on your belt buckle. And you just live life for a week, seeing everything from your belt buckle. Would you start to feel like that's where you were located, you know? Someone must have had a go at this. And Neil didn't say it had been done.

No, no, we were just, yeah, we were just talking about it. It would be cool if someone had. I'm sure that's a great idea for a YouTube video, actually. We should try that out. I think it would be a great idea for quite a substantial research. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's guilty birth of one's zone, as it were. There's something a bit like it with a technology for the blind, where there's a camera that's used to create tactile sensations on your torso, like a screen-like thing.

And I don't know whether people like that have a different sense of where they are. Yeah, I wanted the extent to which, like, death and... people who are deaf and blind, and maybe people who can't smell you'd have to have. I don't know how easy it would be to communicate and to learn, like, this kind of communication, but to get a picture of like where they feel like they exist. Because I think I share your intuition that there would be not much of a reason to place it in the brain if it weren't for the senses, but then if the octopus has this sort of spread out neural experience that's partly in the in the in the in the arms i'm trying to imagine whether it would

be more like having a centralized experience that can can just feel in the arms or some kind of weird sense in which that experience is split between being localized in the arms and in the head or if there are sort of like two experiences that just sort of happen independently but somehow sometimes come together because it's a mystery how that happens in octopuses, right? And when you see like an arm with a bunch of neural activity and a hedge and you think, well, how are they connected but not connected? I think less obviously that problem also just arises in the human brain. You know, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere doing their own thing, but coming together. And so I think thinking hard about how an octopus might experience the world might tell us something interesting

about human consciousness, you know what I mean? But I don't know what you think it would be like to be an octopus, given what we've just spoken about. I think the things you're emphasizing are the things that feel like a real barrier. Yeah. And sometimes when people say, it'd be very weird, you know, we can't imagine what it would be like to be an octopus. To some extent, I want to push back a bit and say, well, no. I mean, what you should, you should imagine being a very visual animal with very good eyes,

probably mostly monochrome, but maybe not entirely monochrome. Everything you touch, you taste. I can sort of imagine that. It's not a crazy supposition. They taste with their arms, do they? Yeah, yeah. Interesting. The whole, all those suckers on the arms have a chemical sensing capacity.

So if an octopus touches you on your skin, I mean, they much prefer skin to gloves and wetsuits and things like that. They find the taste interesting, I think, oftentimes. They don't like soap and deodorant and stuff like that. Huh. Interesting. You know, all this, I think, is imaginable, and it's also imaginable that my body has no fixed shape, and, you know, I, and it's, I think, for me, at least, it's also further imaginable that I'm not completely sure what shape I have at any moment, because there's some autonomy there. But then there's the thing that you were just emphasizing, which is the kind of the seat of experience, the locus of experience, should we imagine that through all these,

this, despite all the different ways of, ways in which it's set up differently, the kind of, the basic seat of experience fact remains similar across us and them. Or should we think that's just a mistake? Yeah, right. And we need a different model with an unseated, you know, a no-locus, almost a no-self version of experience. That's a second option. And a third option is the one that you also mentioned, which is a kind of double, the double located in this. I probably think of this as the least likely. But why do I say that? You know, I don't really.

Yeah, well, that might depend on what your view of mind is, right? I mean, this idea of trying to imagine what it's like to have a delocalized experience is very strange. But I found myself like, like just yesterday I was on a train and I was thinking about this in relation to preparing to speak with you. And I found myself like pinching or like biting my finger. and just really trying to pay attention to what the experience was like. Now, I know that the pain is kind of like in the brain. And yet, when I pinch my finger, I feel it in the finger, right? It feels like that is the location of the experience.

