Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.
Keith Frankish is a philosopher and writer, British-born but now living in Crete, Greece. He is an Honorary Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield, UK, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, UK, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete. He is also editor of the Cambridge University Press series Elements in Philosophy of Mind. He spent many years thinking about the nature of belief and reasoning, developing a ‘two-level’ view of the human mind that he set out in his 2004 book, Mind and Supermind. Now he focuses mostly on Philosophy of Mind and says “I now spend much of my time defending the unpalatable but salutary view that phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion.”
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”
Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
00:00 Clips
00:52 Welcome
03:15 Keith’s Intro
– “By the way I don’t think sentience is an illusion”
– “I’m best known as a person who thinks consciousness is an illusion… I don’t think that”
– “I spend most of my time thinking about the human mind”
– “I suppose I have a sort of campaigning streak”
– “The state of consciousness science is unsettled… a revolutionary state”
– “It’s important for science… for philosophy… for knowledge… ethical implications too”
– “Trying to invite people to look at things a different way”
– Moving from UK academia to Greece “I moved more to the edges… I think it freed me… to spend more of time doing I think are important… devote energies to things that perhaps wouldn’t have got so well rewarded in the formal academic structures”
08:23 What’s Real?
– Working class family
– “Religion was present but in a very watered down typically sort of English way… I was baptised… go to church… Sunday School”
– “It was never oppressive”
– Uncle “… a wonderful example of the compassion and… the commitment to social justice that can come with religion”
– Reading an encyclopaedia about the scientific scepticism about the soul “Oh right, there’s no soul then… and that was it!”
– “I had a very strong inclination to trust science… certainly against religious interpretations of the world”
– “…there’s another world in which I would have become a scientist.”
– Health issues “prevented me from completing my schooling so I spent a lot of time educating myself…”
– “You can’t really educate yourself in science but you can educate yourself in philosophy… philosophy can only be taught by self-education.”
– “My path went somewhat away from science but I always felt that they were the people actually uncovering the nature of reality”
– Engineer dad “He was fantastic at explaining how things worked and taking things apart… I loved that.”
– “It wasn’t that science was just cataloguing a lot of facts. It was showing how things worked. Revealing the secrets.”
– Fascination with magic… “The mechanism never lives up to the effect… that’s kind of the wonder of it… how you can get such amazing effects from such simple mechanisms.”
– Darwin’s Evolution by Natural Selection “You can explain it on a postcard… but it explains so much… such wonderful explanatory power… that real magic as Dan Dennett would say.”
– “A lot of modern philosophers were doing stuff that seemed very close to science… continuous with science… particularly in philosophy of mind.”
– Being introspective “probably too much… I spend an awful lot of my life just sitting and thinking… often to no benefit whatsoever… A lot of time in my own head.”
– “Not only thinking about the world but also thinking about the thinking that was happening in my head.”
– Asking as a child “What are these thoughts?… what exactly are they?… where are they?… what causes them?… how are they connected?… how are they my thoughts rather than just thoughts that exist?”
– First degree with the Open University including the “Reason and Experience” course
– Doing an MA at University of Sheffield “Mind and Intentionality” with Peter Carruthers
– Alternative epistemologies: revelation, authority, faith, dogmatism and bad faith or bad quality naturalistic “evidence and reasoning”
– “I don’t like that individualistic starting point [that everything comes to us through the subjective]… I think I’m here in the world… with you… we’re enquiring together”
– Descartes “What could he be sure of… individually?… What if he’d just taken as a starting point that there are lots of other people who are also enquiring… and asked ‘what can we be sure of?’ you get a very different pattern of enquiry.”
– “There’s an implicit Cartesianism in this that all we really know are our own mental states”
– “Our minds put us in touch with the world… in a selective, distorted, interest-relative way but still in touch with the world.”
