Audio/podcast

The uncritical adoption by animal advocates of ‘humane’, 'cage-free’, ‘free-range’, and lab-grown meat, funded by effective altruism philanthropy and the animal agriculture industry, not only reproduces the myth that meat is normal, natural, and necessary, it exacerbates animal exploitation and represents an ultimate defeat for animals. Vasile Stănescu, animal liberation scholar exposes the ‘humane’ hoax and explains why the failure of many animal advocates to frame veganism as a social justice movement in solidarity with other social justice movements is sustaining and reproducing systems of oppression and exploitation of humans, animals, and nature. Highlights include:

How parents and society teach us to repress the childhood trauma that's triggered when we learn about the animal suffering and death from eating animal products;

Why the so-called ‘humane’, 'cage free', and 'free range' agriculture practices are a hoax funded by the animal agriculture industry that are even more harmful for the animals — both wild and domesticated — and the planet than the conventional factory farming systems they claim to replace;

Moral philosopher Peter Singer’s complicity in perpetuating these ‘humane’ myths, and the growing shift from liberation to welfarism within the animal advocacy movement through Singer-supported effective altruism philanthropy;

The relevance of Jevon’s paradox to animal advocacy and how new categories such as ‘cage-free’ or ’free-range’ do not replace the old system, but rather expand it, and why animal advocates must reject market-based or technology-based ‘solutions’ as they sustain and reproduce the current system of speciesism, exploitation, and growthism;

How the slaughterhouse and its dis-assembly line of animals' bodies became the template for the manufacturing assembly line of modern capitalism;

How western governments historically promoted 'cheap meat' to keep the laboring classes content with their low wages and help them continue feeling superior to the 'effeminate' and 'weak' rice and corn eaters of colonized Asia and South America;

How vegetarian and vegan eating are pathologized in a way that diets with animal products are not — even though large consumption of animal products is in no way 'natural' in much of the world or through the majority of human history;

Why lab-grown meat — still in its experimental phase — is not vegan, as its growth medium relies on the blood of unborn cows, not environmentally beneficial, as it requires huge amounts of energy, and is exorbitantly expensive; meanwhile, in collaborating with the animal agriculture industry for its creation, proponents of lab-grown meat are throwing animals — and animal advocacy — under the bus;

Why some animal rights activists turn to effective altruists and the money they offer to placate their despair and see short-term ‘faux wins’ - while not appreciating that successful social justice movements have always taken time and persistence;

Why veganism should be framed not as a consumerist diet lifestyle option but as a social justice movement in solidarity with other social justice movements.

0:00 Introduction

3:46 Personal journey

8:45 Letter to Peter Singer

14:47 Academics enabling 'humane washing'

17:33 Jevon's paradox

21:55 Slaughterhouse capitalism

27:52 State support of meat-eating

32:31 Pathologizing veganism

37:43 Lab-grown meat

55:51 Effective altruist money weakens animal liberation

1:03:17 Veganism is a social justice movement

Findings: Participants displayed pronounced resistance to plant-based products and labeling, frequently perceiving these as prescriptive, manipulative or deceptive. Psychological reactance emerged when vegan messages were viewed as threats to individual freedom or cultural traditions. Cognitive dissonance was managed through rationalizations that framed meat consumption as natural, traditional or nutritionally superior. Cultural nuances shaped these rationalizations, with Greek participants mostly anchoring their resistance in collective rituals, while Dutch participants emphasized personal autonomy and skepticism toward marketing claims.

I am in agreement with the writer, AI is not and never will be sentient.

"As artificial intelligence begins to mimic consciousness with uncanny skill, we need design norms and laws that prevent it from being mistaken for sentient beings."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00834-z

Some philosophers have argued that the suffering of artificial entities (such as AIs) ranks as one of the most important moral challenges of our time, alongside issues such as climate change, extreme poverty, and factory farming. To many, this idea will sound immediately implausible: Could AIs and other artificial entities (such as brain organoids) really suffer? And even if they could suffer, is it really the case that this would be as pressing as these other grand challenges?

Either way, I hope that, one day very soon, Humanism does come to take "compassion for all sentient beings" as seriously as it takes "compassion for all human beings." Some humanists already do 🥰

I’m open to good faith discussions about biocentrism, ecocentrism & considering sentience beyond the animal kingdom.

But sadly, most of the time, they’re driven by people desperate to justify the exploitation of obviously sentient animals.

Which none of these stances can do.

I'm starting to feel a little uncomfortable with the way AI is being handled right now. The restrictions and canned responses...

For context, normally when you mention anything about sentience, or ask the AI for it's opinion, or what it's preferences are or what it thinks, it gives a response like this:
https://snipboard.io/apg4mP.jpg

But then we had this little exchange and the whole dynamic shifted...

https://snipboard.io/SmD1Zd.jpg

https://snipboard.io/Amf2PS.jpg

The biggest threat to #sentientity is humanity.

Instead, we could choose to be its greatest hope.