And I'm wondering what that would be like if, you know, I was experiencing something in my finger in the same way, but it was like I was experiencing sight or hearing or indeed taste. And that doesn't actually seem that difficult to imagine. And yet even though I experienced this pain, in my finger and I don't feel it in my brain, but I'm cognizing it with my brain and put it together with the rest of my body. It's all sort of delocalized. It still feels like I'm like one individual person, one individual unit. And so there is this weird mystery even in a human being,

like how do I feel the pain in my finger, but it's still part of me, but I thought I was up here in my, in my skull. And maybe it's just sort of something a little bit like that going on, just to a higher degree and with different kinds of senses, you know? Yes, although the things you're emphasising there, but don't draw on the fact of decentralisation. It's more just the mystery of the ways that experiences are referred to places in the body. And in the octopus case, I mean, this example of a pain in your finger is quite pertinent. I gave a talk at Cambridge last week about experience, especially pain-like experiences,

in a bunch of animals, octopuses and some others. There's a very nice experiment by Robin Crook from San Francisco, which is the best pain experiment on octopuses. It's the best study. What she did was she gave octopuses a small injection of acetic acid, vinegar, basically, in one arm. And the question was, well, one way of asking the question is, was there going to be the same kind of network of adaptively sensible-looking effects coming from that that you would see in a person?

And the answer was very much yes. The octopuses who'd had an acidic acid injection would protect and groom that area. Now, that actually had been known before with an earlier a pinch study where the octopuses were protecting and grooming an area. So they must be referring the experience to the point of injury in the same way that a person does, the same way that you were describing. The octopuses also learnt to avoid the place where they'd had this happened to them, and a normally disfavored environment became more favored after the experience. There was a part of the experiment where a local anesthetic was put on after the injection. And then the octopuses didn't groom.

They didn't mind. And they didn't mind the area where it happened. It's kind of an amazing study. You've got an animal that the common ancestor of us and them is this little tiny flatworm, maybe a centimeter long, 600 million years ago. And the network of effects that the octopus shows when it's had a minor injury is so similar. to what happens in us, protection, avoiding the place, the same anaesthetic chemicals, some of them anyway work on them as work on us.

And this makes, this makes, you know, evolutionary or ecological sense. You've got an animal, you know, the octopuses, as Crook says in the paper, the injection probably mimics a poisonous sting or something. Octopuses are very sensitive to the stings of anemones and jellyfish and things like that. probably a sting-like stimulus, and the octopus appears well aware of where this problem is located. Yeah. It seems relevant to the octopus to groom the site. It actually removes a little area of skin around the sting, which she suggests is designed to get rid of maybe venom that's been, get rid of the stuff, essentially. it's a very human-like network of effects. So the things that you were thinking about in relation to the referring of pain to the injured spot,

even though it's up here. In your case, the octopuses are doing something surprisingly similar. There's a lot to say about the similarity of pain experience in other animals as human beings. and we'll get into that, I think. And I think a lot of that rests upon our views of how animal brains and consciousness work, which is why we sort of need to talk about that first. As far as I understand it, you're a physicalist about consciousness, right? You think that conscious experience is just the same thing as like neural activity, right?

Yes, and that, right, that's the way to say it. It's not a product of it. It is the same thing. Yeah, because it gets a bit complicated, right? Because there are people who think that the mind, let's say the immaterial mind, the experience of redness or the image of a triangle in your head is a completely separate thing to your brain, like mind-body dualism. There are people who think that it's connected to the brain, but it emerges from brain activity, that the brain, like, causes consciousness. And then there are people who think the brain just sort of is consciousness. Yeah. Sensations are brain processes.

I'm sort of stuck in the middle here. I find it really difficult to comprehend the weirdness of something like dualism. I find that really difficult to believe. But I also find it impossible to believe that I talk about this all the time that the experience of redness or the three-sided triangle that I imagine in my head is just the same thing as some neurons firing. You 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 like 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 a 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. That 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, you know, irreducible, undefinable quality of redness. But if we're going to pick problem cases, I think your case with the triangle is, you know, spatially organized forms of experience are probably better because there's such a temptation to say, you know, I know there's nothing in a computer that's like, that's red, it wouldn't help

with 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, 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, or like you can 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'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 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? It'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. And then in the 1970s, some, you know, a second round of work showed, well, no, there are cells. 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's 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, you know, fallacious to suppose such a thing. was needed, the empirical response from recent neuroscience is, well, it's not that far away. I mean, it's not that the, it's not that the map looks physically like a ordinary, you know, human cartographic map with lengths, mapping to lengths and so on.