– “When we get together with other people who are also in touch with the world… and we start collaborating… devising techniques for testing who’s perspective is better… there is a collective subjective enquiry… a community of enquiry”
– “I’m getting more and more pragmatist as I’m getting older… or maybe the pragmatism that was already there is coming out”
– “Of course you’re not going to get foundational stuff… I don’t like essences and foundations…”
– “My overriding desire is not to fool myself, not to be tricked, to be taken in either by other people or by myself”
– “If I had a revelation… I would be more inclined to think it was a delusion or a hallucination than that it was a direct revelation of some deep truth… especially if it was a comforting revelation”
– “I’d rather be miserable than have false comfort”
– “I’d rather know the truth and be prepared to deal with it than… to be deluded”
– “We enquire together but that doesn’t mean that any of us defer to each other”
– “We should certainly be suspicious of gurus”
– Dan Dennett’s use of Wilfred Sellars concepts of the manifest (as it presents itself to us – colours, people, values…) and scientific images of the world (constructed by scientific enquiry and theorising)
– The scientific image: “Which says that a lot of these elements of the manifest image… don’t have the sort of salience that they seem to have… colours, for example… It’s not that there’s nothing there that corresponds to them but they don’t show up in the same way.”
– “Aspects of the mind… as they appear in the manifest image don’t quite appear in the scientific image… say of neuroscience”
– “The trick is to try to bring these two images into some sort of harmony”
– “This image is the product of an evolutionary process… it’s adaptive… a way of carving up the world, of categorising things and reacting to things that make sense for us given the type of creatures we are”
– “The solid object… it’s not just clouds of subatomic particles… that’s how we see it… that’s the image of the world of solid, middle sized objects that we need”
– “This [manifest] image is very much human-relative, species-relative. It’s relative to our needs.”
– “The scientific image tries to abstract away from that human-specific interest… try to get a more impartial, objective picture”
– “We could just say ‘throw that one [the manifest image] out, just trust the science’… I don’t think we can do that. This is the world we inhabit… our world… feelings and love and the richness of sensory experience… we can’t throw that away – that’s where we live!… That’s the human image of the world… the biological image of the world… framed for us by evolutionary processes…”
– “We can’t throw that away. If we did we’d cease to be human.”
– “But at the same time we can’t deny the power of the scientific image… it works, it’s getting at something deep and potent… you can do stuff with science that you can’t do with the manifest image… We can’t bend that [the scientific image] to make it fit [the manifest image]… mental powers or forces… add extra forces into the science… you can’t do that”
– “The trick is to see them as harmonising, not conflicting… different perspectives constructed on the same reality”
– “That may mean making revisions… things like free will… seems to be part of our conception of ourselves… we can act in a way that’s uncaused… from within ourselves… You can’t get that into the scientific image… But that doesn’t mean we have to throw out free will… [instead] rethink it a little bit… self-control and autonomy and the nature of the causes of our actions”
– JW: Is free will more a psychological than a physical phenomenon?
– “Understanding how and why we have this perspective… this perspective [our sense of free will] evolved to do work for us… it doesn’t have wholly spurious stuff in it [like telekinesis or telepathy]”
– Belief-desire psychology “We ascribe beliefs and desires to each other and we explain and predict each other’s behaviour in terms of beliefs and desires” vs. predicting behaviour from analysing brain states
– “Dennett’s great insight… you don’t need to do that… picking out actual discrete states and processes within the brain… it’s enough that it picks out a pattern in your behaviour… in your reaction to the world”
– “To be useful to us it needs to be tracking something real… it’s enough as Dennett points out that it’s tracking patterns… talking about somebody as desiring something is a highly compressed and informative way of talking about how they will be disposed to react to all sorts of different situations”
– “In bringing these images into harmony we may need to reconceptualise aspects of the manifest image”
– “Colours… they’re out there on the surfaces of things… they seem simple… that’s how the manifest image presents them… how we take them”
– “A better question would be ‘how have we evolved this way of interacting visually with the world… for which we use colour talk?’”
– “What is this way of taking the world… colourwise? Why has evolution equipped us with this capability?… Why are we inclined to say the things we’re inclined say about colours”
– “There are features out there, there’s our sensitivity to those features and then there’s responses to those features… what significance say ‘red’ has for us”
– “Then you understand more of the mechanics of the manifest image and therefore in a position to see how it harmonises with the scientific image”
– “Science is really talking about the same processes but with a different vocabulary and a different theoretical framework”
– “People are quite happy to say… ‘colours aren’t really out there’… because there’s a way you can still hang on to the reality of colours… ‘they’re not really out there but they are somewhere so they must be in here [in the mind]’”
– “Once you make that move you’ve taken this element of the manifest image, the colour element, you’ve taken it out of… the world around us and put it into some other place which… it’s not wholly clear what this other place is… the mind, the subjective… already you’ve done some distortion… these colours that are in the mind now… how do we reconcile that with the scientific image… a mind as a functioning brain.”
