This commentary reflects on Jonathan Birch’s framework for defining and scientifically investigating sentience in animals, and considers trace conditioning, affective states, and neural architectures as potential windows into consciousness in insects.
Abstract
What does The Edge of Sentience tell us about insect sentience and consciousness? In this commentary, we reflect on Jonathan Birch’s framework for defining and scientifically investigating sentience in animals. We discuss the methodological challenges of studying subjective experience in evolutionary distant species, and consider trace conditioning, affective states, and neural architectures as potential windows into consciousness in insects. We argue that uncertainty, whether concerning definitions or methodology, should not prevent experimental investigation; rather it should motivate new approaches and experimental designs for exploring the diversity of conscious experience.
I critically examine Jonathan Birch’s account of how brain emulations might create artificial sentience candidates, arguing that his account risks collapsing into a behaviourist account, unless the specific computational processes realised by such emulations are carefully considered. Drawing on examples from computatio...
Abstract All animals exhibit complex behaviours that share features with those that in humans we call ‘emotional expressions’. Sidestepping contentious issues about the conscious experience of emotion, their expression across species provides a wealth of detail about their emergence in evolution, the shared features th...
R. Adolphs· Philosophical transactions o...· 2 citations
This essay explores time as both a scientific constant and a deeply subjective human experience. Drawing on the historical evolution of timekeeping, philosophical contributions from Plato, Aristotle, and Einstein, and the psychological phenomenon of time perception, the piece examines whether time is an objective, meas...
Suhani Gupta· International Journal of Adv...· 0 citations
Contemporary societies possess unprecedented knowledge of ecological crises, yet responses remain profoundly inadequate. This paper argues that the problem lies partly in estrangement from the living world, understood as a failure of adequate participation. Drawing on phenomenology, recognition theory and critical phen...
Lisa J. Hall· Studia Universitatis Babeș-B...· 0 citations
Who or what is conscious? Because subjective experience is directly accessible only in the first person, judgments about consciousness in other entities depend partly on analogy. Historically, such inferences have focused on nonhuman animals, but advances in artificial intelligence have raised the possibility of consci...
Neuroscience has witnessed a curious inversion over the past decades, with a switch from views of the brain as abstracting information from sensory input to a view of the brain as a constructive organ, actively generating explanations for – and sampling – the sensorium. Perhaps this inversion is not strange, but a reve...
K. Friston, Thomas Parr· Frontiers in Psychology· 0 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
