In response to my very recent blog post about consciousness in animals a follower tweeted/posted the following:

So I thought - great. I will do this. I’ll take the advice and open my mind to alternatives. So it turns out there exists a very popular podcast on Youtube with a slick website and lots of episodes (178 as of writing this today according to the website https://www.philosophizethis.org/, although in other places on the website episode 181 https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcasts and if you go to the feed itself it says episode 187 (like on Youtube)) That might seem pedantic, but it just means things are not synched up and it makes searching for specific recent episodes a little difficult. The host, Stephen, began "Philosophize This!" as a  podcast not entirely unlike my own (ToKCast) remains - focussed just on explaining his perspective on ideas and certain thinkers. But he has moved recently more and more into another “interview” style podcast. Which is all fine - but the ones where he just speak are more illuminating about where he, personally comes from. His motto for the podcast is “Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday.” But, and this will sound terribly arrogant, at no point in over an hour listening to two episodes did I feel I learned a single thing - except about his personal approach to podcasting. Which I admit, and will come to, is interesting. And may explain why he has so many downloads and I do not by comparison. “Philosophize This!” Is hosted by Stephen West and he is even endorsed by a reviewer at University College London (no less) right here https://www.univ.ox.ac.uk/news/philosophize-this/#:~:text=The%20Philosophize%20This!,prior%20experience%20with%20the%20subject.

So that’s amazing. And he won’t be hurt by my saying that in the two episodes I heard it was less Philosophize and more “Misrepresent This” or perhaps “Misunderstand This” I will explain this further so it doesn’t seem I’m just slinging epithets. Misconceptionism after all, everywhere and I think he actually is doing something good here with the podcast. His listeners will find other thinkers - they would surely be led to Harris and some other mainstream podcasters and intellectuals and then maybe they will find David Deutsch. Which is why I say: it’s all to the good. He’s not promoting evil - he’s not out there spouting communism (from what I see) but some anti human pessimism and absolutely some prophecy some creep in. But then he is in good company there. He seems like a really nice guy. He says “Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. 
My only goal in life is to make a podcast that brightens people’s lives a little bit. I want to be the notification on your phone that doesn’t induce any stress. Thank you for making that dream of mine possible.” Which is sweet and nice and that’s great. But all that said it won’t shield him from my criticism. It’s what I do and I do not think criticism is anything but showing respect and taking ideas seriously in their own terms as I explain in many places but for example here: https://youtu.be/_vHAe86isdE?si=1Z3S1qqeJs7cndgg

Ok, let’s get to it. I listened to two episodes. The first was the episode all about the ethics of eating meat. I will come to that soon as that is the main point of my post here. The second episode I listened to was a far more recent one all about AI existential risk which can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO6ZEeH9XNM and is titled “Episode #184 ... Is Artificial Intelligence really an existential threat?” This gave me a good gauge or benchmark of whether I should listen to more of his work. In both cases the episodes made very mainstream arguments of the kind I spend my podcast steel manning (or faithfully representing as Popper admonishes!) And then refuting. Only Stephen West puts those mainstream arguments made by other thinkers through a “Philosophize This!” Filter that extracts out muchof the more sophisticated details that actually make the cases passably work in many cases. So in the one on AI (which I won’t do a full breakdown of here - I’ve already done a breakdown of the steel manned version in many places not least of which is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&list=PLsE51P_yPQCQMuCsxeUWxVWmEixmgnWJD&index=5  and here 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&list=PLsE51P_yPQCQMuCsxeUWxVWmEixmgnWJD&index=6
Stephen in his episode on AI risk basically takes as read the work of Bostrom, Yudkowsky and especially Harris and rehashes all those arguments with little criticism. I heard nothing new in the entire episode that I have not already refuted as my own listeners will be well aware of. It’s a horse I have flogged not until was it dead but cremated and buried. Yes, I’ve overdone it. So I won’t recapitulate anything here except that the podcaster fails to deal with any of the substantive criticisms of those thinkers on any of this and he comes down on the side of “alignment” and the dangers of AI and compares it to the trope of nuclear weapons and so on. It is Bostrom’s perspective to the core filtered through Harris but, as I say, filtered again through a mechanism that makes it suitable, I guess, for people with almost no interest in philosophy at all. Which I admit is a very good idea. “Philosophize This!” has 125,000 subscribers on Youtube alone. It’s a huge podcast for this kind of material. So he won’t even notice my criticism and is no doubt big enough to take it (or simply ignore me). But he desperately needs to understand universality, personhood, David Deutsch and Karl Popper. We will return to that.

