Jacy (https://twitter.com/jacyanthis & https://jacyanthis.com/) is a social scientist & co-founder of the Sentience Institute (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/). His acclaimed book, The End of Animal Farming  (https://jacyanthis.com/book), analyzes the development & popularisation of food technologies such as plant-based & cultivated meat.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

0:00 Welcome

1:26 Jacy's Intro

Utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, Buddhism, neuroscience, community building, Animal Charity Evaluators, Sentience Institute, The End of Animal Farming, Sociology PhD & moral expansion.

3:22 What's Real?

- Growing up around Baptist & Catholic churches near Houston but in an agnostic family

- Attending church "lockins"

- "I wasn't even told Santa was real growing up"

- Interested in Buddhist views of suffering, but not the supernatural aspects

- Naturalism has a connotation that there is nothing supernatural. "That's an empirical claim about which I remain uncertain"

- Would multiverses, our universe being a simulation or pre-Big Bang history be seen as "supernatural"?

- The varieties of religious identity: metaphysics, ethics, community

9:20 What Matters?

- Moral heuristics & their conflicts

- Adopting utilitarianism at 12 yrs old & looking for a "proof"

- From moral realism to anti-realism (per Brian Tomasik)

- It's up to us to decide which mental phenomenon to put in the "sentience" and "consciousness" categories

- Objectivity, relativism, nihilism & arbitrariness

- Even most religious people would act morally if there was no god

- Rejecting "mind-independent" truth as the next step up from rejecting supernatural truths

- Non-objective morality can still be compelling

- Grounding morality in a concern for the experiences of others

- The priority balance between reducing suffering vs. enhancing flourishing

18:20 Moral Scope & Expansion

- Utilitarianism led to vegetarianism then veganism

- Focusing initially on human issues, working at GiveWell

- Cause prioritisation led back to non-human issues

- Persuading sentiocentrists to be more effective & effective altruists to be sentiocentric

- The bias against helping other species

-  Non-human animal causes can seem sentimental until you engage w/the arguments

- Far future/long-termism

- Effective Altruists have the highest veg*n % of almost any human group

- Ancient roots of sentiocentrism/veganism & naturalism

- "Everything has been said before"

... And much more - see Sentientism.info for full show notes.

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at https://sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall https://sentientism.info/wall/ here: https://sentientism.info/im-a-sentientist.

Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. Main one: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sentientism.

Thanks Graham for the post-prod https://twitter.com/cgbessellieu.