Interview, Fireside Chat
Highlights: Edge cases of sentience & acting ethically despite massive uncertainty | Jonathan Birch
- Dr. Jonathan Birch, a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, released the book The Edge of Sentience on August 15th, focusing on the risks of overconfidence in assessing sentience across humans, animals, and AI.
- Neonatal surgery without anesthetic was common practice in the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic, a practice sustained by surgical overconfidence regarding anesthesia risks versus the risks of operating without it.
- Public campaigns led by Jill Lawson, whose baby died after unanesthetized surgery, coincided with courageous scientific studies proving that the lack of anesthetic caused massive stress responses, reduced survival chances, and led to long-term developmental damage.
- The 1990s Task Force report on disorders of consciousness confidently stated that pain requires active cortical mechanisms, a claim made in 1994 when the science of consciousness was barely developed, effectively ruling vegetative patients as incapable of feeling pain.
- Birch argues that the 1990s error stemmed from "inductive risk," where experts valued the consequences of admitting patients might feel pain (such as increased care costs) over the precautionary principle of avoiding potential suffering.
- Concrete evidence of consciousness in disorders of consciousness often emerges through recovered patients, such as Kate Bainbridge, who provided harrowing testimony of suffering while presumed vegetative and untreated for pain.
- Research by Adrian Owen's group uses fMRI protocols asking vegetative patients to imagine specific tasks (e.g., playing tennis vs. navigating a house), generating distinct brain signatures in some patients that match healthy controls.
- Birch advocates separating the debate on fetal sentience from the legal right to abortion, arguing that abortion rights are grounded in bodily autonomy and the prevention of forced pregnancy coercion rather than fetal non-sentience.
- Tying abortion rights to fetal non-sentience is strategically dangerous because advancing science could prove sentience emerges at earlier gestational stages, potentially eroding legal protections for abortion access.
- Neural organoids are 3D models of brain tissue created from human stem cells, intended to replace animal research, though current models lack sleep-wake cycles and brainstem structures required for sentience under the Merkurd-Pankseft view.
- A 2019 study used EEG data from preterm infants to train a model that could guess the age of neural organoids better than chance, raising concerns that future organoids with ~10 million neurons may approach the complexity of a bee brain.
- The "Open Worm" project successfully emulated the entire nervous system of C. elegans (400 neurons) in software, allowing a robot to navigate environments, demonstrating the scientific value of whole-brain emulation for understanding brain function.
- Birch suggests that "Open Mouse" or "Open Fruit Fly" projects are highly likely to emerge, driven by the scientific desire to understand brain function without invasive animal experiments or to replace animal research entirely.
- The concept of "Large-scale Computational Functionalism" posits that recreating the global computations of a brain may be sufficient for sentience, even if the underlying hardware or specific algorithms differ from biological systems.
- Birch proposes using citizens' assemblies for bioethics policymaking, where scientific experts define the zone of reasonable disagreement and the public evaluates the proportionality of risks and responses.
- In a Nuffield Council on Bioethics panel regarding genome editing of farm animals, randomly selected citizens challenged expert assumptions more effectively than the experts themselves, rejecting narratives that editing would primarily improve welfare.
- The public in the genome editing case identified a risk that liberalized laws might be exploited by corporations to make animals (like chickens) fatter for profit rather than to improve animal welfare, a concern experts had overlooked.