I do think we need to remember that we thought babies experienced no pain and regularly preformed surgeries on them. We need to be able to treat living things with kindness, whether we think they experience pain or not.
I loved this episode. I think it's just our anthropomorphic bias that regulates how certain animals are treated. It raises questions about who has the right to life.
@@feyindecay912 There is nothing to prove that other oragnisms are not conscious and/or don't feel pain. There are tons of facts that proves the other way around, some stronger some more anecdotal.
@@feyindecay912 no m8. Get back to Logic lessons. A statement has to be proven either if Is negative or positive. There Is no bonus ticket for the assholes
Running to Google after this to ask, "What states or regions say sentient as 'senchent'" because I'm an American and have only heard it said that way rarely online.
Given you can't even prove I exist yes, this is an extremely difficult topic. That said I'm so happy to see research like this as it doesn't matter what we think we know or believe, it matters what we can DEMONSTRATE. That's why this is so important and fascinating.
This is a very good question. I don't think pain in the sense of a noxious stimuli is enough to declare sentience (I'm leaving some caveats aside for the sake of simplicity). I'll focus only in the biology because sentience is a much more complicated topic, but we do have evidence that from the biggest vertebrates to the smallest invertebrates do react to noxious stimuli (IE pain). Now, the more interesting fact is that plants also react to noxious stimuli but in a different way. Some trees release their seeds during wildfires to, what is believed, enhance the chances of the species' survival. There's a plant that, I forgot the name but I'm sure somebody will know, that if you pinch one of the branches, all the leaves in it "close", as it were a reaction to a negative stimuli. I don't think pain, by itself, is a necessary part for sentience. Going slightly further, a reaction to a noxious stimuli is something cells also do by releasing cytokines, histamines, prostaglandins and, because of those chemicals, we feel pain (as in the medical definition of physiological pain). I'd be happy to be proven wrong too. Being wrong in science means we learn more about a subject. Edit: Also... Kitty!!
Such an interesting topic, Joss. I'm no scientist but I've been thinking for a long time that maybe we can't measure everything in relation to how humans do it. Maybe (probably) there's more to this Universe.
There was a documentary I once saw a couple of decades ago that talked about a study that was done on ape sentience with gorillas that had learned a degree of sign language and they actually graded them negatively when the gorillas indicated a nice home was a typical gorilla nest instead of the human home that was one of the choices... which to my mind was a stupid thing to do, sentience isnt just a human thing and should never be graded with us as the benchmark.
I mean at this extent we can agree that animals feel pain! One of the many reasons why you and I are vegan! We understand the logic of how animals do feel pain!🙌🏻
This channel is what i always wanted , behind the scenes of how facts are found . Science has become kinda collection of decree , this is true , this is not , when actually science is THE process to find out truth loved it my fav channel now
I strongly believe that animals do NOT need a neocortex to experience pain and be sentient. As someone who has spent the past six years working with reptiles, I can attest that these animals not only feel pain, but feel positive emotion too, and make associations between positive and negative stimuli and their environment. The issue is finding a way to scientifically record and prove it, as that is... immensely difficult for anything involving an animal's subjective experience. We just can't read their minds, not quite yet anyway. Hopefully this scientific field continues to advance and make breakthroughs.
I'm british, but I've spent some time in america and never heard this pronunciation there or in any kind of media until this video. It sounds really jarring.
I responded this in a thread, but clicked in my brain just as I was typing, so I think its worth it to share directly: As you pointed out, other branches of life might have found completely different ways of achieving the same things. For example, It is estimated that eyesight has evolved independently at least a dozen times in different species on Earth. We can't rule out a similar situation for sentience just because we can't communicate with other species. That kind of thing is always going to be hard, because people are not willing to admit ehen they do horrible things. I remember vividly the first time I saw how they cook crabs.... I could not understand why no one else tought it was cruel.
“Nature never draws a line without smudging it” - Winston Churchill, A Roving Commission This quote tells you everything you need to know about consciousness: it’s not a matter of yes or no… it’s a matter of degrees on a broad spectrum
@@Howtown thanks for the response! I get what you’re saying. It’s true, the science behind neurons and consciousness is super complex, and my comment was a bit oversimplified. Appreciate your insight!
@@HowtownI would assume the baseline for consciousness is the ability of the brain to be able to directly monitor what is happening in different parts of itself
I think this is one of those times when the dictionary fails to reflect how people actually talk. It's probably more likely that in modern American English, "sen-ti-ent" / "sen-chent" / probably even "sen-chi-ent" are in free variation, but "sen-chent" is the historical prestige pronunciation.
This piece is fun to see after just reading "Children of Ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, featuring some fun speculation about octopus perception and communication.
Love what you both are doing with this channel. Keep up the good work. This is the internet, after all, so I also love Adam's cat in the background just doing their cat thing.