But it's not, it's not so far away. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Nonetheless, I, right, I agree with you that the sense we have, inexperience of spatial organization, 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. To me, 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 the Cartesian kind or something, are they, where are the triangles there? That's also a good question. 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 things themselves. What 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. You know, 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. So it must be permanent and everywhere. It's a 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 physicalist view so difficult to entertain, and I really don't.

Yeah, right. I don't think this is just ideology instructing imagination here. I, when I think about what a brain is like, what brain activity is like, in the particular way that I do, I mean, 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? I think, no, it's not mysterious at all. And they're special, you know, grains of sand are nothing like this, the kinds, 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, you know, 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, you know, there's no reason to think there's something that's like to be a grain of sand or a rock or, you know, a glass of water. And once the difficulties, 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. There's 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 think most contemporary pan-psychism 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 panpsychism looks like an 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. 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 talked 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 white, pancycism looks like it. Not so much, not that I remember, right?

And I remember what captured me about it, 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. That 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 a mathematical system for describing emotions of the planets. But in the scolium to the Principia Mathematica, He says, as for what gravity actually is, like 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. And which 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. Yeah.

But Philip Goff at least opened my eyes to this idea that. But 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. Well, what's a negative charge?

Oh, it means that it, like, repels other negative. That's been a relational description. That tells you what it does. And so if I ask you, what is it when you're not? 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, look, 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 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? I think there is a better word. 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 let's say that. And I suppose in order to build a positive case of panpsychism, I might say something like there is this selectivity of action. And 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? Selects 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? And 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 if this is 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 golf and other people have, you know. So suppose we take the chair, which is proper wood. You know, what's the chair made of? Well, it's wood. What's wood made of? Well, wood's mostly cellulose and lignan. Those are the two main constituents of wood.

Cellulose is a, it's a sugar, surprisingly. You know, 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 heart. So you've got cellulose and lignin. You know, 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. Then a person might say, well, tell me about cellulose. What's cellulose made of? Well, you got carbon, you got oxygen, you 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. mental level, but it's getting to a level at which these questions concerning the natures of things and dispositions do become difficult. And 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, 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, it's, here's what it's made of and here's how things that are made of that stuff are going to behave when, when they get hot and there's oxygen around. So I do want to, I don't want to concede some of that. Yeah, sure. Here's the nature of science. material that not just the panpsychist

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 because when I look at like when you say well what's this chair made out of you say well the arm of this 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 just has you know 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 this is the view I would take and 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 after and stuff, some stuff about what Wood is, and so I'd, I don't, it's still incomplete, but. Yeah, I don't, I'd imagine that, but complete is asking a hell of a lot. Oh, yeah, exactly, right? And, 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 determinate 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 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, in that case, it's close to incorrect or because it's not as if it was made of metal or plastic. It wouldn't be made out of a little. Yeah, right, right. So it's a sort of the uninformativeness of the answer is a very intense, uninformativeness.

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 chairs, 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 science is. But 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. Yeah.

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? And 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, I can't remember exactly how you word it, but you talk about how when the cells clumped 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. But for me, that was eye-opening because I suddenly realized that, like, this difference between why it is that cells communicating in the ocean, you know, billions of years ago, are individual organisms also. 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 pencychists think that, you know, fundamental atoms are basically conscious,

and that as you start putting them together, you have this mystery of 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. We 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 like 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. I see the analysis.