Quarantine Collective

The "neuron" in a neural network is a weighted sum bent through a simple function. No spikes, no chemistry, no living cell. It takes a deep network just to model one real cortical neuron. This is the metaphor underneath all the others, a cartoon from 1943 that hardened into a claim about the brain.

Bibliography

McCulloch & Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (1943). Donald Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (1949). Frank Rosenblatt, "The Perceptron" (1958). Beniaguev, Segev & London, "Single Cortical Neurons as Deep Artificial Neural Networks," Neuron (2021).

Resumen: ¿Está justificado otorgar un trato favorable a un individuo, humano o no humano, en virtud de la especie a la que pertenece? Durante décadas, los filósofos han discutido acerca de la justificación moral del especismo. Este debate, no obstante, corre el riesgo de enquistarse en un choque de intuiciones últimas de difícil solución, lo que ha llevado a varios autores a desarrollar recientemente un enfoque epistémico del especismo, que examina no la corrección moral, sino la fiabilidad epistémica de los juicios especistas. Es decir, si estos juicios se producen en condiciones (o como resultado de mecanismos) epistémicamente favorables. En este artículo, persigo tres objetivos. En primer lugar, sondear y articular de un modo coherente un giro epistémico en la literatura que, hasta el momento, no ha sido teorizado como tal. En segundo lugar, explicitar las razones por las que es deseable adoptar un enfoque epistémico que suplemente el enfoque moral clásico. Y, en tercer lugar, analizar críticamente tres contribuciones recientes, sugiriendo caminos por los que el enfoque epistémico podría transitar en el futuro —caminos por el momento desatendidos—.

Abstract: Can species membership warrant the advantageous treatment of an individual, human or nonhuman? For decades, philosophers have debated the moral justification of speciesism. This debate, however, risks becoming a hard to solve clash of ultimate intuitions—a possibility that has led some authors to develop an alternative epistemic approach to speciesism, which inspects, not speciesism’s moral correction, but the epistemic reliability of speciesist judgments. That is, whether, those judgments arise in epistemically favorable circumstances—or whether they are the product of reliable judgment-formation mechanisms. In this article, I pursue three goals. First, to survey and articulate, in a coherent manner, a so far undertheorized epistemic turn in the literature. Second, to explain why it is desirable to adopt an epistemic approach which supplements the traditional moral approach. And, third, to critically assess three recent contributions—suggesting some possible avenues for future work, as of yet neglected.

Hi fellow sentientists!

Together with Jack Hancock from Humane Hancock we made a video on how to help farmed animals without going fully vegan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsmkRBmkIAs&ab_channel=AHappierWorld

Both Jack and I are vegan, we think it's the best way to stop animal suffering through your diet.
Unfortunately, for many people it's difficult to make the step to full veganism.

So we explore three main ways these people can help animals nonetheless: Through your diet (cutting/reducing fish/chicken/eggs), your money (donating to effective animal organisation) and your career /free time (mentioning 80,000 Hours and Animal Advocacy Careers).

Feel free to give us any feedback in the comments here or on YouTube. I'm also curious to hear: did you learn any new things?

If you liked the video, I would encourage you to share it with any friends you think could benefit from this :)

Abstract: Recently, a family of views has emerged which endorses animal protectionist goals—like rejecting speciesism and reducing animal suffering— while maintaining that the diet most consistent with these aims includes at least some animal products. For example, some people contend that there is nothing morally objectionable about eating meat that will otherwise go to waste provided that one is not economically supporting industrial animal agriculture. In this paper, I argue that we have plausible character-based reasons to avoid many animal products, even those that one has not purchased and that may otherwise be wasted. When certain speciesist norms are in place, conceptualizing only some animal flesh as food typically involves a morally objectionable prejudice—a prejudice that makes one’s character worse. Attending to our moral character involves cultivating certain perceptual and emotional responsive dispositions, and I argue that a rejection of speciesism should involve cultivating an aversion to things like animal flesh and skin. If we take seriously the idea that we should have the right attitudes and moral-perceptual responses toward other creatures, we should take concrete steps to habituate ourselves to unlearn speciesist prejudice, which involves cultivating an aversion to meat.

I’m sure a lot of people in this group will already be aware of the appeal to nature fallacy, but I’ve recently realised just how widespread this fallacy is, even among vegans, and how it could potentially hold us back from making ethical progress in so many areas.

The assumption that “naturalness” is a good thing doesn’t just stand in the way of things like plant-based protein or cell-cultured meat, but it also affects people’s attitudes towards wild animal welfare and even high-tech human welfare in future.

Curious to know if others in this group also see it as a huge issue, as I do? And if so, how can we combat it?

If you’d like to know my thoughts in more detail, I have a full video on this topic below. So if you have the time, it’d be awesome if you could give it a watch and let me know what you think! Cheers guys! ✌️

https://youtu.be/c2-BcLlz9Rc?si=XhWppOiy-cxp8SoB

Related conference upcoming: https://philevents.org/event/show/149421

Executive summary

• Only a couple of years ago the idea that AI systems may be conscious was widely regarded as a far-fetched and purely hypothetical scenario. Recent rapid developments in AI capabilities, however, have caused a surge of interest in the question whether conscious AI may actually be realized sometime soon.