I always thought this was the wrong question, one that stems from trying to differentiate humans and animals as separated things, different in their essence. From what I've seen from studies on consciousness and awareness, sentience may even just arise in the microtubules that are present in all living cells, we just don't know. I don't think the sentient categorization has any real meaning that can be actually applied. To me it feels more like a moral judgment of "this looks human" or not.
Maybe a warning about the butchering scenes (from 11:02 to 11:16) should be at the beginning of this video, and then again right before. I would tend to think of octopi as nearly all brain. I think they do some complex processing in their arms. It's like they are muscle and brain. I would err on the side of any creature that has to navigate their environment and be able to quickly adapt to a cause of pain and danger should be seen as sentient. Even a nematode. Where there is symbiosis involved, that might be considered an overall complex processing. A fungus might not feel pain nor care, but somewhere along the web someone is going to feel the pinch in their life. No one should consider hurting someone else satisfying.
@@Mifaroicazzimieidaadessoinpoi are u for real? you know that the pain receptiveness in various tissues varies dramatically? quantification of pain is not something we can do in humans let alone in animals. maybe u should brush up on basic biology instead of posting bs on yt
I absolutely love this channel. I will say, though, something about the voice over and in particular the sound effects sounded particularly harsh and high pitched - it was honestly a little uncomfortable to listen to with headphones on. I hope this is just a one-off and will be back for the next video!
i really enjoyed this video, i've never even doubted the idea that an animal could be 'non sentient', it's just really strange for me to think that way, but it's true that that is really hard to prove
You should do a video about some of the well liked offended comments to your video- why humans quickly, and decidedly apply their moral judgements, persecute and move on, and why a few reflect instead. I was curious and saw your whole video (it took three taps on the phone!). P.s : No, the video is not propagating the idea that octopuses don’t feel pain like we do, in fact if anything it’s deeply empathetic towards it. Loved the way you ended the video with your trip to the aquarium.
First - octopus have brains in their arms. Signals don't have to go all the way to the head for them to be perceived. Second - octopus are demonstrably intelligent. They are way beyond just responding to pain stimuli.
Ok I'm American but apparently I pronounce it British? I have been main-lining David Attenborough documentaries all 33 years of my life, so I guess that makes sense.
Definitely a tough question to pose. I had the thought, if we are claiming sentience is being able to feel pain, what about the humans with the inability to feel pain. (CIPA) By that standard, they must no longer be sentient. Id argue that memory is more important for sentience. But you could also argue that with Dementia. To that, I'd say that in a way, patients with severe dementia are not sentient. Their whole existence at that point relys on another person. But then, I would argue. Does it matter? We should treat animals with respect regardless of sentience, just like you would a person.
I'd say sentience is having a concept of self (awareness) as distinct from your surroundings. A rock does not distinguish itself from water but a raven does. And a worm does not distinguish itself from the earth, it just acts
Maybe a good approach would be to leave animals alone unless we are absolutely confident that they don't feel pain and suffer? Otherwise we would risk causing immense suffering on unfathomable scales...
I have trouble accepting that pain receptors equal sentience - because I think it requires consciousness. A sense of self - something I think comes about by social interaction. More and more depending on how defined you are as an individual within a social context. There can't be an experience of pain without a self to experience it. I don't think our empathy judges correctly either, because we are instinctively Anthropomorphisising. (Did I write that right?)
Up until 1980ish the scientific and medical community thought that HUMAN BABIES were not developed enough to feel pain like children and adults do. They gave less if any pain medication to babies until the 1980's. In the late 1990's the American Association of Pediatricians formally acknowledged that babies can / do feel pain. I am sure that animals all are aware that they are feeling pain.
As a Brit, I'm very happy we passed that law. I also couldn't care less how people pronounce a word that sounds and means the same thing! 😅 Same for aluminium... it doesn't matter. 😊
I do wonder if a meaningful difference in sorting out which organisms are sentient is the difference between pain and suffering. Organisms that learn from a noxious stimulus and avoid it in the future aren't necessarily suffering while they are in pain. The experience of pain has been evaluated behaviorally but I don't think suffering can really be evaluated without a way to communicate subjective experiences with evaluators. If we're defining sentience based on pain, is there a different word we should use to label organisms who can suffer? Should we base decisions or policy on sentience or this other label?
"I think that I usually distinguish between sentience and consciousness. Sentience is the ability of a system to make sense of its relationship to the world. So, basically understands what it is and what it’s doing. And in this sense, I would say that a corporation like Intel is sentient, because Intel has a good model of what it is, a legal model, the model of its actions, of its values, of its direction and the necessary cognition is largely facilitated by people. But this doesn’t really matter, because these people have to submit to the roles that they implemented in principle at some point. We can implement these tasks with other information processing systems that are able to make coherent enough models. And consciousness is slightly different from sentience in that it is a real-time model of self-reflexive attention and the content that we attend to. And this gives rise to a fundamental experience usually. And I don’t think that Intel is conscious in this sense. It doesn’t have self-reflexive attention. And the purpose of consciousness in our own mind is to create coherence in the world in which we are and create a sense of now to establish what is the fact right now." Any guesses who said that. No googling :-)
It's interesting that we're kind of studying this to sort out which animals should we hurt. It's like we are trying to put animals into two categories: feel free to hurt and try not hurt
I am listening to an audiobook called "Super Fly" about flies, and the author seems to be convinced that flies are sentient. Though his evidence is rather anecdotal.