– “The very reasons for thinking that the colours couldn’t really be out there in the world are equally reasons for thinking that they can’t be in the brain… the brain has no more colour than the rest of the world. So now you really have a problem… a hard problem in fact.”
– “The only way to deal with this… is to say that the scientific image isn’t a complete image of what’s happening… You need to add either some new science or some metaphysical dimension that’s not part of science at all that’s a further dimension of reality”
– “Another way to go is to explore exactly how… our sense of what colours are and their nature… that maybe in some respects it’s misleading… Colours are out there but they’re not what we think they are… then you’ve got to explain why we think they’re something else.”
– “We have this image of ourselves… as self-reflective creatures. Creatures who don’t just inhabit the world but inhabit their own minds.”
– “It’s [the mind] a curious aspect of the world but if you take seriously the idea that we are evolved creatures that are wholly part of the world… we’re not immaterial souls… we don’t inhabit some separate realm from the physical world… we’re not magic…”
– “It’s not the case that as evolution progressed something magical really did happen… an extra dimension of reality came into some existence at some point inside the brains of living creatures”
– “If you balk at that, and I do… then the thing to do is not to… just dismiss all this talk about subjectivity, the privacy of the mind… you can’t do that… we’re talking about very, very important things… the most important things to us… our own subjective life.”
– “But we need to reconceptualise… what it is to have a subjective life in such a way that an evolved biological being could have one. It’s got to be a construction of the brain… just as the brain constructs a manifest image of the world it constructs a manifest image of itself and its own activities.”
– “It’s going to be simplified, distorting… it constructs an image of what it is itself doing, it monitors itself… the trick is then not to throw that manifest image out… the inner manifest image… but to see how we can harmonise it with the scientific one.”
– “That won’t weaken it… it will show that it’s solid and a genuine part of the reality that science itself maps.”
– “Treating it as something distinct from the world mapped by science is dangerous because it’s now putting it at risk of complete falsification by science”
– “If, as science progresses, we find there’s less and less work for this dualistic aspect to do, then the conclusion will be ‘it doesn’t exist’ just as people have done away with the soul”
– “You see scientifically minded people who say ‘so we’ve got to throw out free will’… they might say you’ve got to throw out the notion of consciousness… We don’t… we have to rethink them”
– “People see me sometimes I think as trying to deny the reality of consciousness. I’m not, I’m trying to save it… from an inflated dualistic conception that threatens to remove it.”
– “If you inflate it into something that can’t exist in a physical world then there’s danger… people are going to go… ‘the scientific perspective is so powerful, so robust… that there’s no place in it for this [consciousness]’ and it will go like the soul.”
– “We don’t want consciousness to go.”
– “That means thinking again about what our image of ourselves is doing for us psychologically, not just taking it that this is how things seem to me… that’s how the mind must be, that’s bedrock, it can’t be questioned.”
– “Why does my mind seem to be that way to me?… Did evolution equip me with it?… Is it a product of culture?… That is the interesting question.”
– Keith’s MindChat YouTube and Podcast with panpsychist Philip Goff
– Sentientism episodes that focus on panpsychism: Luke Roelofs, David Pearce, Emerson Green, Christof Koch
– The risk of a universalist approach to panpsychism leaving consciousness as ethically insignificant, because “it’s absolutely everywhere”
– “I think he [Luke Roelofs] would agree that it’s the complex psychological states that are of moral significance… when you get the fundamental stuff organised into complex mechanisms of sensitivity and reaction that you get things that are of morally of interest… as opposed to… consciousness in rocks.”