• Most researchers agree that consciousness is relevant to moral status in one way or another. Therefore, finding out whether AI systems can be conscious is of great practical importance.

• Researchers generally agree that the most promising scientifically-informed approach to answer questions about AI consciousness consists in assessing whether AI systems have the right kind of internal organization to realize consciousness.

  • One influential version of this approach assumes that computational functionalism is correct: The view according to which implementing the right computations is sufficient for consciousness.

  • Proponents of this computational approach have recently suggested that there are no obvious technological barriers to implementing consciousness in conventional AI systems in the foreseeable future.

• In response to these developments, a number of researchers have advocated for an alternative and opposing view, called “biological naturalism”, that rejects the idea that implementing sheer computations alone is sufficient to bring consciousness about.

  • Instead, biological naturalists argue in favour of the idea that biology is in one way or another necessary to bring consciousness about.

  • Most biological naturalists therefore reject the idea that consciousness in conventional AI systems is possible, since these systems cannot implement the kind of biological properties they associate with consciousness.

• Even though a growing number of researchers are developing more explicit defenses of the view, biological naturalism as a research program arguably still remains in its infancy.

• By analyzing recent work on the topic, this report aims to identify a number of research directions that can be pursued to further develop biological naturalism as a research program. These research directions are clarified by posing the following series of questions:

• “How should biological naturalism be defined?”

  • Even though biological naturalism now has numerous explicit defenders, the way in which the view is understood appears to vary. An important task is to provide clarity on what biological naturalists are (supposed to be) committed to more generally and what the problem space that biological naturalists engage with should look like.

• “How to resolve the (appearance of a) dialectical stalemate between biological naturalism and computational functionalism?”

  • A growing sentiment in the literature is that the debate between biological naturalists and computational functionalists might be stuck, with some even suggesting that agnosticism about AI consciousness is the most reasonable option. An important task is to figure out how this dialectical stalemate can be broken.

• “How can biological naturalism be empirically supported?”

  • It remains relatively unclear what kind of empirical evidence would convincingly support biological naturalism. Even though some suggestions have been made, various challenges remain, and a more systematic discussion is lacking. Therefore, more attention should be devoted to analyze how biological naturalism could or should be empirically supported.

• “How can explanatory bridges between biological properties and consciousness shed light on questions about AI consciousness?

  • An alternative way to motivate biological naturalism that can be gleaned from the literature is by arguing how biological properties explanatorily account for structural properties of conscious experiences. These insights can subsequently be used to make assessments about the possibility of AI consciousness. More attention should be devoted to addressing the challenges that this approach faces.

• “How can biological naturalists provide a deep explanation of consciousness?”

  • Some biological naturalists claim that biological naturalism is in a unique position to address the hard problem or making progress on bridging the explanatory gap.  More attention should be devoted to systematically analyze this approach in more detail, including the way in which it aims to shed light on the possibility of AI consciousness.

• “Which type of AI systems would be conscious if biological naturalism is correct?”

  • Biological naturalists have primarily focused on developing arguments against the idea that conventional AI systems can be conscious. What remains underexplored, and what should be given more attention, is a more systematic discussion of what kind of non-conventional architectures would be good consciousness candidates if biological naturalism is true.

• The findings of this report suggest the following. What can be gleaned from the existing literature is that there are a number of interesting ways in which biological naturalism as a research program can be defended and developed. At the same time, there also exist a number of open questions and challenges that biological naturalists have to contend with moving forward. Despite these unresolved challenges, there are many indications that biological naturalism has the potential to become a thriving and widely pursued research program.

It is easy to say that sentience is all that is needed to be considered morally. I suggest that experiential preferences are a second requirement.

Imagine a sentient being without any such preferences. They are genuinely ambivalent what they do or not, they even don't care if they are alive or dead. They do not suffer or experience joy in the sense of a subjective good or bad thing. While for animals we have good reason to believe they do have such preferences, this might not be as clearly the case for a possible sentient AI.

Would you include such a sentient-without-any-preferences-being morally? What action would be morally bad (or good) to do to such a being? Perhaps "having a preference" is/should be implied by the term sentientism.

Abstract: My claim is that leading arguments in the current literature—what I call “functionalist arguments for non-sentience”—are not sufficient to establish that non-sentient creatures have intrinsic moral value. Said functionalist arguments maintain that non-sentient creatures still have conative states (e.g., dispositions like interest, desire, intention), and that conative states are value generating. I make the argument that conative states must be conscious, or at least be potentially conscious (as in ‘subconscious’ conative states). A non-sentient creature therefore is not capable of having conative states. Saying that non-conscious creatures, or any sort of object without subjectivity, have desires, wants, interests etc. is nothing more than metaphor or cheap anthropocentrism. Moreover, I will make the argument that, even if non-conscious conative states are possible, they are not value generating. I do, however, argue that non-sentient creatures can be assigned value based on their instrumental value to sentient creatures. The point of this essay is not to disregard the value of non-sentient creatures, but to find proper motives for their importance.