Sentience?

[Cirion Spellbinder]

How do we know animals are sentient? Are there any studies you could refer me to?

[Mr. Purple]

Sentience is just being able to experience pleasure, pain, and other subjective experiences. With how biologically similar animals are to us, it would be mind blowing if they weren't sentient. They have a brain just like we do in the same place in their body, configured almost exactly like ours, complete with a nervous system including pain receptors that run through their bodies just like with humans. To me that would already answer the question, but on top of that, they behave in ways that seem sad or terrified in situations that would make us humans sad or terrified, and look happy and excited when something good happens to them. I'm all for being skeptical, but i think this is usually asked because of bias rather than skepticism. If this was really how high your bar for skepticism was, you should be seriously questioning whether other humans are sentient as well. It always surprises me that people actually have to ask this.

On the other hand, if this isn't too serious a question and you are just looking for cool animal science, then I don't blame you :p

[brimstoneSalad]

How do we know animals are sentient? Are there any studies you could refer me to?

This thread asked about it too:
https://theveganatheist.com/forum/viewt ... f=7&t=1023

Sentience is a more complex quality, made up of several simpler ones. So, you won't find a study on sentience, but you will on its components.

E.g. you'd want to find one showing that animals have true intelligence (as demonstrated by associative learning), and that animals have sense experience (as demonstrated by sight, sound, touch, pain, etc.).

Once you've shown those to be true, the logical conclusion is that they are sentient (experience sense, and understand that sense in the context of interests as proven by learning from it and responding intelligently to it and not just by reflex). It's kind of a 2+2 = 4 thing.

Specifically, the smoking gun is demonstrating operant conditioning. This proves a sense of self and environment, and basic understanding of causality, with a sense of "want".

Only moving toward or away from something doesn't prove that thing is wanted, since it could be reflexive.

"Awareness" is inherent in associative learning. All conditioned responses (not sensitized ones, which is different), are predicated on awareness.

There's a quote I think kind of highlights things, that has been floating around in cognitive science:

"The primitive sign of wanting is trying to get"

If you're trying to get something, you want it by definition. That's the root of feeling, of desire.
However, merely moving toward or away from something is not "trying to get". That would be like saying objects want to fall. In order to prove you're trying to get it, you need to modify your behavior to get it when conditioned by environments or situations that are different to what you would have evolved to live in.

Like, if you move toward the food, I take it away. If you move away from the food, I give it to you.
If you learn to move away from the food instead of toward it based on that experience, then you legitimately want the food because you have proven your behavior to be molded after obtaining it, and not merely mindless reflex.

https://theveganatheist.com/forum/viewt ... 8261#p8261

True learning is true thinking. The two can not be separated. What you'd be looking for is what impulses are driving the displayed ability of operant conditioning. What kinds of drives are pushing the animal to learn to push a button, or do another related task for the reward?

Compare two animals with superficially identical behavior. One is sentient, one is not.

When you put food in the bowls, both creatures slither to the food and eat it in their respective bowls. In this circumstance, we can't determine which is sentient.
The non-sentient one is just driven by a mechanical instinct to move toward the food, while the sentient one has learned to move toward the food because it likes it. The result is the same.

Now, when you put food in a bowl only when a button is pushed in that bowl, this changes the entire experiment.

The non-sentient one does nothing, or acts randomly, sometimes pushing the button, and then going for the food, and sometimes not.
The sentient one, on the other hand, first acts randomly, and then learns that by pushing the button (first accidentally) food is made to appear. After this, it begins pushing the button more frequently, and going for the food.

The sentient organism adapts its behavior in order to get what it wants, and the non-sentient organism acts only on reflex because it doesn't really want anything -- it just does things.

https://theveganatheist.com/forum/viewt ... 022#p13022