Sentientism

This episode is a cross-post from the Give Yourself The Chat podcast where I (Jamie) was interviewed about Sentientism.

Peter Lewis is a coach, consultant and, as we found out in this conversation, a fellow Sentientist. Peter's podcast focuses on personal development and practical philosophy. If that sounds interesting - why not subscribe to the podcast and sign up for his mailing list at https://peterlewiscoaching.com/?

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” You can find out more at Sentientism.info. Why not join our “wall” using our simple “I’m a Sentientist” form?

Everyone interested, Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our community groups. Our main group is here on FaceBook. We have a fascinating range of compassionate, rational people there from around 90 countries so far!

Full show notes & links here.

Roman is a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Louisville. He is known for his work on behavioral biometrics, the security of cyberworlds & artificial intelligence safety. He founded the field of intellectology – the analysis of the forms & limits of intelligence. He is director of the Cyber Security Laboratory in the department of Computer Engineering &Computer Science at the Speed School of Engineering. Roman has written over 100 publications, including many books spanning these fields.

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

To catch the cameo from Luna the puppy ("seems conscious") watch the video of our conversation here. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel while you're there.

We discuss:

Vicky is Managing Director of The Humane League UK . She trained as a vet and worked in the animal agriculture industry before leaving to focus on campaigning for non-human animals.

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

Full show notes and links here.

This conversation is also available here on our Sentientism YouTube Channel. Why not subscribe there too?

We discuss:

- Feeling an early affinity with animals, volunteering at animal sanctuaries at 10 years old, always wanting to be a vet

- Training as a vet, seeing the reality of animal farming & feeling helpless. How vets are caught up in the machinery of the industry

- How broken animal agriculture is & how much suffering is caused

- Leaving to advocate for animals, with CIFW then Humane League UK

- Driving institutional change. Working with companies to reduce the animal suffering they cause at scale

- The relief of meeting others that take sentience & suffering seriously

- Questioning then leaving Christianity as a teenager & the death of a close family member as a turning point

- Finding comfort in naturalism. “We have our time & then it passes”

- Naturalistic wonder, awe, meaning & a sense of connection, enhanced through a silent meditation retreat (vs. “spirituality”)

- Suffering/flourishing of others as the foundation of morality

- Meditation as a practice of focusing on our own sentient experience and feeling gratitude

- Relativism & supernatural ethics are arbitrary vs. grounding ethics in a naturalistic understanding of sentience

- Going vegetarian (despite challenges from parents re: nutrition)

- The shock of watching an artificial insemination unit operate

- Fighting cognitive dissonance on the way to going vegan + how much it helps to have others around you to help ease the transition

- Visiting Ghana as an eye opener re: global development & the history of colonialism

- Considering the ethical impacts of our personal consumption

- Cognitive dissonance as a way of protecting ourselves given the scale of suffering. Avoiding burn-out

- The Diving Bell & the Butterfly

- Taking the perspective of others, rather than just imposing your own assumptions

- Wild-animal suffering & flourishing. Nature programmes as “snuff movies”

- Categorising an animal as “farmed” or “wild” doesn’t reduce the animals’ experience of its own suffering

- Red vs. grey squirrels

- Not knowing how to help doesn’t warrant excluding beings from our moral circle

- Culling as the default for human intervention in the wild

- Ending animal farming as an obvious win-win-win

- Important problems are often the easiest (e.g. end animal farming)

- Animal farming change is happening fast now (e.g. ending cages) & consumer consciousness is shifting

- Veganism getting less “weird”, approaching a tipping point?

- Concern for species is mostly about human interests

- Economic & social drivers slowing change

- “Lesser developed countries” leap-frogging past the mistakes made by “more developed countries” on both climate & animal agriculture, because of more compassionate values and more radical innovation

- While you’re participating in something, it’s hard to think clearly about its ethics

- Freeing our latent morality!

- A more socialist future?

Visit Sentientism.info (click here) for full show notes!

Subscribe to the Sentientism YouTube channel to watch the video of our conversation.

Floris’s bio states he is “a philosopher and therefore an atheist”. He is a practical, activist, vegan philosopher. He has written a number of books including “Philosophy for a Better World”, “On Green Liberty”, “De vrolijke veganist” (“The Happy Vegan”) and “Hoe komen we van religie af?” (“How to get rid of religion. An inconvenient liberal paradox”). In 2017, Floris participated in a television series “To Hell With Your Religion”, in which he lived with a group of people of various religions for two weeks, exploring and critiquing religious ideas.