Sentient means awareness of oneself and I highly doubt a fly would continue the charade that is their life, if knowing their mortality is extremely short..
@@KimberlyBishh , from their perspective, their life wouldn't be considered too short. Also, human life is also extremely short. Especially, considering that obtaining education takes 20-30 years of our lives and raising kids - another 20-30 years of our lives.
Pain or suffering is just connected with us by our sensory system and by those sensory system we feel things around us and i believe that or sensory system is developed through time and experience and can recognize the petern and those waves like pattern latter form suffering or pleasure based on intensity of what our sensors were faceing
Even humans we don't have a good way to compare to the point that conception arises that men can handle more pain or women can handle more pain or [ethnicity] can handle more pain, leading to human pain being disregarded 😢
I'd say that, if a life form moves away from any stimulus, or moves an affected body part away, or reacts angrily or violently, it can feel pain on some level. How it truly experiences that pain is another question.
Pain is pain, but a non-sentient being would perceive pain by avoiding it at all costs. Sentient creatures could evaluate the pain on a scale, from complete avoidance and escape to, tolerable or even necessary to complete a goal.
Have you found a definition of sentience or consciousness that makes the most sense to you? The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism-something it is like for the organism."
5:05 using an octopus arm recoiling from pain is a terrible example of noiception because every octopus leg has it's own brain. So this wasn't like a geckos tail that falls off and squirms to trick predators.
@@michaelmayhem350 “brain” is an imprecise word for what’s going on in their arms. They have very complex nervous systems so science communicators use the word brain or mini-brain to avoid introducing new vocabulary but these areas are not centrally integrating
This is a good working definition. So given that, why are researchers and activists preoccupied with "ability to perceive pain"? The two are not coextensive. You can totally have subjective experience without the ability to feel pain (e.g., folks with analgesia), and you can definitely detect harmful stimuli without being aware of it (e.g., amputated octopus arm). That is also why sentience, rather than the ability to feel pain, should determine whether or not an organism has moral relevance - otherwise we could put people to death and take their money just as long as they don't feel hurt.
this may be my psychosis speaking, but personally, i think it's best to avoid causing anything that even resembles pain, if you're capable. i don't know where the spectrum of sentience stretches, but i do know that everything that can react to stimuli can _appear_ to suffer. organic compounds flinch, and squirm when you cut them. ai chatbots mimic malaise when mistreated. even something as simple as a roomba bears the appearance of suffering when it's trapped under a table. obviously, we can't babysit every last particle in the universe, but when this sort of negativity can be avoided without causing problems, it should be. research should still be done, of course, if it is ethical. there's no other way to learn how to better treat things, and ourselves. but in general, nothing good comes from participating in harm, even if the harm is later proven to be an illusion. through our morality, merely _believing_ we've caused suffering is poisonous to us.
I am a layman, so i could be way off in this opinion...but it seems like using pain as an investigatory probe isn't the best way to go about a sentience test. Many things will react to stimuli such as pain, i think we need to zoom out and broaden the tests. I think one of the unique things humans can do is not only be aware of our existence, but we can learn very high level abstract ideas, then react to/use these ideas dynamically. For example, the concept of time. if i was to communicate to another human "24 hours from now, there will be an adverse weather event in your area." The other human is able to understand what to expect, when to expect it, why this event occurs, and how to prepare for it...or make a decision that it doesn't seem to be a big enough threat to prepare for. I don't think any other animals have the ability to actually understand these higher level abstract concepts, let alone be able to dynamically react to them.
Only if you know the right language, the other person can communicate with you, you both have the SAME concept of time and the way it 'flows', and have the same expectation of that adverse event. Not to mention that this perspective is entirely too human-centric to be universally acceptable. In the same way that if a dog used the smell of a meaty treat hidden in some boxes to see if humans could smell - and then concluded that humans couldn't smell because we couldn't find the treat.
@@jmanfiji i dont think language is relevant to this. While humans may have different languages to refer to objects or concepts, we all intuitively can agree and understand on some fundamental underlying fact of the matter. For example, when we say the word "water". In spanish the word is "agua", in french it's "eau"...etc. While the words for water may be different, they are all pointing to the same compound(H2O) and invoke a web of different qualities associated with H2O in peoples brains. While humans sense things better/worse/different than animals, animals seemingly do not understand the underlying fact of the matter. For example, they do not hypothesize, test, or, seek to learn. Using the dog smelling example, although humans cannot smell as well as dogs, we can understand the underlying science behind smelling. We can test how it works, why dogs smell better, and it gives us the ability to learn/apply these higher level abstractions instead of just operating as a giant nested "if/then" program.
