Jonathan Birch is a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and is Principal Investigator on the “Foundations of Animal Sentience” project, a European Union-funded project to develop better methods for studying the feelings of animals and new ways of using the science of animal minds to improve animal welfare policies and laws. In 2021, he led a review for the UK government that shaped the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. In 2022-23, he was part of a working group that investigated the question of sentience in AI.
Do you not think more research like that I quoted by from Andrews (2024) would meaningfully decrease the uncertainty about the welfare of nematodes?
What about doing Welfare Footprint-like analysis (e.g. here), but including both positive and negative experiences, and investigating what kinds of behavioural tradeoffs they make between different (intensities of) experiences to weigh intensities?
check for functions (causal roles) that can be reasonably interpreted as generating appearances of stimuli as good/desirable/worth promoting or bad/undesirable/worth avoiding. These are enough for moral status in my view, but pain and pleasure could be more specific. Or, what does it mean for something to be painful or pleasurable in functionalist terms? Develop that, and check for it in nematodes.
It’s unlikely that any of this will be conclusive, but it can inform reasonable ranges of probabilities.
On the question of what they find painful or pleasurable, check what they tend to avoid and approach, respectively, especially through learned behaviour (and especially more general types of learning) or internal simulation of outcomes of actions, rather than in-built reflexive behaviour and very simple forms of learning like habituation.
EDIT: You can also validate with measures of brain activity and nociception. There are probably features common to (apparently) painful experiences in nematodes, and features common to pleasurable ones in nematodes, which could be identified and then checked for across experiences.
Nematodes are among the 4 “Investigation Priorities” mentioned in section 13.4 of chapter 13 of the book The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch.
Do you not think more research like that I quoted by from Andrews (2024) would meaningfully decrease the uncertainty about the welfare of nematodes?
I really don’t think so. I cannot conceive of research that would clarify whether a nematode life is net positive or negative
What about doing Welfare Footprint-like analysis (e.g. here), but including both positive and negative experiences, and investigating what kinds of behavioural tradeoffs they make between different (intensities of) experiences to weigh intensities?
How are you going to decide whether a nematode experiences pain or pleasure, and if they do what is painful or pleasurable to a nematode?
I’d follow something like these:
https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/invertebrate-sentience-useful-empirical-resource/
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2022.788289/full
check for functions (causal roles) that can be reasonably interpreted as generating appearances of stimuli as good/desirable/worth promoting or bad/undesirable/worth avoiding. These are enough for moral status in my view, but pain and pleasure could be more specific. Or, what does it mean for something to be painful or pleasurable in functionalist terms? Develop that, and check for it in nematodes.
It’s unlikely that any of this will be conclusive, but it can inform reasonable ranges of probabilities.
On the question of what they find painful or pleasurable, check what they tend to avoid and approach, respectively, especially through learned behaviour (and especially more general types of learning) or internal simulation of outcomes of actions, rather than in-built reflexive behaviour and very simple forms of learning like habituation.
EDIT: You can also validate with measures of brain activity and nociception. There are probably features common to (apparently) painful experiences in nematodes, and features common to pleasurable ones in nematodes, which could be identified and then checked for across experiences.