by Jonathan Birch at OUP: Years before I wrote about The Edge of Sentience, I remember looking at a crayfish in an aquarium and wondering: Does it feel like anything to be you? Do you have a subjective point of view on the world, as I do? Can you feel the joy of being alive? Can you suffer? Or are you more like a robot, a computer, a car, whirring with activity but with no feeling behind that activity? I am still not sure. None of us is in a position to be sure. There is no magic trick that will solve the problem of other minds.
Yet if I have no magic trick, and am self-aware enough to realize this, why have I written a book about the topic? Books about sentience or consciousness often promise marvels: you will be uncertain about the nature of sentience at the beginning, but worry not, for by the end a magnificent (if enormously speculative) theory will have answered all your questions. Reading these books, I feel like I’ve fallen for a bait-and-switch. Speculation is cheap and settles nothing: there are speculations on which crayfish are sentient and speculations on which they’re not.
The Edge of Sentience, rather than offering Houdini-like escapes from uncertainty, is all about how to make evidence-based decisions in the face of uncertainty. The trouble is that overconfidence about sentience is everywhere—and it’s dangerous. In researching the book, I encountered some shocking examples. Did you know that, until the 1980s, surgery on newborn babies was routinely performed without anaesthesia? Surgeons doubted newborns could feel pain, and they worried about the risks of using anaesthetics. But they were thinking about risk in a deeply flawed way. When researchers investigated the consequences of this practice, they discovered massive stress responses doing lasting developmental damage to the baby: operating with anaesthesia was far safer. A public outcry, together with the new evidence, changed clinical practice.
The crucial concept we need is proportionality: our precautions should be proportionate to the identified risks.
The case has a pattern of features that I’ve now seen many times: initial overconfidence about the absence of sentience, new evidence shaking that overconfidence, and a crucial role for the public in shattering the groupthink that sometimes grips cadres of experts. I’ve seen the same pattern with patients unresponsive after serious brain injury, often still described problematically as “vegetative”. Clinicians have long used diagnostic categories that starkly imply the absence of any sentience when, in reality, there is evidence that a fraction (and we don’t know the precise fraction) of these patients have residual conscious experiences. Overconfidence has, at times, led to horrific cases of patients presumed unconscious who were then able, later, to report that they had suffered terribly from routine procedures performed without any pain relief. Clinical practice, in the UK at least, has recently started to shift in the right direction.
We need to get serious about erring on the side of caution in all cases where sentience is a realistic possibility: those involving humans and those involving other animals. But it is not enough to just tell people to ‘err on the side of caution’ and leave it there. Almost any action, from outrageously costly precautions to the tiniest gesture, can be described as ‘erring on the side of caution’. We need ways of choosing among possible precautions: a precautionary framework. The crucial concept we need is proportionality: our precautions should be proportionate to the identified risks.
I do not think proportionality reduces to a cost-benefit calculation. It requires us to resolve deep value conflicts: conflicts that obstruct any attempt to quantify benefits and costs in an uncontroversial common currency. What sort of procedures can we use, in a democratic society, to assess proportionality? My proposals give a key role to citizens’ assemblies, which attempt to bring ordinary members of the public into the discussion in an informed way in order to reach recommendations that reflect our shared values.
Because I think these decisions should be made by democratic, inclusive processes—and not by any individual expert or group of experts—I think my own precautionary proposals about specific cases should be read as just that: proposals. They are not supposed to be the final word on any of these issues. I am not auditioning for the role of ‘sentience tsar’. But I have given a lot of thought to what actions are plausibly proportionate to the challenges we currently face, and I am publishing my proposals in the hope of provoking debates I see as urgently needed. If the book succeeds in stimulating discussion, I can dare to hope the discussion may lead to action. And I hope that, among those actions, will be steps to protect invertebrates like crayfish from the pain of being cooked alive—a particularly grotesque display of overconfidence.
More here.