– The Jacy Reese Anthis Sentientism episode and his suggestion that much philosophy of mind might be a semantic disagreement over terminology rather than substance
– “Panpsychists… phenomenal realists… they trust certain intuitions about our own minds… the manifest self image… in a way that illusionists don’t”
– JW: Is there a link to revelation as an epistemological method? “A sense of overweighting that revelatory experience in the same way as someone who has had a religious experience. Someone who has had a religious experience is more weighting the information in that experience whereas I think a phenomenal realist or panpsychist is maybe… overweighting the existence of the experience itself”
– “Philip [Goff] does indeed use the term of revelation… he thinks that introspection reveals the essence of the phenomenal properties being introspected…”
– “We can recognise gold and water… but we have to defer to science to tell us what gold and water really are… they have a hidden nature that explains their appearance. The idea is that in the case of consciousness… qualia… there isn’t a hidden nature… their full nature is directly revealed…”
– “…Acquaintance.. an epistemically basic relation… not mediated by any detection mechanism… we know them [qualia, consciousness] somehow… I don’t see how you can give a naturalistic explanation of that”
– “Who knows them? Who is we here? It’s not clear that the ‘we’ here can be the biological organism because that would need a detector…”
– “If you’re not careful this is going to lead you into something like a substance dualism where there is an immaterial self that is directly acquainted with the immaterial qualia”
– “Self-knowledge is an achievement… know yourself… that’s hard work… your nature is not just revealed to yourself”
– JW: The panpsychist response “The content of consciousness might be warped or deluded or illusory but the existence of the consciousness itself can’t be an illusion… I might be experiencing things that are illusions but to even experience an illusion implies I must be experiencing… that’s the one thing that can’t be an illusion.”
– “We can recognise when we are having experiences… we can compare them… this is all uncontroversial…”
– “These experiences matter to us… some experiences we don’t like… we strive very hard to get out of those states… others we like being in… we try to seek them out… all of this is absolutely uncontroversial”
– “I’m not suggesting that those things are illusions. I’m suggesting that we… misconceptualise them as states that we know in a very special way, that have a kind of quality that’s very different from any other qualities or properties that science recognises… that pose a hard problem of how they can fit into the world as science describes it.”
– “We use labels like the ‘what it is likeness’, the ‘feel’, the ‘qualia’…”
– “What we’re doing in these cases is misconceptualising a really complex, cognitive psychological, neural process of interaction with the world… which we are aware of through mechanisms of self-monitoring… as a simple, unstructured feel that we are immediately aware of… that’s where the illusion comes in.”
– “I’m not saying hallucination – I’m don’t say they don’t exist. Illusions are when things aren’t the way they seem to us.”
– “By ‘seem’ here I mean that we judge to be a certain way… I want the seeming itself to be understood in psychological terms as a cluster of judgements, beliefs, other reactions to that state [not as a direct, incontrovertible feel]”
– “I’m under an illusion of something being the case if I respond as if that thing were the case… qualia are an illusion because we form the beliefs and we have the other reactions that we would have… if we were directly acquainted with qualia. The illusion consists in the downstream effects.”
– “Multiple drafts of what I want to say are competing with each other to come out… I will sometimes be aware of that process… what do I consciously want to say… I have to wait and see what comes out. Once it comes out I kind of have to stand by it…”
– “I’m kind of making up myself as I go along. I’m making up my opinions, in a sense I’m making up my experience… choosing what to focus on, what to incorporate into a narrative about myself”
– “I see myself as a narrative construction. I am what I present myself to myself as.”
– Why we trust internal reports while being sceptical of external reports “Introspection is going to be as fallible as perception… more so”
01:04:55 What Matters?
– “I have a pretty good sense of what I ought to do or ought not to do, the struggle has been to do it. It’s been practical, it’s not been theoretical.”
– “We have evolved ethical instincts as social creatures. I don’t think the world comes stamped with ethical value.”
– “I think values emerged for creatures. It’s only once you get organisms that things of the world start to matter to other bits of the world.”
– “Before there was any life there was just matter doing its thing and no bit of the world mattered to any other bit of the world.”
– “Asteroids would crash into planets and stars would explode and nothing of this mattered to anything.”
– “It’s only when you get organisms that have a kind of integrity… that are striving to sustain their integrity over time and reproduce… a little bit of the world that carves itself off… with a little membrane around it… has its own dynamics… a boundary…”
– “…and now things outside that boundary start to have meaning for it… they can be threats or opportunities”
– “Things start to matter. That’s the origins of value.”
– “As you get more complex kinds of creatures you get more complex kinds of values”
– Interests of colonies or groups vs. those of individuals. Social vs. individual types of animals
– “Some of these are predators. Then the lives of their prey don’t matter to them very much.” But they matter greatly to the prey animals.
– “Things matter from perspectives.”
– “Social animals like us… where not only do we matter to ourselves but other people matter to us.”
– “We have social instincts. Living an ethical life is simply an elaboration of these instincts in the light of one’s own personality.”