His technique of reducing almost all technical arguments has the effect of straw manning even what Harris, Bostrom and those he seems to be aping are actually saying. Which means he straw mans the opponent argument even worse (as we will see in the present critique on his stuff about the ethics of eating animals). This technique, as I say, will find a large audience who has no time for technical arguments and wants something not merely mainstream but also digestible in very sugary form. This is the other end of the spectrum to people like Sean Carroll or Eric Weinstein whose podcasts at times do not shy away from reminding the listener they are professional physicists and mathematicians and so will pepper episodes with talk of topology and tensor calculus, the wavefuntion, the Dirac Delta Function, manifolds, differential geometry and lots of things only those with a graduate understanding of physics would appreciate. Fair enough - some people like that style too. I try to walk a middle line where when the technical physics and mathematics comes up I always try to explain it in plain, simple English. I try to follow not merely the arguments of Deutsch and Popper but their style. Don’t talk down to the audience but do unpack the technical stuff in a new way that you think helps people you have talked to about this stuff who don’t have a background in science and philosophy. I may fail at this and sometimes get it wrong, but that’s the aim. I don’t avoid the technical stuff but I don’t leave the technical stuff as assumed knowledge either unless in the rare instance I have just talked about it in a previous episode (see my Multiverse series for examples of this where really the 5 or 6 episodes are a sequence where we build towards something quite technical and assume one is familiar with other episodes).

So all of this is to say thankyou to my new follower on Twitter who suggested (quote) “Anyone interested in this should totally watch philosophize this’s  video on whether it’s moral to eat them.  Search him up on YouTube” - this being my post about animal consciousness. Which actually was not about whether it was “moral to eat them”. And philosophize this did not talk about consciousness so actually there isn’t a close relationship. However there is some crossover.  

But I want to thank him for the link. Genuinely it is very useful. 😊 But not for the reasons he might think. Now trigger warning again: this analysis and reflection will sound terribly harsh as perhaps the previous brief analysis of the AI one was. This one will be longer. But I did spend time listening to the entire thing at https://youtu.be/HsZsg3mlsNM?si=AdMtfT_rgbits22k called Episode #071 ... “Is Killing Animals For Food Morally Justifiable?” so unless there is yet another episode he does on this I get the idea of his ideas, his podcast and this issue in particular. And conjoined with his AI episode that I listened to straight after, I get the tone, tenor and methodology of his podcast. I get his worldview not only on these issues but approach to philosophy and epistemology. It is a kind of “Sam Harris Lite” take. I know that sounds terrible! But it’s just to give an indication of how I think he is coming from a mainstream perspective which, as I said, is further refined, so the speak, for an audience who might find even Harris too erudite and hence boring. 

Brief Interlude on the thinking behind ToKCast

Perhaps I’d have more subscribers if I employed some of the tactics of those guys with massive audiences. Or not! I may just not be to most people’s taste. And that’s ok! I know precisely where I sit in the “intellectual landscape” and it is to counter mainstream misconceptions and by definition the mainstream is the majority. So I’m appealing, a priori, to a minority. And a minority within a minority. I mean compared to Rogan, Harris is the minority (people interested in the philosophy of science, neuroscience, computation, physics and all the stuff I talk about). But he takes mainstream views on those things and so appeals to a large minority of the “majority” of people interested in long form podcasts. I’m basically over here disagreeing with everyone on lots of things so of course Harris’, Carroll’s, Weinstein’s - and well even Yaron Brook’s audience (which is itself a minority of a minority) won’t like what I have to say. The worldview of Deutsch, Popper and Feynman is a very narrow intersection of refined ideas that forms a robust but sophisticated worldview that actually is coherent. Each part of the web holds together with the other and captures the fabric of reality to serve as a beginning of infinity (did you like that? Tortured, wasn’t it?)

There’s a few things to “get” with my podcast when you come to it especially “mid stream” to a random episode and I can never find the one easy way in for people. Is it conjectural knowledge? Guessing? The woven web? “Guessing knowledge” seems to put people off - they think “relativism”. Is it “people are cosmically significant” is that my “in”? No, rationalists think “religious sounding woo”. Is it quantum computation and universality? They think: technobabble. Optimism? They think glass half full self help. The problem is we use all the regular words…we don’t neologise wherever possible (unlike Weinstein who is a master of this) and try to explain things in common sense terms. Ultimately that works against us as people begin to think “I already know this” or at the other extreme “That is so preposterous and challenges my deeply held assumption none of the rest is even worth listening to”. So, as I say: small audience. But with Naval’s help and David’s increasing popularity we are getting there.