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

You can find Floris’s books on Amazon & here.

After our conversation, Floris kindly shared a series of posters he has developed that relate to Sentientist themes. These posters, hosted here, remain Floris’ intellectual property but he is happy with them being freely used for educational purposes.

Floris is on our “Sentientist wall” – why not join him there in helping to normalise compassionate, rational thinking? Just fill out this simple form.

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings.” You can find out more at Sentientism.info.

Everyone interested, Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our community groups. Our main group is here on FaceBook.

Many thanks to Graham for his work on this video. Follow him at @cgbessellieu.

- The imperative to reduce suffering, human & non-human, present & future

- Growing up in a liberal Catholic environment

- Hiding from Jesus 🙂

- Never believing, then finding out that’s called “atheism”

- Finding the label “Humanism”, adding values

- Studying Zen Buddhism in a Japanese monastery

- Hell isn’t compassionate

- Religious compassion often conditional & restricted & subject to higher priorities (the collective, a god, the church…)

- Individuals can experience, collectives can’t

- Not objectivist, not relativist, but a universalist (e.g. slavery is wrong & it was always wrong & it will always be wrong)

- A universal focus on individual victims

- Peter Singer

- Vegetarianism & veganism

And more here!

Naomi is the CEO of Best for Britain, the UK’s leading non-partisan advocacy group upholding internationalist values. Before her campaigning and political career she worked in the corporate world and chaired a number of voluntary groups. She describes herself as an internationalist, xenophile, humanist, vegan. She co-hosts the Oh God What Now? (formerly Remainiacs) and The Bunker podcasts.

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

The video of this conversation is also on our YouTube channel - subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations.

We discuss how Naomi’s personal philosophy has evolved, including her experience of religious sectarianism in Northern Ireland, being excluded from a religious education class and feeling a deep affinity for non-human animals from an early age.

For full show notes - click here!

You can follow Naomi on Twitter here @pimlicat.

Naomi is on our “Sentientist wall” – why not join her there in helping to normalise compassionate, rational thinking? Fill out this simple form.

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings.” You can find out more at Sentientism.info.

Everyone interested, Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our community groups. Our main group is here on FaceBook.

Many thanks to Graham Bessellieu for his post-production work on this video. Go follow him (& maybe work with him!) at @cgbessellieu.

David Pearce is a philosopher & co-founder of the World Transhumanist Organisation, now Humanity+. His work centres on "The Hedonistic Imperative" - a moral obligation to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life."

You can find the video of our conversation here.

We discuss:

- "The Hedonistic Imperative" 

- Using biotech to abolish suffering & replace it with gradients of hedonic bliss

- Compassion, Buddhism, negative utilitarianism & the need to systematise benevolence

- The "3 supers" of Transhumanism: super intelligence, super longevity & super happiness + why non-humans should be included

- Growing up as a 3rd generation v*gan in a Quaker household

- Waiting for god to get in touch at 7-8 yrs old then ceasing to believe at 10-11 yrs

- The centrality of compassion to the values of David's family

- Is morality like supporting a football team?

- We can build our ethics on deep intuitions, then extrapolate

- First person suffering is dis-valuable. Hold your hand in iced water!

- The centrality of our perspective as a highly adaptive illusion. The suffering of others is just as salient to them - each of us is not special

- "My morality is a feature of reality"

- A future connected mega-mind might look back on us as ignorant as well as unethical

- A choice to be immoral is also irrational

- Basing our morality on a naturalistic epistemology & spanning "is-ought"

- How nearly everyone disagrees with Sentientism

- Focusing on the good in religion & working on common ground

- The Bible is light on the bio-tech details of how the lion will lie down with the lamb :)

- If god has given us CRISPR, why not use it to show mercy?

- If humans have compassion, surely god's compassion should be even deeper?

- Not being righteous even when you're right

- Having compassion for people you disagree with & naturalistic humility about your own beliefs

- Religious texts don't prohibit the positive use of tech

- We're all amateurs re: understanding consciousness

- Consciousness/sentience as "just" info proc or something more

- Is the USA conscious? (Eric Schwitzgebel)

- Micro-experiential zombies

- Physicalism plus the intrinsic nature of the physical, is experience the "fire in the equations"?

