That makes sense. I was thinking Guillaume would have thoughts about the cost, and that you and Guillaume could have thoughts about the benefits. I wonder what would be Arthropoda Foundation’s willingness to pay for a similar guide about research on the sentience of nematodes.
I don’t think it’s worth doing. I don’t think we’d learn anything from the exercise. Skepticism about nematode sentience is driven partially by doubts that they achieve the same behaviors via the same mechanisms. So just establishing sameness of behavior wouldn’t be that helpful. The research agenda for them should focus on how more complex brains achieve the same kinds of things, which might shed light on whether those brains are meaningfully different from simpler ones. Or so I’m inclined to think at this point.
This guide took roughly one month of full-time work (I worked on it for two months intermittently), with weekly feedbacks and discussions. It could maybe be quicker if it was simply adapted for nematodes, as most of what’s presented here is how we study sentience for almost any animal. Take an average hourly rate of $40 and it should be around $5k.
Now, would it be useful to actually pay someone a full month to do it: I don’t know, based on what? Counterfactual value over doing/funding something else? By itself, more research and discussions would always be appreciable. I think it would still be worth doing, but maybe we need someone to work on this on their free time. However, where I agree with Bob is that decapods are really closely related “higher” animals and we have high incentives to consider their abilites as very similar; whereas nematodes’ abilities might be below a certain sentience threshold, notably as they lack a highly centralized nervous system. Current evidence for nematodes is very similar to what I explored in planarians: they show good signs of criteria 1 to 4 and the most basics characteristics of criterion 7 (and as disucssed by Birch, not every type of associative learning would weigh the same); and thus much deeper questions should arise about how and if much simpler brains could experience sentience. That said, preliminary work on sentience criteria for nematodes does not seem out of place for me—but we would probably need to discuss way further than that, also since human impact on nematodes is highly different than on shrimps
Guillaume would know better than me! I don’t know how long he spent on this project.
That makes sense. I was thinking Guillaume would have thoughts about the cost, and that you and Guillaume could have thoughts about the benefits. I wonder what would be Arthropoda Foundation’s willingness to pay for a similar guide about research on the sentience of nematodes.
I don’t think it’s worth doing. I don’t think we’d learn anything from the exercise. Skepticism about nematode sentience is driven partially by doubts that they achieve the same behaviors via the same mechanisms. So just establishing sameness of behavior wouldn’t be that helpful. The research agenda for them should focus on how more complex brains achieve the same kinds of things, which might shed light on whether those brains are meaningfully different from simpler ones. Or so I’m inclined to think at this point.
This guide took roughly one month of full-time work (I worked on it for two months intermittently), with weekly feedbacks and discussions. It could maybe be quicker if it was simply adapted for nematodes, as most of what’s presented here is how we study sentience for almost any animal. Take an average hourly rate of $40 and it should be around $5k.
Now, would it be useful to actually pay someone a full month to do it: I don’t know, based on what? Counterfactual value over doing/funding something else? By itself, more research and discussions would always be appreciable. I think it would still be worth doing, but maybe we need someone to work on this on their free time. However, where I agree with Bob is that decapods are really closely related “higher” animals and we have high incentives to consider their abilites as very similar; whereas nematodes’ abilities might be below a certain sentience threshold, notably as they lack a highly centralized nervous system. Current evidence for nematodes is very similar to what I explored in planarians: they show good signs of criteria 1 to 4 and the most basics characteristics of criterion 7 (and as disucssed by Birch, not every type of associative learning would weigh the same); and thus much deeper questions should arise about how and if much simpler brains could experience sentience. That said, preliminary work on sentience criteria for nematodes does not seem out of place for me—but we would probably need to discuss way further than that, also since human impact on nematodes is highly different than on shrimps
Thank you both for the relevant thoughts. Here is related chat I had with Gemini.