Back to “Philosophize This!”

This is not a post intended to be about me or ToKCast (although I now have an idea for writing about what ToKCast is for those new to it). This is about the "Philosophize This!" podcast and specifically the episode “Is Killing Animals For Food Morally Justifiable?”

I’m posting part of this (what will fit) to Twitter/X and so I’m again breaking my general rule t/here about making long posts on that platform just to get this out. These are my notes as I listened:

First: the misconception of “justificationism” is right there in the title and goes on to be deeply embedded throughout the entire piece. He keeps repeating what is “morally justifiable” over and again (rather than focussing on what is known and unknown and good explanations from science and epistemology) and at one point near the end compares the whole issue to the keeping of slaves and how we changed our opinion on that which is just a common, lazy, mainstream take and trope.
Second: Stephen then moves seamlessly into moral subjectivism (asking about what’s “good for you” not objectively good.) and so litters the entire tone of the thing with what is personally right for you rather than being concerned about objective knowledge and good explanations. It’s not even a “principled” stance where we can talk fundamentals. Instead it is all couched in terms of what is “good” or “right” FOR YOU.
Now, what I thought was *good* in the podcast early on was he says he doesn’t know the answer to whether it’s “justifiable” to eat animals. Ok. So I guess he won’t be judgemental? No. He then goes on to be judgemental of those who do eat animals implying he does indeed know and thus only makes arguments for one side of the issue (all the reasons against ever eating meat). He takes it for granted that the arguments for eating meat are just known by the audience but what he assumes is completely false in his attempt to refute those assumptions. Namely: it’s just not true it’s about about “nutrition” and “taste” (for example) when it comes to the philosophy of this. I’ll come back to that.
The episode is also fixated  on how the animal suffers - like so many do. But this *begs the very question I am not*. I am asking: how can we know the animal suffers? What is the philosophical criteria? What even is suffering? He doesn’t say.

So the stuff about taste and nutrition is all irrelevant to the question but he spends a long time on it. Who actually makes that argument?
His argument from who is bigger and stronger? The idea people/humans are higher on food chain. I never actually hear that argument either *philosophically sophisticated* (like Harris or say Singer who is big on refuting arguments from meat-eaters on this) and understandably because it’s so bad. Even they don’t assume their opponents ever make those arguments. Sure, the guy down the pub might, but why are we worried about him here?
He then says, and returns to this, that all these arguments so made so far about eating other animals would also apply to eating other *people* too. This is completely wrong. No, they do not! No one makes that argument. It’s a very weak straw man.

But he makes this because at no point does he ever grapple with the crucial philosophical l question of *personhood*. What is a person? He just says more than once that we have a more “rich and vibrant experience of the world”. Again: who says *merely* that? It’s very weak. He hasn’t read the literature or listened even to someone as mainstream as Harris on this: at all.

So then he talks about aliens being better than us. Ok. So now he mentions an argument people like Harris also make. Which says very little. It’s a weak argument. Aliens would not want to eat us. If they’ve travelled across the galaxy they’re not looking for snacks on Earth and *they* understand universality and the moral qualitative difference between people and all other structures in physical reality. He doesn’t (of course then neither do the AI doomers, vegans, Singer, Harris, Gervais or anyone else pushing the “don’t eat animals” barrow).

Ultimately he comes down on the side of anti-humanism. Who are we to say we are more important than other animals? This is a standard trope. I deal with that at length in various places including directly in that post I made. This is the most obvious way in which Deutsch’s criterion of universality makes all the difference here. He’s not aware of it. Or fallibilism. Or “hard to vary” explanations. Or conjectural knowledge/Popper. Conflates pain and suffering: the main point of my post is to tease this apart. He doesn’t mention consciousness or qualia at all. Those are key.

None of this was at all insightful or made me think anything else he says would be worth listening to, I’m afraid. Again: that sounds a little harsh but we need heuristics in this world and “Philosophize This!” does not seem to have anything interesting on this issue to say in terms of actual, legitimate philosophy. He could change his channel, on the basis of this episode to “Misrepresent this”. That would be closer to the mark.

But as I say: thankyou to my follower for the link as it gives me an important insight into how yet another “type” of thinker goes about reasoning on these issues and representing their opponents and what the standard of discourse in general is. Even on “philosophy” podcasts.