– “We are also highly autonomous and self-reflective. So we don’t just have these instincts we can reflect on those instincts.”
– “We can ask questions about our value to ourselves… we judge others… if people don’t contribute properly… we can apply these to ourselves…”
– “We can decide whether we think we are good members of the community… good in ourselves… we can internalise these social relations… start to tell ourselves stories about ourselves… guilt”
– “Then of course we can start to do philosophy and try to systematise all this mess… elucidate some core principles… I’m sceptical of that because I don’t think it’s that kind of a subject”
– “The idea that there should be an answer to moral conundrums… no, sometimes things just conflict and there’s no right way out”
– “I suppose I’m a virtue ethicist in so far as I’m anything”
01:15:10 Who Matters?
– “If someone said ‘why should I invest more time in my daughter’s education?’… I think saying ‘because she’s my daughter’ is a perfectly good reason.”
– “Saying ‘why should we not harm this creature?… because it feels, because it’s sentient’ I think is a perfectly good reason.”
– “Our ethical instincts can give us reasons for all sorts of things. At some point you’re going to come back to ‘well that is just what I care about’”
– JW: “It might just be a choice”
– “That’s important… the extent to which moral life does involve an element of choice… or commitment”
– “You can’t provide me with some sort of deductive argument from unquestionable premises to the conclusion that I should care about the welfare of this or that creature… but I’m going to make a commitment to that… it matters to me… that’s where I stand… that’s the kind of person I am.”
– JW: “And you might have got there through intuition or a sense of felt compassion or intellectual exploration or philosophical work…”
– “We may not know… we’re often quite blind to our own motives… things that prompt us to take certain decisions and actions”
– “This is a marker I’m going to steer by… am I happy with it?… Is this making me feel like I’m living the life I want to live?”
– “There are moral facts relative to organisms… but there aren’t moral facts written into the code of the universe… and qualia don’t provide that.”
– What illusionism contributes to the moral scope debate: “It doesn’t give you an answer but it tells you what kind of information is relevant to the answer and how you find that information”
– “Specifically it denies that the answers to this lie in some inscrutable, essentially private world, that what it’s like to be another animal is something we can never know.”
– “No, it says that we can know all the relevant facts about this animal’s existence… objectively determinable… the way that the animals engage in the world… it’s sensitivities… reactions… whether its flourishing.”
– “Is what’s happening to it… putting it in a highly aversive state… triggering all kinds of negative reactions… impeding its flourishing… stopping it living the kind of life that it wants to live? Or is it something that’s doing the opposite… These questions are perfectly objective… that we can study.”
– “It’s all there if we just go and look”
– “There are certain kinds of suffering that they… non-human animals… are not liable to… worry about their finances… the long-term consequences of disability…”
– A vet’s tale about a seriously injured cat still purring when stroked: “Sure, it had been in pain, but it wasn’t distressed by this accident in a way that a human would have been… it couldn’t think ‘Oh my God I’m not going to be able to walk any more’”
– “We have lots of sources of relief from suffering that animals don’t have.” Imagining a chimpanzee at the dentist.
– Dennet’s example: “If you could take all the pain that you’re going to suffer over the next year and condense it down into 5 minutes of extreme pain just right now… would you take that… yes everybody would… the mere pain itself isn’t [the only consideration]… Spreading it out would have disrupted your activities and your life…”
– “It’s all wrapped up in a much richer context… a multi-dimensional thing”
– “Certainly there is raw distress [in non-human animals] and this is absolutely evident. I can tell when my dog is in pain to a moral certainty… That matters to me. Because I can see plainly that it’s in a state it doesn’t want to be in…. a state of distress objectively.”
– “We can measure… you can say ‘there’s this ineffable horrible quality’ but there are other things that happen… you can’t focus your attention… you desperately want it to stop… have nausea… find it difficult to move, to talk… all sorts of perfectly observable, detectable signs of distress.”
– “When we talk about ‘the pain’ it’s simply a catch-all term to recognising all of those effects within you”
– Sentientism conversations with Walter Veit and Mark Solms about the potential evolutionary origins of sentience
– JW: The gap between moral theory and practical choices. The logical link from Sentientism to veganism “How I see the ethics of animal agriculture… lead me to want to boycott that”
– “All the relevant facts to the moral decision-making are available… there’s nothing deeply hidden… it may not be easy to find out what it’s like to be a bat… you need to… study bats… talk to people who’ve spent their lives studying bats”
– JW: Could we in principle run a bat emulator in our own minds?