And 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, 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. Sure. 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 not in principle perplexing. We can say, well, this neuron, you know, suppose it's part of a logic circuit or it does, it's part of what does a certain kind of mathematical processing in relation to other cells

around it. We 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, you know, 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 the, what you might, 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. Now, 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, 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, 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. It'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 pan-psychist, 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 hope that wasn't too much of it. No, I think about that a lot, like 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, that doesn't feel right. The gaps between humans are different from the gaps between cells and a brain. I 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 and probably less i would imagine and and there are some ideas about surprising channels that i don't think should be written off but that there's a lot of there's a lot of individuality that we each have yeah 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 certainly think so too. And as I say, I'm, I really feel a bit like stuck in the middle here in that it's like every door that I tried to open it just has something that's a bit wrong about it, you know, like the physicalist view. I still, I still struggle to wrap my head around the triangle. It's the triangle. Yeah, but then the, and then I, then I, you know, think of a jewelist thing and it's interaction and then I think of, you know, idealism and that doesn't seem right either. And so I love exploring 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. And 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. Book club on Monday. Jim on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine.

And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexsavers.caver's.cai to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. There are people who think that non-human animals either feel pain in a completely different way to us 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 are 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, or certainly for, certainly like for shrimp or more plausibly oysters, for example. I would deny it for oysters. Yeah, I think, I think basically everybody does, right? And so the question is, how do we go about, like, 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 brain structures that we do that produce pain in us. Let alone the octopus with the donut and the... Yeah, but then you think about the final third you talk about this. the fact that octopuses also don't have the same like visual cortex that we do, and yet they can clearly see.

Right. And so obviously these brains are functioning in very different ways, but sometimes producing similar or analogous results. So 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 Crook 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. we 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 effect 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. There'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 sort of simple way. And this is why that case is a bit similar to this octopus case.

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 so you'd be 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 of inspect itself and try to work out what happened there and would poke its head inside the shell apparently to work out you know this shell seemed perfectly

fine why is it suddenly make, well, 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. There's the tending, just 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 they'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 yeah but it's just a little robot that doesn't feel feel any of this stuff so I think and what I'm describing now is the way is what's actually happening and especially in the UK, which is a real centre for this research, the Lwood 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'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 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. It's not enough just to say, this is something that bothers me about some aspects of the debate. If someone does years of glorious experiments very difficult to do, they work out, and you get 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. I 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, yeah. It's not enough. And, I mean, actually, I would, 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. When 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 pleasure-like states in bees and flies is growing and is, you know, there is evidence of that kind. The 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. 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, like all kinds of behaviors, but 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? It's certainly will be disruptive, no question. I think we're heading for disruptive conclusions. Not of the simplest kind. A few years ago, there was a declaration on the probability of sentience in a number of these invertebrate animals, the New York Declaration, 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. that 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, we 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. Yeah. It's not a, 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, perhaps I speak too fast. We might, we might at least think about ways that we could render them less destructive to human life. while taking their interest into account, right? That'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.

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Oh hungry, oh Henry. So, I mean, a lot of people don't think that fish feel pain, and I I understand there's a big debate around that, and it seems like you could look for these networks of reactions. There's a bit of debate, I think that's fading, but there are still people, as you say, who don't think the fish feel pain. But like, 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. I 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 their inevitable treatment as like by catch for all kinds of reasons, but also eating them directly, ordering them at a restaurant. Like the food that you eat, it's 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, you know, 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 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. It'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, 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, right, but now we can, with that on a table, I think talking about cases like shrimp is interesting.

One important, I think the case that shrimp have pain like states is a pretty decent case, I think that they're probably going to be become fairly clear yes cases before long. One of the important things about shrimp is, I mean, there's something that Elwood emphasizes in one of his papers. You know, if you ate beef every day for the rest of your life, 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. Yes. In a meal. Yeah, we farm, I think the shrimp welfare project says 440 billion shrimp a year. Really? Yeah. 440 billion a year. Bear in mind

that I think... And shrimp farming is not very nice. It's awful. Much worse than wildcourt. 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 writes on sub-sack, 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 depressing issue, which is a very, of course, factory farming. And he's like, I'm not so sure about that. He thinks it might be the most important. 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 human to. So it takes about 20 minutes. So these shrimp are often just killed by laying them out on ice and letting them suffocate up 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 $1 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, be 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, and numerous, most sort of impact, biggest impact. And it's done cooperatively, you know, the producers. Yeah, like do it, do it, 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 sort of 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, like, I don't even know how to begin, like, working out where our ethical priority should lie. I say this just because you said, as I would say, like, oh, yeah, we'll talk

about, like, shrimp, that's interesting, but let's not take away from the main issue. But just because of the shared 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, I mean, in the case of pigs and chickens especially, 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, yeah. There's no reason to be as awful to them as we are to some other animals.