Well, we can't really use those criteria, right? Human babies lack that understanding of time flow, of cause and consequence, or even object permanence. It doesn't make them not sentient, clearly. The fact that we understand each other at our level is a matter of having developed language, and then we are talking about intelligence and culture, not sentience. Like they say in the video, other branches of life might have found completely different ways of achieving the same things. For example, It is estimated that eyesight has evolved independently at least a dozen times in different species on Earth. We can't rule out a similar situation for sentience just because we can't communicate with other species.
Don’t the words “sentience” / “sentient” originate from the French word “sentir”, which means “to feel”? Feelings and emotions are usually used interchangeably, so if you have the capacity to feel and reflect and making meaning upon the felt experience that would make you / the organism conscious and a subset of consciousness…
I've always wondered if animals feel phantom pain. When a dog is hit by a car and its leg is messed up and in pain, then has it amputated, will it experience phantom pain like a human would?
Have you seen those amputee dogs just wheeling around? They're happy af like all the time. Idk dude. Phantom pain probably comes from thinking about the leg not being there
Animals can feel phantom limb pain. "Development of a Phantom Limb Pain Model in Rats: Behavioral and Histochemical Evaluation" (Published 21.06.2021) (Just copy the title into your search engine. Unfortunately RUclips deletes links not leading to RUclips ...)
I can say and explain how human genrate feeling or emotions and how they tell the difference about good and bad by evaluate and back track there memory of past depends on the memory that what kind of memory we our recalling
I do think we need to remember that we thought babies experienced no pain and regularly preformed surgeries on them. We need to be able to treat living things with kindness, whether we think they experience pain or not.
We gotta do what we gotta do.
Wasn't that long ago, either. Late 80s.
I am horrified all over again every time I'm reminded of this.
I have some bad news we still preform surgerys on babys
You poussee your choice
As a cephalopod researcher, I really appreciate the careful, nuanced explanations provided here!
cool!
I’m from the U.S. and have never heard anyone pronounce sentient this cursed way
Same, Texan here and I prefer sen-ti-ent lol
I’m from the US and I pronounce it somewhere in the middle: sen-shee-ent
sen-chee-ent... It's how I grew up!😂
This channel has become one of my favorites in all of youtube in very very little time
I loved this episode. I think it's just our anthropomorphic bias that regulates how certain animals are treated. It raises questions about who has the right to life.
Though our anthropomorphic bias could just aswell make us believe that those animals we do judge to suffer may not actually suffer either.
I wrote an essay on this for my environmental ethics class its a very fascinating subject
@@feyindecay912 There is nothing to prove that other oragnisms are not conscious and/or don't feel pain. There are tons of facts that proves the other way around, some stronger some more anecdotal.
@@BresciGaetano you don't have to prove a negative statement, the only thing there is to prove is that they *are*
@@feyindecay912 no m8. Get back to Logic lessons.
A statement has to be proven either if Is negative or positive. There Is no bonus ticket for the assholes
This channel came out of nowhere and is already one of my favorite channels. Amazing.
It's mid ngl
Running to Google after this to ask, "What states or regions say sentient as 'senchent'" because I'm an American and have only heard it said that way rarely online.
Given you can't even prove I exist yes, this is an extremely difficult topic. That said I'm so happy to see research like this as it doesn't matter what we think we know or believe, it matters what we can DEMONSTRATE. That's why this is so important and fascinating.
Glad to have you on the vegan team homie🙌🏻
This is a very good question. I don't think pain in the sense of a noxious stimuli is enough to declare sentience (I'm leaving some caveats aside for the sake of simplicity). I'll focus only in the biology because sentience is a much more complicated topic, but we do have evidence that from the biggest vertebrates to the smallest invertebrates do react to noxious stimuli (IE pain). Now, the more interesting fact is that plants also react to noxious stimuli but in a different way. Some trees release their seeds during wildfires to, what is believed, enhance the chances of the species' survival. There's a plant that, I forgot the name but I'm sure somebody will know, that if you pinch one of the branches, all the leaves in it "close", as it were a reaction to a negative stimuli.
I don't think pain, by itself, is a necessary part for sentience. Going slightly further, a reaction to a noxious stimuli is something cells also do by releasing cytokines, histamines, prostaglandins and, because of those chemicals, we feel pain (as in the medical definition of physiological pain).
I'd be happy to be proven wrong too. Being wrong in science means we learn more about a subject.
Edit: Also... Kitty!!
Such an interesting topic, Joss. I'm no scientist but I've been thinking for a long time that maybe we can't measure everything in relation to how humans do it. Maybe (probably) there's more to this Universe.
Yes. I agree to this 100% .
There was a documentary I once saw a couple of decades ago that talked about a study that was done on ape sentience with gorillas that had learned a degree of sign language and they actually graded them negatively when the gorillas indicated a nice home was a typical gorilla nest instead of the human home that was one of the choices... which to my mind was a stupid thing to do, sentience isnt just a human thing and should never be graded with us as the benchmark.
