My apologies @Vasco Grilođ¸ I was lazy there and didnât read the whole article properly. Thanks for pointing out the important areas. Working memory and operant conditioning donât carry any weight with me personally, I struggle to connect those with a meaningfully increased chance of pain experience. For example the portia spider has a very advanced working memory for very specific tasks which makes sense evolutionary, as do many other organisms, but i canât imagine why these specific evolutionary advantages would also lead to sentience?
âFinally, higher order cognitive processes such as episodic memory and self-recognition, can yield insights into animal awareness. These have not been studied in S.P.U.D. subjects, and this would likely be impossibleâ
These higher order processes would be most convincing for me than the memory stuff, especially deeper levels of self recognition which I feel like could maybe be tested?
Perhaps a silly question, but I thought the mirror/âparasite mirror test was related to âself recognitionâ, but you seem to mention that as something different.
My apologies @Vasco Grilođ¸ I was lazy there and didnât read the whole article properly. Thanks for pointing out the important areas.
No worries. I could have highlighted them more too. So thanks for asking. I linked to the relevant section in this comment, but I have now linked to it at the top of the post too. âThe article has a section discussing promising ways of assessing sentience (here is some brief context [my comment just above])â.
Nitpick. I get email notifications of comments on my posts, and replies to my comments even if I am not tagged. I think this is the default setting on the EA Forum. If I am tagged in those cases, I get 2 email notifications, although this does not bother me.
Working memory and operant conditioning donât carry any weight with me personally, I struggle to connect those with a meaningfully increased chance of pain experience.
I would also give them the least weight among the 4 indicators, but I am not confident they should have negligible weight. I think negligible weight makes more sense for classical/ârespondant conditioning, as SPUDs are capable of this.
In addition, I believe some types of working memory and operant conditioning should have more weight than others. Here is some brief context from the post.
More stringently, it could be that not all operant learning requires sentience [it demonstrably does not require consciousness of the rewards and punishments], but that only some sub-types do. Thus, it could be that Ginsburg and Jablonkaâs (37) hypothesis about second-order conditioning [context] is correct: again something not yet known, but amenable to empirical test. If their hypothesis is supported [it may not be], then again there are already some cases demonstrating conditioned responses to secondary reinforcers by fish.
These higher order processes would be most convincing for me than the memory stuff, especially deeper levels of self recognition which I feel like could maybe be tested?
Perhaps a silly question, but I thought the mirror/âparasite mirror test was related to âself recognitionâ, but you seem to mention that as something different.
Both the mirror test and âmirror test with biting parasiteâ test self-recognition, but the latter offers stronger evidence for sentience. I asked Gemini 3.5 Flash to contrast the 2 tests with respect to this given the articleâs description of the âmirror test with biting parasiteâ. The answer is below. I think it is good, except that it is overconfident (as it is often the case with LLMs). Words like âprovesâ and âdemonstratesâ should be replaced with âoffers stronger evidence (relative to the standard mirror test) forâ.
The standard mirror test is widely used to check for self-awareness, but it doesnât tell us if an animal can actually feel things like pleasure or pain.
Mason and Lavery (2022) proposed a modified version to bridge this gap. Here is how the two tasks contrast and why the new one offers stronger evidence for sentience.
The Two Tasks Contrasted
The Standard Mirror Test (Affectively Neutral): An animal is marked with a spot (like a dot of odorless, painless paint) in a place it can only see using a mirror (like its forehead). If the animal looks in the mirror and then grooms, touches, or scrapes its own body where the mark is, it passes. This proves the animal understands that the reflection is âmeâ rather than another animal, showing a baseline of physical and visual self-awareness. However, because the mark doesnât feel like anything, the task is affectively neutralâit doesnât involve emotions or feelings.
The âMirror Test with a Biting Parasiteâ (Affectively Charged): This version introduces feelings. Instead of a neutral dot, the animal is trained to associate different visual marks with physical comfort or discomfort. For example:
The animal is exposed to a black triangle mark that is physically uncomfortable or painful (simulating a biting parasite).
It is also exposed to a white circle mark that causes no discomfort at all.
Finally, the researchers place these marks on the animalâs body without any actual pain or discomfort attached, in a spot the animal can see directly or via a mirror. The test checks if the animal reacts with greater urgency, anxiety, or scraping behaviors toward the ânastyâ black triangle than the âbenignâ white circle, purely based on what it looks like.
Why the Parasite Test Provides Stronger Evidence for Sentience
To understand why the parasite version is stronger, it helps to separate two concepts: awareness and sentience.
Passing the standard mirror test proves awarenessâspecifically, the cognitive ability to map visual reflections to oneâs own physical body. But critics argue that a highly complex, non-sentient robot or AI could theoretically pass this test using pure geometry and visual processing, without experiencing any inner feelings.
The biting parasite test targets phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) and affective statesâthe actual capacity to subjectively feel pain, fear, or distress.
By showing that an animal doesnât just recognize a mark, but specifically anticipates and reacts to the remembered emotional and painful quality of that mark, the test demonstrates that the animal experiences the world through a lens of âgoodâ and âbadâ feelings. It links visual self-recognition directly to an inner emotional state (the desire to avoid pain), providing much sturdier proof that the animal is truly sentient and capable of suffering.
My apologies @Vasco Grilođ¸ I was lazy there and didnât read the whole article properly. Thanks for pointing out the important areas. Working memory and operant conditioning donât carry any weight with me personally, I struggle to connect those with a meaningfully increased chance of pain experience. For example the portia spider has a very advanced working memory for very specific tasks which makes sense evolutionary, as do many other organisms, but i canât imagine why these specific evolutionary advantages would also lead to sentience?
âFinally, higher order cognitive processes such as episodic memory and self-recognition, can yield insights into animal awareness. These have not been studied in S.P.U.D. subjects, and this would likely be impossibleâ
These higher order processes would be most convincing for me than the memory stuff, especially deeper levels of self recognition which I feel like could maybe be tested?
Perhaps a silly question, but I thought the mirror/âparasite mirror test was related to âself recognitionâ, but you seem to mention that as something different.
No worries. I could have highlighted them more too. So thanks for asking. I linked to the relevant section in this comment, but I have now linked to it at the top of the post too. âThe article has a section discussing promising ways of assessing sentience (here is some brief context [my comment just above])â.
Nitpick. I get email notifications of comments on my posts, and replies to my comments even if I am not tagged. I think this is the default setting on the EA Forum. If I am tagged in those cases, I get 2 email notifications, although this does not bother me.
I would also give them the least weight among the 4 indicators, but I am not confident they should have negligible weight. I think negligible weight makes more sense for classical/ârespondant conditioning, as SPUDs are capable of this.
In addition, I believe some types of working memory and operant conditioning should have more weight than others. Here is some brief context from the post.
Both the mirror test and âmirror test with biting parasiteâ test self-recognition, but the latter offers stronger evidence for sentience. I asked Gemini 3.5 Flash to contrast the 2 tests with respect to this given the articleâs description of the âmirror test with biting parasiteâ. The answer is below. I think it is good, except that it is overconfident (as it is often the case with LLMs). Words like âprovesâ and âdemonstratesâ should be replaced with âoffers stronger evidence (relative to the standard mirror test) forâ.