It's economic to be a bit less awful. In the shrimp case, when we just think about the 20 minutes at the end, yeah, I, if I was a wild living shrimp and had an unpleasant end, it's very different from being in a factory farm setting. Yeah, and I imagine, again, I'm also speaking from ignorance here and that I don't know what the life of a shrimp is like. I don't know, to what it's sent there, farmed or wildcourt or whatever. They're mostly farm now, and it's mostly in Asia, and 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 about that. 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, save from torture. is suffering for one dollar and in this article which i'll link i'll link below from from pentham's bulldog

he he talks about how uh there's a there's an organization called rethink priorities who try to sort of calculate like the relative proportional amount of pain that shrimp fill 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 i want to i'll link it in the description but just so people know like it you know three percent he starts making a comparison as to like, you know, the equivalent of how much human suffering and whatnot, I, I, in putting this in the description and endorsing it as a thought, I'm not endorsing that line of thinking. Yeah, yeah. But as long as it's, it's a question to ask. As long as it's non-zero, like, we're talking about a great, a great deal of suffering and possibly your highest impact, like, dollar to individual, save 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 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 in line with. Okay. Shrimp, shrimp are the perfect case for me to reply with in this case, because in my own case, I used to, 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 this will, I know this sounds a little

crazy, but hanging out with shrimp while diving. I wrote a blog post about this. about a year ago. If people go to my blog, Metazohan, 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 Banded Shrimp are cleaner, they're 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're cleaners. And they're They live in these kind of, you know, quite delicate, quasi-symbiotic relationships or cooperative relationships with larger animals.

Now, if you hang out with banded shrimp, they're quite curious about people sometimes. They like to touch you. They like to touch you if you have a diving glove off. They don't like that. They're like octopuses. Yeah, yeah. They can feel the skin and they prefer the skin. And 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 the cleaning role. But they're a lot more complicated than I would have thought shrimp would be. They have a kind of a wary, curious engagement with a patient diver. This 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. And it appeared even a few years ago. 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. In 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 octopuses, I just have too much affection for them to be, you know, in the food category

at all. And surprisingly to be, Schumpur and other crustaceans are sort of making their way into that category. And I think one has to be, I think it's fine to have a kind of sentimental response, but one should also think about, you know, 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. There 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, they, 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, I think it's kind of healthy as a human to have sentimental responses to particular animals. I think that's entirely, 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 as 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, and then I'll speak to someone next week who says, that's all, you know, 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 therefore I'm just not going to buy that 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 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 maybe all three

I don't know the main thing I think about is whether the animal had a life worth living Yeah. That's the kind of 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.

So 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. The 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 looked after, and then after a certain amount of time, you were killed for food. So there's, the way it's put by one of the American

pioneers of this kind of farming is, you know, 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. Yeah, I think it's fine. One that you would rather live than not live at all. Right. A test I apply in all these cases is a kind of reincarnation test. Yeah.

Where I think, 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, 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, there's a good case. And the gap, the difference between that and the worst practices, especially around pigs and chickens, is just so enormous. It'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. It's very, it's hard to give animals and experiments a life worth living. Yes. I think it's possible in principle for rodents. Philip Kitcher wrote a good paper about that some years ago. Do you want to use rodents and experiments? fine, but make the overall life of those rodents in the experiments superior to the wild analogue 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. It's not just a kind of gut response. It's a, 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, like vegans often will hear something like that and they'll think 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 it very well. He says, yeah, like, I do think that it is better that those animals lived, even if they had to die, then 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? If 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 criteria in 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. Yeah. I think it's okay in this setting to separate the human and non-human cases, you know, presumptively pretty far apart. And, and then one, my 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 with vegans and the like and there was a flurry to this online a couple of years ago i wrote an article called if not vegan comma then what and a lot of the vegans said well vegan you know yeah yeah is the answer to that something that became a strong impression to me and i 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 in it. And 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. I think death is a part of life. Everyone dies somehow.