I mean at this extent we can agree that animals feel pain! One of the many reasons why you and I are vegan! We understand the logic of how animals do feel pain!🙌🏻
To be fair, IIRC octopi have a brain-like structure at the end of each arm. So a severed octopus arm might well be sentient, if it's still alive.
They're called cephalopods because their heads are a derived form of the mollusc foot.
@@OakenTome ...oops. Thanks for the catch.
This channel is what i always wanted , behind the scenes of how facts are found .
Science has become kinda collection of decree , this is true , this is not , when actually science is THE process to find out truth
loved it
my fav channel now
I strongly believe that animals do NOT need a neocortex to experience pain and be sentient. As someone who has spent the past six years working with reptiles, I can attest that these animals not only feel pain, but feel positive emotion too, and make associations between positive and negative stimuli and their environment. The issue is finding a way to scientifically record and prove it, as that is... immensely difficult for anything involving an animal's subjective experience. We just can't read their minds, not quite yet anyway. Hopefully this scientific field continues to advance and make breakthroughs.
Shoutout to An Immense World by Ed Yong and Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith for stunning deep dives into the minds of animals
Can I add The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery? probably my favorite nonfiction book to date.
You mean all this time as an American i have been using or thinking the correct way to pronounce “sentient” is the British way?
Same lol as born and raised USA, I've never heard the pronunciation they said is our version. It's always been the British version (apparently)
Same! I've never even heard someone say 'senchent' lol it sounds ridiculous I'm from the midwest
I'm british, but I've spent some time in america and never heard this pronunciation there or in any kind of media until this video. It sounds really jarring.
There is no "correct way" it's just preferences. If you're getting your point across, you're doing great!
I responded this in a thread, but clicked in my brain just as I was typing, so I think its worth it to share directly:
As you pointed out, other branches of life might have found completely different ways of achieving the same things. For example, It is estimated that eyesight has evolved independently at least a dozen times in different species on Earth. We can't rule out a similar situation for sentience just because we can't communicate with other species.
That kind of thing is always going to be hard, because people are not willing to admit ehen they do horrible things. I remember vividly the first time I saw how they cook crabs.... I could not understand why no one else tought it was cruel.
“Nature never draws a line without smudging it” - Winston Churchill, A Roving Commission
This quote tells you everything you need to know about consciousness: it’s not a matter of yes or no… it’s a matter of degrees on a broad spectrum
That makes sense to me too but we don't know enough yet about how neurons produce consciousness to characterize it one way or another!
@@Howtown thanks for the response! I get what you’re saying. It’s true, the science behind neurons and consciousness is super complex, and my comment was a bit oversimplified. Appreciate your insight!
@@Howtownwhat do you mean by neurons producing consciousness?
So, Churchill was a biologist?
@@HowtownI would assume the baseline for consciousness is the ability of the brain to be able to directly monitor what is happening in different parts of itself
I must be British, as I have always said sentient the "British way" (I am a Gen Xer), and I have heard most people say it the British way.
I think this is one of those times when the dictionary fails to reflect how people actually talk. It's probably more likely that in modern American English, "sen-ti-ent" / "sen-chent" / probably even "sen-chi-ent" are in free variation, but "sen-chent" is the historical prestige pronunciation.
This piece is fun to see after just reading "Children of Ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, featuring some fun speculation about octopus perception and communication.
Love what you both are doing with this channel. Keep up the good work. This is the internet, after all, so I also love Adam's cat in the background just doing their cat thing.
I always thought this was the wrong question, one that stems from trying to differentiate humans and animals as separated things, different in their essence. From what I've seen from studies on consciousness and awareness, sentience may even just arise in the microtubules that are present in all living cells, we just don't know. I don't think the sentient categorization has any real meaning that can be actually applied. To me it feels more like a moral judgment of "this looks human" or not.
Maybe a warning about the butchering scenes (from 11:02 to 11:16) should be at the beginning of this video, and then again right before.
I would tend to think of octopi as nearly all brain. I think they do some complex processing in their arms. It's like they are muscle and brain. I would err on the side of any creature that has to navigate their environment and be able to quickly adapt to a cause of pain and danger should be seen as sentient. Even a nematode.
Where there is symbiosis involved, that might be considered an overall complex processing. A fungus might not feel pain nor care, but somewhere along the web someone is going to feel the pinch in their life.
No one should consider hurting someone else satisfying.
I was going to say the same thing. I recoiled when I saw the octopus getting torn apart immediately after discussing them as sentient.
I totally agree with you!
@@DanikaLeighEllisAbsolutely horrifying cognitive dissonance from them for sure
Wussies
I love this channel. A much needed wholesome-smart-honest pocket of the internet.
Yeah, but how did the researchers know that a shot of acetic acid would only feel like lemon juice on an open cut? 🤔
I thought exactly the same!
they don‘t. it‘s just something they tell people who don‘t know better to calm them down
@@hidingdissidentIs acid, they know how It works on tissues. You know It too.
