All of SammyF's Comments + Replies

(Quick sidenote: "if we categorize all taxa as a likely yes"... it sounds like you're saying "taxa" are the features/rows, but "taxa" refers to groupings of animals. Sorry that the term is a bit unfamiliar.)

Hi Sammy. I’m one of the researchers on Rethink Priorities’ invertebrate sentience team. Thanks for your comment. This is an issue our team has thought a lot about and plans to address explicitly in forthcoming work. I agree that our research would be more digestible if we provided an overall probability of sentience for each taxon. Unfortunately, assigning a “sentience score” is extraordinarily difficult. The 53 features we investigated are not equally important, and the context in which they are displayed often makes a substantial difference to their evidential weight. One would have to have an expert grasp on biology, philosophy, and neuroscience (as well as lots of time on her/his hands) to even justifiably begin such a scoring project. And because subjective experience is, well, subjective, strict calibration in this domain is necessarily impossible. Despite the above difficulties, Rethink Priorities is considering reporting our best guesses about the probability of sentience for our studied taxa. We are still figuring out the best way to present these preliminary estimates. We want the estimates to be viewed as hypotheses to be further refined (or perhaps completely abandoned) as more evidence comes in rather than hard conclusions that our work definitively supports. One concern is that interested parties might skip straight to our (uncalibrated, somewhat unjustified, extremely speculative) numerical estimates without taking the time to understand the nuance and intricacy of the issue. Personally, I worry that assigning sentience scores sacrifices too much in the name of digestibility. Nonetheless, it’s not as if our currently published findings are completely silent on the matter. Clearly, there is better evidence for sentience for cephalopods and arthropods than there is for annelids and nematodes. Stay tuned for our invertebrate welfare cause profile (slated to go up in late July) for more on the implications of our research.

Hello and welcome Sammy! Excited about Future Perfect and looking forward to what Vox does with it. It looks like your comment may have gotten cut off, to the detriment of anyone who wishes to stay informed.