- Falling asleep doesn't destroy consciousness, it breaks binding

- Eric's "crazyism" - stay open minded

- Powerpointism as an alternative to panpsychism :)

- The temptation to fill gaps / address uncertainty with "woo" and mysticism/magic/god

- Even if consciousness is fundamental, it's not "like anything" to be a rock

- Distinction between panpsychism (consciousness attached to fundamental entities) & non-materialist physicalism (experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical)

- Using genetics to give our offspring better lives - for health and to adjust their hedonic set-points

- Ending animal farming "death factories" - laws will outlaw

- Making it easy to do the right thing

- Mitigating wild animal suffering (fertility regulation - immuno-contraception/gene drives). We are already intervening negatively on a massive scale

- SCN-9A gene, the volume knob of pain

- Converting carnivores to herbivores, providing cultured-meat alternatives, without being constrained by species essentialism

- "Nature is pretty" vs. "Compassion for the suffering"

- Moving from "kill them all" to compassionate interventions

- Using our tech capability to tap into the latent compassion of humans.

See the YouTube video for full show notes.

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

Stijn is a physicist (phd), economist (phd in progress), animal activist, rational moral philosopher (another phd) and an Effective Altruist! He co-founded and is president of EA Belgium. He’s currently researching economics at the university of Leuven.

We talk about:

You can learn about Stijn’s work here: stijnbruers.wordpress.com & he's on Twitter here @StijnBruers.

Stijn is on our “Sentientist wall” – why not join him there in helping to normalise compassionate, rational thinking?

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings.” You can find out more at sentientism.info.

Everyone interested, Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our community groups. Our main group is here on FaceBook.

John shares his story, from being a devout Pentecostalist Sunday School Teacher in Nigeria to being a Sentientist, atheist, vegan academic and author. Video version here.

John is Strategic Lecturer in the School of Law and a Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. He is a cellist and dancer.

We discuss:

 John at QMUL. @JohnAdenitire. sentientism.info. FBook.

New York Times bestselling (4 times!) author and journalist AJ Jacobs experiments on himself to help us all learn.

In this Sentientist Conversation he talks with Jamie about what he believes, what matters morally, and how his writing projects link to Sentientism's tenets of evidence, reason and universal compassion.

AJ: “I love the idea of Sentientism”

We discuss:

- Sentientist themes in AJ's personal experimentation writing projects: Living biblically, connecting everyone, thanking everyone, never lying, learning everything! 

- The "belonging, belief and behaviour" of religion – including secular Judaism and hanging out at the Scientology centre.

- Effective altruism and longtermism.

- Moral realism, relativism and why the Taliban’s ethics just aren’t good.

- Preferring shallow beliefs to deeply held beliefs.

- The ethics of human and non-human animal, robot and far future ethics.

- Expanding our moral circle through recognising our connectedness and/or through seeing climate change as a common enemy. 

- Presenting positive opportunities to do good vs. using guilt.

- What a Sentientist utopia might look like and whether we should even specify one.

- Can Sentientism help address today’s dogmatic polarisation?

AJ is on our Sentientist "wall":  - why not join him there using this simple form?

AJ's web site is ajjacobs.com.

Sentientism is "Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." You can find out more about it at https://sentientism.info/

Everyone interested, whether Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our global community. Our main group is here on Facebook. 

Many thanks to Graham Bessellieu for his post-production work on this video. Go follow him (and maybe work with him!) at @cgbessellieu.

What's it like to have Prince throw a creationist tantrum when you take him on his first trip to a natural history museum?

Carole Raphaelle Davis tells us what it's like to be a radical feminist, atheist, vegan (and Sentientist) in the showbiz world of Hollywood.

"Sentientism feels like home!" 

We talk about:

- What it was like to work with and socialise with Prince - and how his religiosity affected their relationship

- How animal ethics and veganism are finally, irreversibly going "mainstream"

- Why it's so important for public figures, like Joaquin Phoenix, to be vocal about their ethics.

You can find the video of our conversation here on YouTube - why not subscribe there too?

Carole Raphaelle Davis is an actress, recording artist, writer and activist best known for her roles in Sex and the City and Madam Secretary and songwriting with Prince. Find out more about her work at caroleraphaelledavis.com. Here she is on our Wall of Sentientists. Why not join her there?

Sentientism is "Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." You can find out more about it at sentientism.info.

Everyone interested, whether Sentientist or not, is welcome to join our global community. Our main group is here on FaceBook.

Many thanks to Graham Bessellieu for his post-production work on this video. Go follow him (and maybe work with him!) at @cgbessellieu.