@@Mifaroicazzimieidaadessoinpoi are u for real? you know that the pain receptiveness in various tissues varies dramatically? quantification of pain is not something we can do in humans let alone in animals. maybe u should brush up on basic biology instead of posting bs on yt
@@hidingdissident and are you for real? What Is a conspiracy? They tell to people bla bla...c'mon
I just hope more people can know this channel - love how howtown provided a new way to see all the “hows” in this world 🌎
I think it’s important to treat everything with empathy and try your best to not hurt creatures that aren’t gonna hurt you.
Lovely vid, Joss and Adam are such a good team.
Octopus are sentient.
Source: The boys.
👏😆
The example of the octopus with vinegar is an example of classical conditioning. This is reflexive learning and not necessarily evidence of sentience.
Loved this insightful video, saw it in the Hank letter and decided that I should give it a watch. Really enjoyed this video :))
I got ADHD. This channel is like gold for someone like me. I’m always curious and always asking “how does…”. Looking forward to more and more vids
First time visiting this channel. This is awesome.
Please please consider having Ann Jones from ABC Science as a guest! Really enjoying the channel⭐️
You’re telling me a shrimp felt this pain?
These are such incredibly done videos, awesome job!
Please more content with joss gong. We need more of her
Cnideria really made me think about this in my paleobio courses. Such a hard distinction to think about. Watch worms wriggle with salt. So weird
Adam's skunk bear on NPR were some of my favourite vids on youtube!! Glad this is happening!
How come did i miss your long form videos while vibing with you two on ig smh. Instantly subscribed!
one of my new favourite channels.
I absolutely love this channel. I will say, though, something about the voice over and in particular the sound effects sounded particularly harsh and high pitched - it was honestly a little uncomfortable to listen to with headphones on. I hope this is just a one-off and will be back for the next video!
i really enjoyed this video, i've never even doubted the idea that an animal could be 'non sentient', it's just really strange for me to think that way, but it's true that that is really hard to prove
I just LOVEEE your channel!
How dare you say my Roomba has no feelings!
Great video! Humbly asking that you get an audio engineer to help you reduce the mouth sounds from your mic. 🙏 Misophonia sucks.
Composition on point throughout but that top-down printer shot takes the cake!
You should do a video about some of the well liked offended comments to your video- why humans quickly, and decidedly apply their moral judgements, persecute and move on, and why a few reflect instead. I was curious and saw your whole video (it took three taps on the phone!).
P.s : No, the video is not propagating the idea that octopuses don’t feel pain like we do, in fact if anything it’s deeply empathetic towards it. Loved the way you ended the video with your trip to the aquarium.
But octopus have brain cells in their arms….
God i love this channel so much
First - octopus have brains in their arms. Signals don't have to go all the way to the head for them to be perceived. Second - octopus are demonstrably intelligent. They are way beyond just responding to pain stimuli.
right! They didn't really mention that, did they...
Who’s here just for Joss Fong?
Contrary to the way men treat the internet this is not a dating website...😂
The timing with today’s the boys episode
Ok I'm American but apparently I pronounce it British? I have been main-lining David Attenborough documentaries all 33 years of my life, so I guess that makes sense.
Another banger.
6:07 am I the only one who sees a Hermit crab wearing a shower cap or maybe a chef's hat?
I can just imagine this discussion moving on to fetus sentience.
But what about the yesciceptor? I need to know more about them.
I'm an American, and i say it the British way.
I also hate pronunciation of species as "speeshees".
Call me a bad American but it's hard T for life over here
Also I spot Adam's cat! Here for it.
Hot damm. What a great video. How do you guys start a new channel and immediately make great content. Love it.
I highly recommend reading The Mountain in the Sea if you like speculative fiction regarding animal sentience.
Definitely a tough question to pose. I had the thought, if we are claiming sentience is being able to feel pain, what about the humans with the inability to feel pain. (CIPA) By that standard, they must no longer be sentient.
Id argue that memory is more important for sentience. But you could also argue that with Dementia.
To that, I'd say that in a way, patients with severe dementia are not sentient. Their whole existence at that point relys on another person.
But then, I would argue. Does it matter? We should treat animals with respect regardless of sentience, just like you would a person.
post more videos
your contents are very nice
thank you for making this video :)
Just because an animal doesnt have a spine doesnt mean it doesnt have a nervous system.
Correct! Octopuses also have brain cells in their arms...as you very well know❤
I'd say sentience is having a concept of self (awareness) as distinct from your surroundings. A rock does not distinguish itself from water but a raven does. And a worm does not distinguish itself from the earth, it just acts
thanks make a video on this , I actually asking the same question since i watched your dogs video.
Maybe a good approach would be to leave animals alone unless we are absolutely confident that they don't feel pain and suffer? Otherwise we would risk causing immense suffering on unfathomable scales...
