Nice post Max. I found this by backtracking from the recent posts from Rethink Priorities on invertebrate sentence and am glad that this is starting to gain research traction. A few comments:
Research might be less directly persuasive then more direct forms of advocacy (because it is not optimized for that purpose), but I think that there is also less worry about backlash from it.
Research on invertebrate sentiance is controversial in research, and I expect it will be hard to except for vertebrate focused researchers. For instance, Andy Barron’s PNAS article received three rebuttal letters. It has also received a lot of citations, and while I have not looked through them in detail, I suspect it would not be referred to favourably in vertebrate literature (looking at these citations could in itself be an interesting subproject to see how this high profile paper was received in different fields). Academic research can be quite political, and professors often maintain their stance on controversial topics longer than the evidence suggests they should. It’s hard to predict how this will influence public opinion, but as the media often likes to get both sides of a story, any press describing an invertebrate sentience study is likely to note the controversy with an unfavorable quote from a vertebrate researcher. Perhaps a form of research advocacy could involve synthesising the arguments for invertebrate sentience in a non-confrontational and comparative (to vertebrates) way for publication in a vertebrate focused specialist journal.
Many invertebrate biologists who might otherwise have a lot to contribute in the area are not philosophically inclined, and have not thought about the ethical implications of their knowledge, and so become confused about the question of insect sentience.
Agreed, I have a background in robotics and computational-behavioral-invertebrate-sensorimotor-neuroscience (ok, that a bit of smash together of fields) although I am now doing more work in computational physics and 3D imaging. When doing neuroscience studies on invertebrates explaining a behaviour as conscious would be completely unacceptable by publication stage (although invertebrate researchers do tend to anthropomorphize the actions of their study animals while in the lab). Even behaviour that seems quite intelligent (like learning) becomes practically reflexive as soon as you can pin down the underlying neural circuit in an invertebrate. This partly from my group’s approach which which was always mechanistic and focused on a reductionist approach. However, I suspect that research on similar topics in humans doesn’t result in the ‘magic’ of intelligence being lost when, say, learning can be described by a circuit. Since becoming involved with EA I have become more aware of the philosophical discussion around invertebrate neuroscience, but I suspect there are not many others.
Nice post Max. I found this by backtracking from the recent posts from Rethink Priorities on invertebrate sentence and am glad that this is starting to gain research traction. A few comments:
Research on invertebrate sentiance is controversial in research, and I expect it will be hard to except for vertebrate focused researchers. For instance, Andy Barron’s PNAS article received three rebuttal letters. It has also received a lot of citations, and while I have not looked through them in detail, I suspect it would not be referred to favourably in vertebrate literature (looking at these citations could in itself be an interesting subproject to see how this high profile paper was received in different fields). Academic research can be quite political, and professors often maintain their stance on controversial topics longer than the evidence suggests they should. It’s hard to predict how this will influence public opinion, but as the media often likes to get both sides of a story, any press describing an invertebrate sentience study is likely to note the controversy with an unfavorable quote from a vertebrate researcher. Perhaps a form of research advocacy could involve synthesising the arguments for invertebrate sentience in a non-confrontational and comparative (to vertebrates) way for publication in a vertebrate focused specialist journal.
Agreed, I have a background in robotics and computational-behavioral-invertebrate-sensorimotor-neuroscience (ok, that a bit of smash together of fields) although I am now doing more work in computational physics and 3D imaging. When doing neuroscience studies on invertebrates explaining a behaviour as conscious would be completely unacceptable by publication stage (although invertebrate researchers do tend to anthropomorphize the actions of their study animals while in the lab). Even behaviour that seems quite intelligent (like learning) becomes practically reflexive as soon as you can pin down the underlying neural circuit in an invertebrate. This partly from my group’s approach which which was always mechanistic and focused on a reductionist approach. However, I suspect that research on similar topics in humans doesn’t result in the ‘magic’ of intelligence being lost when, say, learning can be described by a circuit. Since becoming involved with EA I have become more aware of the philosophical discussion around invertebrate neuroscience, but I suspect there are not many others.