– “Even if we couldn’t the thought experiment still wouldn’t prove what it’s meant to prove. But actually we can. You can train yourself to do echolocation… it’s not that hard… There are ways of getting yourself into animals’ perceptual worlds.”
– “My point is that third person study, scientific study will get you all the information you need just as well. The emulation is just a sort of short-cut.”
– “There are going to be no bright lines here. There is a sort of bright line I think with humans… these self-reflective capacities… full-blown consciousness including self-consciousness… a much richer phenomenon both in positive and negative directions.”
– “There’s no bright line so we’ve got to go right down, to not just through the animals but we’ve got to go into plants… microorganisms… a little world of it’s own that has a boundary… things in that outer world matter to it… It senses the grain of salt and withdraws because it’s toxic to it.”
– “That… is not a totally different kind of… there’s not some bright line between that and what you get in mammals…”
– “I would see sources of value in the inanimate world too… a wonderful rock formation… is a reason for not destroying it.”
– “If the last person on earth… decided to go and smash up all of the stalactites he’d be a bit of a bastard”
– “Sentience is going to run off into areas where it would be completely impractical to have much concern… for harmful bacteria and viruses”
– “It’s an organism that has interests… seeking to sustain itself… is a reason for saying, other things being equal, just leave it alone and let it get on with it.”
– “If it’s producing a horrible disease in me… let’s take the antibiotic… but if it’s just floating around there minding it’s own business… leave it alone.”
– “The fact that the thing has interests… is a prima facie reason for not hurting it”
– “It does mean the interests of non-human animals can be overridden by other things that we value.” JW: “As in intra-human ethics”
– “I do eat meat… I live in a country where meat eating is absolutely central to the culture… I don’t eat a lot of it and I don’t particularly like myself for eating it.”
– “I certainly do not like factory farming at all… we treat animals atrociously… I should be doing more… I do feel wrong about that… I don’t think I’m making the right trade-off.”
– “I’m quite happy and pleased to see people… pushing on that because I think it’s right and good…”
– “Those of us who are too complacent… too lazy to steer by the correct marker that they want to steer by… should be prompted and pushed and made to feel uncomfortable.”
– “I feel much less uncomfortable about very small scale farming… my aunt and uncle were very small scale farmers… they had a pig and they looked after the pig well… it lived in luxury… but there did come a point where it was killed… a person who came round… swiftly, quickly and every bit of it was consumed… nothing was wasted.”
– “The pig was loved”
– “Factory farming… it’s awful for the creatures… a structure where people are so distanced from what’s happening”
– “There they lived with the pig and they knew the pig, they fed the pig, they patted the pig, the pig had babies, they looked after the babies, they showed the babies to the grandchildren. It was part of a family. And yes there’s a nasty end but they lived that and faced that and saw that.”
– “They made that trade-off in full knowledge of what they were doing. We don’t.”
– JW: “Ethically… I can almost struggle more with the family situation than with the factory farm. Because in the factory farm it’s impersonal, they’re objects, we just turn the handle… artificial insemination… family separation… mutilation… slaughter… the object comes out the other end. To actually carry out… those same sorts of processes to a being that you treat as a family member and love… and you do that directly… The lifetime experience of that animal is less bad… but from a human ethical standpoint it feels more like a betrayal.”
– JW: “In a human instance… You wouldn’t say ‘we cared, we loved, they’re part of a family, and then…’ There’s a stronger betrayal when a relationship has been built up and where there is genuine love and compassion – than when you treat someone as an object from start to finish.”
– “To some extent the love and whatever were projections of human relationships… I don’t think the pig reciprocated and understood… it was just being treated nicely… I don’t think it felt that it was part of a family… that it knew what a family is”
– “Dogs have evolved to do that… be part of human families… that line of thinking wouldn’t work with a dog precisely because they do understand these notions of loyalty”
– “Here in Greece that sort of relation with animals is much more common… a village style of life where they would have animals close to them”
– “If you go to the butchers they’ll have pictures of the animals in a natural setting all smiling and looking happy because they’re trying to reassure you that this is the familiar [village style] relation”
– JW: “One obvious focus… the negatives and the horror and the experiences of the animals going through those processes… Equally important… imagine what genuine, positive, long, flourishing family lives are like for these beings… spend some time in a really good quality sanctuary… the richness of relationships even cross species… the joy, the play…”
– “Care as much as you can… in certain societies it would be very hard to be a vegan… cultures, societies and situations where it’s not easy to give that amount of care to animals”
– “As our material conditions improve it’s appropriate to extend our concerns as far as we can”
– “You couldn’t have been a vegan, I guess, in palaeolithic times but now you can and there’s a reason for doing it… not causing unnecessary suffering… so try!”