Considering we cause immense suffering on unfathomable scales to human beings pretty regularly I think this argument is gonna fall on pretty deaf ears
no thanks. im not me when im hungry
I have trouble accepting that pain receptors equal sentience - because I think it requires consciousness.
A sense of self - something I think comes about by social interaction. More and more depending on how defined you are as an individual within a social context.
There can't be an experience of pain without a self to experience it. I don't think our empathy judges correctly either, because we are instinctively Anthropomorphisising. (Did I write that right?)
* anthropomorphising
Up until 1980ish the scientific and medical community thought that HUMAN BABIES were not developed enough to feel pain like children and adults do. They gave less if any pain medication to babies until the 1980's. In the late 1990's the American Association of Pediatricians formally acknowledged that babies can / do feel pain. I am sure that animals all are aware that they are feeling pain.
As a Brit, I'm very happy we passed that law.
I also couldn't care less how people pronounce a word that sounds and means the same thing! 😅
Same for aluminium... it doesn't matter. 😊
I imagine an alien somewhere has already said, "But the key detail here is that these arms are no longer attached to a terran."
I do wonder if a meaningful difference in sorting out which organisms are sentient is the difference between pain and suffering. Organisms that learn from a noxious stimulus and avoid it in the future aren't necessarily suffering while they are in pain. The experience of pain has been evaluated behaviorally but I don't think suffering can really be evaluated without a way to communicate subjective experiences with evaluators. If we're defining sentience based on pain, is there a different word we should use to label organisms who can suffer? Should we base decisions or policy on sentience or this other label?
Me encantó. Gracias, very interesting.
Awesome!
"I think that I usually distinguish between sentience and consciousness. Sentience is the ability of a system to make sense of its relationship to the world. So, basically understands what it is and what it’s doing. And in this sense, I would say that a corporation like Intel is sentient, because Intel has a good model of what it is, a legal model, the model of its actions, of its values, of its direction and the necessary cognition is largely facilitated by people. But this doesn’t really matter, because these people have to submit to the roles that they implemented in principle at some point.
We can implement these tasks with other information processing systems that are able to make coherent enough models. And consciousness is slightly different from sentience in that it is a real-time model of self-reflexive attention and the content that we attend to. And this gives rise to a fundamental experience usually. And I don’t think that Intel is conscious in this sense. It doesn’t have self-reflexive attention. And the purpose of consciousness in our own mind is to create coherence in the world in which we are and create a sense of now to establish what is the fact right now."
Any guesses who said that. No googling :-)
OMG... I LOOOVE those glasses! Darn cute. 😻
If Joss is explaining something to me, I won’t contest her. I’ll just agree to everything she says
It's interesting that we're kind of studying this to sort out which animals should we hurt. It's like we are trying to put animals into two categories: feel free to hurt and try not hurt
Its best to respect all creatures rather than trying to find a reason to love it.
I am listening to an audiobook called "Super Fly" about flies, and the author seems to be convinced that flies are sentient. Though his evidence is rather anecdotal.
Sentient means awareness of oneself and I highly doubt a fly would continue the charade that is their life, if knowing their mortality is extremely short..
@@KimberlyBishh , from their perspective, their life wouldn't be considered too short. Also, human life is also extremely short. Especially, considering that obtaining education takes 20-30 years of our lives and raising kids - another 20-30 years of our lives.
I'm going to be honest I'm an American here and I've never heard the American pronunciation of sentient and it hurts my brain oh so much
Howie the crab: look her up ... Crabs are way more intelligent than we expect
Pain or suffering is just connected with us by our sensory system and by those sensory system we feel things around us and i believe that or sensory system is developed through time and experience and can recognize the petern and those waves like pattern latter form suffering or pleasure based on intensity of what our sensors were faceing
This kinda made me emotional
Even humans we don't have a good way to compare to the point that conception arises that men can handle more pain or women can handle more pain or [ethnicity] can handle more pain, leading to human pain being disregarded 😢
reflex response ❌ Ultra Instinct ✅
The ability to show love and affection or logical deduction.
It's a little ridiculous to believe that animals don't feel pain... is one of the best ways to avoid catastrophe! All kinds of catastrophe!
I'd say that, if a life form moves away from any stimulus, or moves an affected body part away, or reacts angrily or violently, it can feel pain on some level. How it truly experiences that pain is another question.
The problem is that pain is defined by perception. So saying reaction = pain doesnt really use any context
The problem is that pain is defined by perception. So saying reaction = pain doesnt really use any context
Pain is pain, but a non-sentient being would perceive pain by avoiding it at all costs. Sentient creatures could evaluate the pain on a scale, from complete avoidance and escape to, tolerable or even necessary to complete a goal.
sentience: says ouch in some way
I see Joss Fong, I click subscribe
Joss Fong ❤
Have you found a definition of sentience or consciousness that makes the most sense to you? The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism-something it is like for the organism."
5:05 using an octopus arm recoiling from pain is a terrible example of noiception because every octopus leg has it's own brain. So this wasn't like a geckos tail that falls off and squirms to trick predators.