Abstract:


We still do not know if animals have "consciousness" because we just do not know what consciousness is yet. We can ascribe it to other people because they can explain they have it as I explain below in "Consciousness and Creativity". Animals close to us socially (cats, dogs (especially) and farm animals (such as cows, pigs, etc) and great apes and even monkeys which is to say largely those animals that have coevolved with humans in one sense or another display individual preferences (and hence “personalities). But those preferences are all due to genetic variation alone and so lead solely to entirely inborn behaviours  or recombinations of inborn behaviours ("behaviour parsing". I.e: they’re due entirely to genetic *variation* (especially in dogs). This may indicate the presence of a kind of "mind" software running on the brains of those animals but in any case this "mind" is of an altogether qualitatively different kind to the mind of a person able to in principle universally explain the worlds both actual ad possible; physical and imagined. 

Introduction
Whether the existence of a rudimentary "mind" in dog or chimpanzee brains confers the experience of anything at all (qualia or consciousness) on them is *unknown*. Hence whether they experience pain as we do is unknown. But whether it gives them the capacity to explain anything is known. They cannot. so they cannot suffer - which is “pain” but with the capacity to explain it (even inexplicitly).
And because we do not know what consciousness is, we cannot know if animals suffer. Let me explain!

​On the distinction between pain and suffering

Suffering and pain are not the same thing. Pain comes in many forms: physical (stress and distress) and mental (anguish). Physical distress is what most people think of when they think of pain. That's the sort associated with injuries: broken bones, cuts, burns, surgery recovery, headache, stomach ache and far worse. We all know some of this with some of us unfortunate enough to experience the worst of it. Living long enough the sad truth is many of us will experience some of the worst of it and we will beg for the soothing salves of modern pharmacological pain relief in the form of everything from mild analgesics through to the most powerful opiates science (in the form of highly expensive to do and carefully managed pharmaceutical research) has struggled to develop and refine. Thank God - or rather capitalism and science for that!

Then there is the pain that is merely a consequence of stress but not distress. This difference makes all the difference in the mind of a person. I have pain working out. Actual athletes no doubt have even more. But are we in distress? Ok, so some in Olympic Marathons might be. But in general, no. We enjoy training. I might feel "pain" when working out or running but I am also listening to my favourite upbeat music and I can reinterpret the pain signals as an indication to do more, go heavier, go faster and it actually begins to feel just a bit pleasurable. There's a fine line between pleasure and pain, as The Divynals sang:

"It's a fine line between pleasure and pain
You've done it once, you could do it again
Whatever you done, don't try to explain
It's a fine, fine line between pleasure and pain
/
Why do you push? Why do you push?
/
Break my body with the back of your hand
Doesn't make sense from where I stand
/
Please don't ask me
How I've been getting off
Ha, no, please don't ask me
How I've been getting off
/
Pleasure and pain (It's all the same)
You've done it once, you could do it again (It's all the same)
Whatever you done, don't try to explain (It's all the same)
It's a fine, fine line between pleasure and pain"

But only for people, right? Not animals. They (perhaps!) experience pain. They cannot tell us. We cannot rule out Descartes' argument that they might just be like a plucked violin. They make all the sounds as if they have emotion, but do they? Is it just a mindless automaton response that elicits in other animals mindless responses? But why? Well why anything in evolution? Survival? Why survival? Why life? Like Agent Smith interrogating Neo in The Matrix. Smith is not supposed to be "human" - he is supposed to lack empathy - perhaps even emotion. He is not a real person. He is the trope of "artificial intelligence" - a form of existence I do not think is physically possible (for one thing Smith gets increasingly angry in the following exchange which adds to the drama but undermines the philosophy). But let us put that aside for now lest I get sidetracked. Angent Smith says in one scene of "Matrix: Revolutions"

Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting... for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although... only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson?! Why?!! Why do you persist?!!!
Neo : Because I choose to.

People are unique in physical reality

​So people are a qualitative step above, beyond and on a different staircase altogether compared with what other animals are and the Matrix is confused at times with respect to providing a coherent philosophical perspective nonetheless it asks some of the right questions. By "people" I mean our erstwhile ancestors and ancient cousins bipedal hominid cousins who likewise had this capacity, extraterrestrial intelligence that must and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which will.

The observation that other animals also vie for survival on a finite planet does not indicate the existence of qualia in what might be mindless biological robots for all we know. Survival alone isn't an explanation. And animals don't know why they want to survive. Even we cannot say why animals seem to desire to survive. But we can explain why we do. We explain that we choose to, as Neo says above. This makes all the difference. Smith apparently has no choice. So he doesn't understand this. On this, the script writers were correct. If Smith is a "mindless" suoerintelligence he does not understand choice. But we do. He must just do what he is doing - destroy the Matrix. He has a purpose. The purpose does not change. He is turning the world into paperclips and cannot reflect on why. But he can only not reflect on that very purpose. ON everything else, he seems to have a general capacity to reflect. This is a paradox unresolved in AI doomer circles.

