My personal opinion is that it is pretty much impossible to make claims at this point about the sign of many animals’ lives without significantly more research. I think the arguments regarding welfare and life history strategy are compelling prima facie, but that might not be enough evidence for action immediately, and instead indicates it is a high priority area for study (which is why we have so much life history work planned this year). Models like the ones you linked here are interesting and provide some insight, but also have huge assumptions built in that significantly alter the results depending on the author’s views on some critical issue (scoring relative utility of subjective experiences, weighting based on the square root of neurons, and a sentience multiplier), and also don’t account for variations in season, climate etc., that would probably alter those numbers massively as well.
My personal guess is that we are quite a ways off from being able to do this comprehensively (at least a few years) for any particular arthropod population, not including discounts that might be made based on number of neurons or whatever features we think might be important. And we are probably much further out from being able to state with certainty which of those features are important, and how much we should discount on the basis of them (if at all).
Either way, academic buy-in is going to be crucial, which is why we are so focused on academic outreach, and doing research that will help us understand what early academic work we should prioritize.
Thanks for your research! It was interesting to see!
My personal opinion is that it is pretty much impossible to make claims at this point about the sign of many animals’ lives without significantly more research. I think the arguments regarding welfare and life history strategy are compelling prima facie, but that might not be enough evidence for action immediately, and instead indicates it is a high priority area for study (which is why we have so much life history work planned this year). Models like the ones you linked here are interesting and provide some insight, but also have huge assumptions built in that significantly alter the results depending on the author’s views on some critical issue (scoring relative utility of subjective experiences, weighting based on the square root of neurons, and a sentience multiplier), and also don’t account for variations in season, climate etc., that would probably alter those numbers massively as well.
My personal guess is that we are quite a ways off from being able to do this comprehensively (at least a few years) for any particular arthropod population, not including discounts that might be made based on number of neurons or whatever features we think might be important. And we are probably much further out from being able to state with certainty which of those features are important, and how much we should discount on the basis of them (if at all).
Either way, academic buy-in is going to be crucial, which is why we are so focused on academic outreach, and doing research that will help us understand what early academic work we should prioritize.
Thanks for your research! It was interesting to see!
True, I still believe that making a toy model with made-up numbers is still better than not doing it at all.
I totally agree—they also often help identify where more research is needed (like seeing which numbers are the hardest to lock down).