@@michaelmayhem350 “brain” is an imprecise word for what’s going on in their arms. They have very complex nervous systems so science communicators use the word brain or mini-brain to avoid introducing new vocabulary but these areas are not centrally integrating
This is a good working definition. So given that, why are researchers and activists preoccupied with "ability to perceive pain"? The two are not coextensive. You can totally have subjective experience without the ability to feel pain (e.g., folks with analgesia), and you can definitely detect harmful stimuli without being aware of it (e.g., amputated octopus arm). That is also why sentience, rather than the ability to feel pain, should determine whether or not an organism has moral relevance - otherwise we could put people to death and take their money just as long as they don't feel hurt.
this may be my psychosis speaking, but personally, i think it's best to avoid causing anything that even resembles pain, if you're capable. i don't know where the spectrum of sentience stretches, but i do know that everything that can react to stimuli can _appear_ to suffer. organic compounds flinch, and squirm when you cut them. ai chatbots mimic malaise when mistreated. even something as simple as a roomba bears the appearance of suffering when it's trapped under a table. obviously, we can't babysit every last particle in the universe, but when this sort of negativity can be avoided without causing problems, it should be.
research should still be done, of course, if it is ethical. there's no other way to learn how to better treat things, and ourselves. but in general, nothing good comes from participating in harm, even if the harm is later proven to be an illusion. through our morality, merely _believing_ we've caused suffering is poisonous to us.
Are those glasses without lenses?
I am a layman, so i could be way off in this opinion...but it seems like using pain as an investigatory probe isn't the best way to go about a sentience test. Many things will react to stimuli such as pain, i think we need to zoom out and broaden the tests. I think one of the unique things humans can do is not only be aware of our existence, but we can learn very high level abstract ideas, then react to/use these ideas dynamically.
For example, the concept of time. if i was to communicate to another human "24 hours from now, there will be an adverse weather event in your area." The other human is able to understand what to expect, when to expect it, why this event occurs, and how to prepare for it...or make a decision that it doesn't seem to be a big enough threat to prepare for. I don't think any other animals have the ability to actually understand these higher level abstract concepts, let alone be able to dynamically react to them.
Only if you know the right language, the other person can communicate with you, you both have the SAME concept of time and the way it 'flows', and have the same expectation of that adverse event.
Not to mention that this perspective is entirely too human-centric to be universally acceptable. In the same way that if a dog used the smell of a meaty treat hidden in some boxes to see if humans could smell - and then concluded that humans couldn't smell because we couldn't find the treat.
@@jmanfiji i dont think language is relevant to this. While humans may have different languages to refer to objects or concepts, we all intuitively can agree and understand on some fundamental underlying fact of the matter.
For example, when we say the word "water". In spanish the word is "agua", in french it's "eau"...etc. While the words for water may be different, they are all pointing to the same compound(H2O) and invoke a web of different qualities associated with H2O in peoples brains.
While humans sense things better/worse/different than animals, animals seemingly do not understand the underlying fact of the matter. For example, they do not hypothesize, test, or, seek to learn. Using the dog smelling example, although humans cannot smell as well as dogs, we can understand the underlying science behind smelling. We can test how it works, why dogs smell better, and it gives us the ability to learn/apply these higher level abstractions instead of just operating as a giant nested "if/then" program.
Well, we can't really use those criteria, right? Human babies lack that understanding of time flow, of cause and consequence, or even object permanence. It doesn't make them not sentient, clearly. The fact that we understand each other at our level is a matter of having developed language, and then we are talking about intelligence and culture, not sentience.
Like they say in the video, other branches of life might have found completely different ways of achieving the same things. For example, It is estimated that eyesight has evolved independently at least a dozen times in different species on Earth. We can't rule out a similar situation for sentience just because we can't communicate with other species.
@@RaphaelMattos_atCW i would argue that babies are not sentient. I think they do have all of the necessary parts to develope sentience though.
Don’t the words “sentience” / “sentient” originate from the French word “sentir”, which means “to feel”?
Feelings and emotions are usually used interchangeably, so if you have the capacity to feel and reflect and making meaning upon the felt experience that would make you / the organism conscious and a subset of consciousness…
I've always wondered if animals feel phantom pain. When a dog is hit by a car and its leg is messed up and in pain, then has it amputated, will it experience phantom pain like a human would?
Have you seen those amputee dogs just wheeling around? They're happy af like all the time. Idk dude. Phantom pain probably comes from thinking about the leg not being there
Animals can feel phantom limb pain.
"Development of a Phantom Limb Pain Model in Rats: Behavioral and Histochemical Evaluation" (Published 21.06.2021)
(Just copy the title into your search engine. Unfortunately RUclips deletes links not leading to RUclips ...)
@@susanne5803 thank you!
@@susanne5803 RUclips deletes links, period.
I can say and explain how human genrate feeling or emotions and how they tell the difference about good and bad by evaluate and back track there memory of past depends on the memory that what kind of memory we our recalling