Find our conversation on the Sentientism YouTube and Podcast.
Jacy (@jacyanthis and jacyanthis.com) is a social scientist & co-founder of the Sentience Institute. His acclaimed book, The End of Animal Farming, analyses the development & popularisation of food technologies such as plant-based & cultivated meat.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” As well as the video above the audio of our conversation is also on our Podcast here on Apple and on the other platforms too.
We discuss:
0:00 Welcome
1:26 Jacy’s Intro
Utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, Buddhism, neuroscience, community building, Animal Charity Evaluators, Sentience Institute, The End of Animal Farming, Sociology PhD & moral expansion.
3:22 What’s Real?
- Growing up around Baptist & Catholic churches near Houston but in an agnostic family
- Attending church “lockins”
- “I wasn’t even told Santa was real growing up”
- Interested in Buddhist views of suffering, but not the supernatural aspects. “Why Buddhism is True” by Robert Wright
- Naturalism has a connotation that there is nothing supernatural. “That’s an empirical claim about which I remain uncertain”
- Would multiverses, our universe being a simulation or pre-Big Bang history be seen as “supernatural”?
- The varieties of religious identity: metaphysics, ethics, community
9:20 What Matters?
- Moral heuristics and their conflicts
- Adopting utilitarianism at 12 yrs old & looking for a “proof”
- From moral realism to anti-realism (per Brian Tomasik)
- It’s up to us to decide which mental phenomenon to put in the “sentience” and “consciousness” categories
- Objectivity, relativism, nihilism & arbitrariness
- Even most religious people would act morally if there was no god
- Rejecting “mind-independent” truth as the next step up from rejecting supernatural truths
- Non-objective morality can still be compelling
- Grounding morality in a concern for the experiences of others
- The priority balance between reducing suffering vs. enhancing flourishing
18:20 Moral Scope & Expansion
- Utilitarianism led to vegetarianism then veganism
- Focusing initially on human issues, working at GiveWell
- Cause prioritisation led back to non-human issues
- Persuading sentiocentrists to be more effective & effective altruists to be sentiocentric
- The bias against helping other species
- Non-human animal causes can seem sentimental until you engage w/the arguments
- Far future/long-termism
- Effective Altruists have the highest veg*n % of almost any human group
- Ancient roots of sentiocentrism/veganism & naturalism
- “Everything has been said before”
- Philosophical pluralism in Sentientism
- Eze Paez & Jacy’s Futures paper re: moral circle expansion (attitudinal and behavioural)
- Moderate & radical flanks of social movements. Shifting the overton window. Corey Lee Wrenn
30:11 Sentientism, Sentiocentrism and Sentience
- Is Sentientism the only moral discrimination?
- Why is naturalism important? Abraham & Isaac
- Sentientism as the naturalistic version of sentiocentrism?
- Valuable intersections with other movements, including religions
- Sentience: goal orientation, mood-like states, complexity, integration?
- Biocentrism, ecocentrism
- Trade-offs & synergies between different perspectives. Working with others without having to agree on everything!
- “Moral circles are not circles”
- Wild animals, invertebrate sentients, artificial sentients
- Defining sentience using examples. Valence, arousal?
- Panpsychism, substance dualism or sentience as a class of info processing?
- Is panpsychism the new “elan vital”?
- “There’s nothing magical about our conscious experience but that’s a really cool thing!”
48:17 The Future
- Locking in the valuing of sentience?
- Singleton AI or governance
- Could we programme a super-intelligent AI to be sentientist?
- Hedonium, the most efficient use of space/energy/matter for pleasure. Dog park simulations?
- David Pearce’s gradients of hedonic bliss
- “I’m not going to pick & choose too much once we’ve eliminated extreme suffering”
- “Most people aren’t very morally driven” but “I’ve become more optimistic about technology” & legislation/institutional change
- Cautionary lessons from GMOs & nuclear
- “We need anger & outrage” as impetus
- Code switching for effective messaging “we can lead this important change!”
- SI’s Foundational Questions
- “Animal farming will end globally by the end of this century”
- To 2025: Building a foundation (e.g. plant/cultivated alternatives). 2025-: Virtuous cycles. 2050-: Mass scale. 2075-: Wrapping up
- Suspicious convergence / veganism as a solution to all problems?
- Supporting humans (e.g. farmers) transitioning. Acknowledging trade-offs. Just Transition
- Imagining transitions & futures. The role of the arts & narrative & design
- The Cellular Agriculture Society’s vision of a more compassionate future
- Existential Hope
- “Is Shame Necessary” by Jennifer Jacquet
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join Jacy on our “I’m a Sentientist” wall using this simple form.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on Facebook.
Thanks Graham for the post-production.