Periodic Reporting for period 4 - ASENT (Foundations of Animal Sentience)
Période du rapport: 2024-07-01 au 2025-06-30
Sentience, in a broad sense, is the capacity to feel. In a narrower sense, it refers to the capacity to have feelings with a positive or negative quality, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, boredom, excitement, frustration, anxiety and joy. These feelings have the elusive property that philosophers like to call “phenomenal consciousness”. It feels like something to have them.
In recent years, an interdisciplinary community of animal sentience researchers, drawn from neuroscience, comparative psychology, evolutionary biology, animal welfare science and philosophy, has begun to emerge. However, the field is characterized by foundational controversy over the nature of sentience and the criteria for its attribution, leading to heated debate over the presence or absence of sentience in fish and in invertebrates such as cephalopods (e.g. octopods, squid) and arthropods (e.g. bees, crabs).
The Foundations of Animal Sentience project (ASENT), led by Dr Jonathan Birch, aimed to find ways to resolve these debates. What was needed was a conceptual framework for thinking about sentience as an evolved phenomenon that varies along several dimensions, a deeper understanding of how these dimensions of sentience relate to measurable aspects of animal behaviour and the nervous system, and a richer picture of the links between sentience, welfare and the ethical status of animals.
ASENT achieved these objectives by constructing a five-dimension framework for thinking about variation in conscious states that has already proven influential in the field. It also provided a methodological strategy for making progress on contested cases (the "theory-light" strategy) that has been widely adopted. It generated groundbreaking results concerning the possibility of sentience in bees, through collaborations with Professor Lars Chittka's lab at Queen Mary, University of London. And it provided precautionary framework for designing policy consistently in the face of risks to the welfare of sentient beings.
In recent years, an interdisciplinary community of animal sentience researchers, drawn from neuroscience, comparative psychology, evolutionary biology, animal welfare science and philosophy, has begun to emerge. However, the field is characterized by foundational controversy over the nature of sentience and the criteria for its attribution, leading to heated debate over the presence or absence of sentience in fish and in invertebrates such as cephalopods (e.g. octopods, squid) and arthropods (e.g. bees, crabs).
The Foundations of Animal Sentience project (ASENT), led by Dr Jonathan Birch, aimed to find ways to resolve these debates. What was needed was a conceptual framework for thinking about sentience as an evolved phenomenon that varies along several dimensions, a deeper understanding of how these dimensions of sentience relate to measurable aspects of animal behaviour and the nervous system, and a richer picture of the links between sentience, welfare and the ethical status of animals.
ASENT achieved these objectives by constructing a five-dimension framework for thinking about variation in conscious states that has already proven influential in the field. It also provided a methodological strategy for making progress on contested cases (the "theory-light" strategy) that has been widely adopted. It generated groundbreaking results concerning the possibility of sentience in bees, through collaborations with Professor Lars Chittka's lab at Queen Mary, University of London. And it provided precautionary framework for designing policy consistently in the face of risks to the welfare of sentient beings.
Across five years, the ASENT team produced agenda-setting work in all its areas of activity.
The team, based the LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, focused on three big questions. The first was: how can we develop better methods for a mature science of animal sentience? The PI, Birch, developed a distinctive methodological approach to animal sentience based on a minimal commitment about the relationship between consciousness and cognition (the “facilitation hypothesis”). This aims to strike a middle path between “theory-heavy” approaches that make speculative theoretical commitments and “theory-neutral” approaches that try to dispense with theory altogether. The team put this general methodological approach into action, using bumblebees as the first test case. The team's collaborative work with Professor Lars Chittka's bee cognition lab at Queen Mary, University of London has resulted in important results that have added to the case for thinking bees are sentient.
The second big question was: how should we conceptualize variation in sentience across the animal kingdom? Birch (in collaboration with Alexandra Schnell and Nicola Clayton) argued against the idea that we should try to construct a single scale on which some animals are “more conscious” than others. We should instead conceptualize variation in terms of “consciousness profiles” with many dimensions. He constructed a framework involving five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, unity, temporality, and selfhood.
The third big question was: how can we use the emerging science of animal sentience to design better policies and laws for protecting animal welfare? The team, in collaboration with Schnell and Charlotte Burn, developed a pragmatic framework for assessing the current state of the evidence in relation to any particular order of animals. They have applied this framework to two contested taxa (cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans), leading to major policy impact in the UK, where the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 legally recognized the sentience of these animals for the first time, as a direct consequence of Birch and colleagues’ research. There was additional major impact in the US, where California's ban on octopus farming (AB 3162, the California Oppose Cruelty to Octopuses (OCTO) Act) directly cited the team's work as an authority on octopus sentience.
The PI, in his book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Animals, and AI (Oxford University Press, 2024, Open Access) drew on these experiences of shaping policy to construct a comprehensive precautionary framework for managing risk when faced with uncertain sentience.
The team, based the LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, focused on three big questions. The first was: how can we develop better methods for a mature science of animal sentience? The PI, Birch, developed a distinctive methodological approach to animal sentience based on a minimal commitment about the relationship between consciousness and cognition (the “facilitation hypothesis”). This aims to strike a middle path between “theory-heavy” approaches that make speculative theoretical commitments and “theory-neutral” approaches that try to dispense with theory altogether. The team put this general methodological approach into action, using bumblebees as the first test case. The team's collaborative work with Professor Lars Chittka's bee cognition lab at Queen Mary, University of London has resulted in important results that have added to the case for thinking bees are sentient.
The second big question was: how should we conceptualize variation in sentience across the animal kingdom? Birch (in collaboration with Alexandra Schnell and Nicola Clayton) argued against the idea that we should try to construct a single scale on which some animals are “more conscious” than others. We should instead conceptualize variation in terms of “consciousness profiles” with many dimensions. He constructed a framework involving five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, unity, temporality, and selfhood.
The third big question was: how can we use the emerging science of animal sentience to design better policies and laws for protecting animal welfare? The team, in collaboration with Schnell and Charlotte Burn, developed a pragmatic framework for assessing the current state of the evidence in relation to any particular order of animals. They have applied this framework to two contested taxa (cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans), leading to major policy impact in the UK, where the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 legally recognized the sentience of these animals for the first time, as a direct consequence of Birch and colleagues’ research. There was additional major impact in the US, where California's ban on octopus farming (AB 3162, the California Oppose Cruelty to Octopuses (OCTO) Act) directly cited the team's work as an authority on octopus sentience.
The PI, in his book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Animals, and AI (Oxford University Press, 2024, Open Access) drew on these experiences of shaping policy to construct a comprehensive precautionary framework for managing risk when faced with uncertain sentience.
The ASENT project invigorated both academic and public debates around animal sentience, providing new ways forward for the science of animal sentience over both the short- and long-term, and generating results with significant implications for animal welfare policy and law. By laying the foundations for a new interdisciplinary field bringing together expertise from philosophy, zoology, animal welfare/veterinary science, neuroscience, psychology, law and policymaking, the project significantly advanced the state of the art. The empirical, science-facing side of the project will developed new experimental paradigms to provide evidence relevant to questions of their sentience in insects and drove debates in the entomology community about a long neglected issue. The welfare-relevant, policy-facing side built entire pathways to impact, running from careful syntheses of the scientific evidence to concrete changes in law and regulation. The PI will build on all of these foundations in his future work as Director of the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience, LSE.