In any case, pain, for us, is a different kind of thing as compared to what other animals "experience" if they experience anything at all when a bodypart of theirs is damaged. Our pain, the pain of people, comes with an explanation. If it's the good kind from working out, when we are not in distress, even if the physical sensation is the same for a heavily worked out muscle as for a strained one we can interpret the former as fine, even pleasurable while the latter evokes suffering.

Suffering is pain with an explanation (of why it is bad).

Animals cannot explain anything ergo, they cannot suffer - in the way I have explained what suffering is - which is the way I think that matters. People understand the possibility of the future and pain, that we regard as bad, we expect to continue into the future causes us suffering. Grief over a lost person, concern about losing someone, how a recently broken bone will hurt for days or weeks yet to come and cause us to be immobilised. Some do say it is possible to learn this power - but I admit I have not myself, yet.

So far I have said little different to anything else I have said on the topic here. But let me add some things I have not previously or failed to emphasise or simply expressed poorly. And that is the following:

Cats and Dogs have preferences and personalities. But why?

Cats, dogs (especially) - cows and horses perhaps (i.e: especially animals that have coevolved with humans) or animals that most closely resemble humans in terms of hardware (nervous systems) and software (the code that controls their behaviour) - in other words all great apes, but also monkeys do have rather (and more or less) individual preferences (and hence “personalities") but they’re all inborn or recombinations of inborn behaviours. They "behaviour parse". See the work of Richard Byrne on this: https://pages.ucsd.edu/~johnson/COGS260/Byrne2003.pdf or the index of "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch for a more refined and succinct explanation of Byrnes work on this. Who is all just to say: yes! Those differences in personality are due entirely to genetic *variation* (including, notably, in dogs). This gives a strong illusion of being "human like" - but only in comparison to animals that do not show so much variation. I am thinking the trope of literal sheep who are supposed to all behave alike. Although shepards no doubt disagree. Carefully edited documentaries of things like meerkats and kangaroos give a false (overly strong) impression of personalities where there are none. Or at least the variation is minimal. Or take it more simple still - rodent like mice. Or starlings. Or fish. Let alone mosquitos. The genetic variation causing behavioural differences is minor meaning their preferences are due entirely to minor differences in their DNA.

With dogs genetic variation between breeds is large so we expect the genetic variation in behaviour (i.e: "personalities") to be large too. And these creatures can behaviour parse in very different ways.

Do animals suffer? Can we avoid suffering as it includes the worst qualia people can experience.

So, do  animals suffer? Perhaps. They experience pain is my guess and close to that of humans - but they do not suffer. Pain is just a kind of first blush "detection" of damage utilising circuitry the evolved in our ancient ancestors. But other animals today do not suffer. This pain experience they have, if experience it is, does not lead them to an appreciation that this experience (for example) means the end is near. Although they do seem to mourn death at times as dogs, elephants, whales and gorillas do. They do seem in pain or sad. That demands an explanation. Maybe they can explain some very limited things inexplicitly. But they are not universal and so their suffering, if it exists at all, is, thankfully, bounded. Small mercies. Maybe they already have a kind of native enlightenment without effort. I've often thought that having seen some pets near the end of their lives, in some pain, but going quiet, as if they have accepted it. Our suffering is not "natively so enlightened in that way - even if some are "enlightened" like James Pierce here: https://www.james-pierce.com/writings/the-experience-of-enlightenment and on suffering James says:

Conclusions to my new editorial on animal suffering

So, I do not think animals can suffer though they may experience pain. But if they can suffer, their suffering is bounded and in any case we are not condemned to suffering. We can learn to experience the world better because we are universal explainers. Animals are not - even the more "sophisticated" ones.

In animals - especially those close to people (both genetically like apes and close socially like dogs and cats) display great genetic variation and the existence of literal memes. This implies something like a mind, but nothing like our mind. Moreover this does not necessarily confer upon them qualia or consciousness. It may but that is, for now, *unknown*. Hence whether they experience pain *as we do* is unknown. But whether it gives them the capacity to explain anything is known. They cannot. so they cannot suffer - which is “pain” but with the capacity to explain it (even inexplicitly). 

Which is all to say: I still do not know as I admitted here: https://www.bretthall.org/humans-and-other-animals.html

But I wish to make clear, what I said there by emphasising these very real possibilities as outlined in my abstract above.