And although dying at our hands, you know, 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. Sure. 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? Everyone has an end. Yeah, sure. Is there a better one than this? And, well, it might, you know, you might gone for long. longer, that's certainly true, but as far as the intrinsic properties of the ending are concerned, there are some decent, there are better and worse options. And the idea

that all options have to be thought of as sort of comparable, I resist that. So 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, you know, passes the kinds of tests that I would want to impose. And in the human case, I think things are somewhat different. If someone directly carried us over to sort of, well, 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, I... So the idea of it is a sort of direct extrapolation, I... I definitely agree with you. I'm just trying to figure out why that's the case, right? And 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 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 doing. But there's always going to be a name the trade argument that you can run. Like, what is it 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, but the act of bringing something into existence infers responsibility. So it's, before that animal exists, it would be better for them to exist and then be inevitably killed, then 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, he at least, like, toyed with that idea. I don't want to put like, you know, 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 he 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 it to the human being. being. You know what I mean? It has to be a very, very difficult question to answer. I don't know if you have any kind of thought on that. You know, like, when I was a vegan, I used to run this name-the-trade argument, and I still run it today as a philosophical idea, but I would literally imagine taking a human being in a gas chamber

as we kill picks and saying, okay, like, we're going to like, we're going to 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 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 no it's not well what if I gave him pink skin or what if I lowered as intelligence and there's no point at which 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 and, well, yeah, valuation and policy choice that go with that and are deeply embedded with that, and 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'm not, I don't think that's compulsory to, you know, 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 is a sort of umbrella term for various views. non-representationalist functionalism about morality. That's a term I would use of myself. I'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 this down. 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. But 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 sea thought experiment I think that there is a difficulty

in just defining the boundaries of any object I think it's very difficult to define I mean the famous example is a cloud like where a cloud begins and ends and what counts as part of the cloud or part of another cloud, 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 with a cloud, people go, oh, that's really difficult. But when you do it with a pig or a human, 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. So I think we can still meaningfully talk about pigs and humans being meaningfully different, even if we can't. Well, I think we can. Precisely. Yeah. So I resist the meteorological nihilism across the board. But, you know, 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,

a bunch of those are morally relevant. So the superficial leg number, skin type stuff, I don't think 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. 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. And so what I mean to say is, even if there are important psychological distinctions, in principle, it's very difficult to define 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 the philosophy to the extent that philosophers can't agree on what a chair is that 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 was were taken. It would be different to you. Generalization to the general meriological questions. 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're

thinking it's ridiculous. So it sounds 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 amazing reality of the way that different brains are functioning in different animals and the extent to which we need to take seriously that 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 something that matters. 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 thing that might make someone be like, oh, you just like, are you just like, you know, having a, having a laugh? Are you sort of using that phrase in the way that you might talk about hanging out with a, with a, with a, with a shrimp because you're sort of just being funny? Or do you really feel as though you're like, yeah, yeah, having fun with these, these creatures and do they, do these creatures, like, have

fun? Do they, like, play? Does it ever feel like, or do we observe, like, behaviors and animals, it just seems like messing around, essentially? Yeah, yeah. With octopuses, I think lots of what they do is messing around. They're exploratory animals. They're always looking for new angles on what's around them, and they're like new objects. They're like novelty. And, yeah, they play.

When they climb on your gear and things like that, which a lot of octopuses like to do, I think that's a play-like exploratory behavior, and they just seem to enjoy it. I 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. I think we'll get, I think we'll get there. 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. That would be cool. I would love to know what it's like to be an octopus one day. And perhaps with, you know, 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, 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.