– “I’d be more inclined to tell people to do better than to insist, in a dogmatic way, that it’s a black and white issue”
– “It’s a collective thing. It’s very important that there are people stating the case as forcefully as possible. We make progress collectively not individually.”
– JW: “The vast majority of humans… if we’d grown up in a vegan world where we just used plant-based agriculture… there was no such thing as animal agriculture… it would be a very rare person who would say ‘…I’m going to go out and kill some animals’ or a startup would say ‘we’re going to start this new process’. You’d think they were crazy. Those social defaults and the systemic inertia is the dark heart of the problem.”
– “Make it easy for people to live good lives. We tend to do the opposite I’m afraid.”
01:47:26 A Better Future?
– “I think we should stop making this worse… that would be a good start… keep the gains we’ve made”
– “I’m not a utopian. I distrust revolutionary sentiments… throw everything up the air… it’s very hard to reconstruct things afterwards… there tends to be a battle over who gets to do the restructuring. It often leads to authoritarian…”
– “I’m much more of a gradualist”
– “The difficulty is when you have systems… like the agricultural systems we have, that are fundamentally structured in the wrong way… we’re dealing with a system that is continually evolving… at a rapidly accelerating pace under pressures we don’t even understand properly”
– JW: “And everyone in the system can point at everyone else… and round it goes”
– “How do you bring about systemic change in a positive direction… technology is evolving… how do we start to organise ourselves to build a better world when we don’t know what we’re going to be dealing with by the time we put the plan into action”
– “There’s a huge amount of inertia in the system… you can’t just smash it up though”
– “The more we know, the more we understand about the natural world and the social world… the economic systems… the better we’ll be able to live with them and push them hopefully in better directions”
– “Knowledge and education is absolutely essential.”
– “We can understand minds a lot better than some people [who insist this can only be a question of metaphysics] think. If we can do that that’s going to put us in a better position to understand the lives of our fellow creatures… each other… indeed our own lives.”
– “I say to my children… I can’t tell you what things are going to be like… what skills you’re going to need… but I’m sure you’re going to need the flexibility to learn and adapt to new conditions”
– “I worry that the direction of our current technology in AI is impeding this educational process.”
– “Rather as the factory farming is distancing us from the reality of the animal suffering, so AI… is putting us at a distance from the reality of the actual world we’re living in. We’re living in this virtual world – it’s impeding our access to the natural and the technological reality behind it.”
– “We’ve just got to have faith in ourselves and our capacities to understand things and respond sensibly”
– JW: “Epistemic uncertainty… ethical uncertainty… leads me to retreat back to the topics we’ve been talking about today. I don’t know really know the answers but if we have a well-grounded epistemology and we have a generous, universal ethical scope that’s got to be two solid foundations that should be pretty robust.”
– Keith’s partner Maria Kasmirli’s work with P4C (Philosophy for Children)
– “Children have a thirst for this… particularly pre-adolescent children before the hormones kick in… bravery and clarity… willingness and openness… they don’t yet realise the rules of what things are acceptable to think and what things are orthodox… they cut straight to the chase… see things with a clarity that we lose… we get enmeshed in a social world that obscures things… children see things much more clearly in many ways than we do”
– “We need to feed that appetite in children… help them form attitudes then of openness, of love of inquiry… and moral passion too… that can then inform the rest of their lives”
– “An adaptability, an flexibility and an openness of thinking… what Dennett called JOOSing… the ability to Jump Out Of the System”
– “Public engagement is incredibly important… do it with seriousness… we can’t just let this play out as it well. We need to get actively involved, all of us.”
– “There’s a lot of money to be made out of cultivating unseriousness”
– “It’s an exciting time”
01:58:12 Follow Keith:
– Keith on BlueSky (“I do not post on Twitter any more”)
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop.