Vegans: Let's Stop Lying About Sentience. (w. Stijn Bruers)

what do i mean with sentience there are
actually two properties first you need a consciousness that means how it feels like a an awareness like i can touch the table and i know how it feels like when i touch the table so you also need a second property that's a utility function now that means preferences positive and negative evaluations we need to demonstrate two things whether the insect is conscious and whether the insect has a utility function what we do know is that insects they have an integrated behavioral control system in the brain so a lot of perceptual inputs vision touch smell and they have to integrate it flies for example have a consciousness in the sense that they are consciously aware of their body position in space also complex learning systems a nice experiment with bumblebees they can learn to roll balls to a target in the middle there's a target and then they get a droplet of sweet sugar water um these bumblebees can easily learn this task to roll the ball into you can look at the video on youtube how they learn it when the balls have another color they again know how to do it and also you can see it in this experiment some of the balls are closer to the target in the middle and they choose to roll the ball that's closest to the targets they choose to roll that ball so they know that they're lazy that's kind of complex learning you can see it's a kind of tool use so for example fruit flies they like alcohol and they don't lack electric shocks so you can yeah these are animal experiments i have to say warn you give them electric shocks and if the electric shock is really small then they say i can endure it i prefer alcohol above the electric shock so i go for the out for the alcohol and i get an electric shock but when you increase the the level of the electric shock at one point the trade-off goes in the other way and say now the electric shock is worse than then the alcohol is good for me so i no longer go to the alcohol this kind of switching the trade-off that means they have a complex utility function um they have to be able to compare the preference for alcohol and the preference for no electric shocks with these also they have communication complex utility functions and especially they can communicate so they can make trade-offs and you know about the b dance the vocal tense this is a how they communicate their own trade-offs that's even more complex it's not that they can compare preferences but they can also communicate about it the b tells to the other bees first the flower abundance how many flowers are there how sweet are they the distance and predation risk and that's complex for the other bees to understand like okay now we have to compare predation risk with distance um a sense of the future that's also a nice one you can make trade-offs between your preferences now and your preferences in the nearby future that requires kind of self-control you know about the marshmallow tests so the toddlers they go for the small the one marshmallow now instead of the two marshmallows later they don't have self-control yet with beasts for example they can learn self-control and you can give them the choice between one small droplet of sugar water now or more sugar water later and they can learn to choose more water later the other day my girlfriend melissa told me that she saw a new video from a natural vegan and i said wow i'm really glad you saw it and i didn't see it because i'd probably be compelled to make some kind of caddy response video if i were so unfortunate as to see it here i was minding my own business and engaged in an activity that a natural vegan herself would definitely approve of i was in fact ordering a huge tub of vegan protein powder online when to my great misfortune i clicked on and started listening to in the background the new video from a natural vegan okay now let's talk about sentience i brought this up in one of my recent videos criticizing and replying to a natural vegan and i did actually get several messages sent in to me i received messages in different forms different content saying oh no no no unnatural vegan just misspoke she really does understand the strict definition of sentience she just happened to use her words incorrectly when she made the ridiculous claim ridiculous that social insects such as bees and ants when she made the claim that insects do not have sentience or that scientists are genuinely divided and are yet to determine whether or not they have sentience now a game that unnatural vegan likes to play with her opponents is have you even looked that word up in a dictionary she does that all the time i've seen her done it and all do it all kinds of snotty and insincere ways let's look up the word sentient in the dictionary sentient able to perceive or feel things sentient sentience has to do with feeling period and that's in the etymology of the word going back to original latin usage sentience is about feeling it's not about dreaming it's not about planning for the future it's not about complex philosophical cognition feeling now many people are misled as to what sentience is because most of the debates we hear about it in modern western culture growing up are from science fiction where we're normally talking about the emergence of sentience um amongst computers or robots and we have this dream this fantasy that computers develop more and more sophisticated uh capabilities in terms of memory and seeming intelligence and then at some point when they're incredibly advanced they cross over a threshold from not merely mimicking human intelligence from not merely following human instructions they pass over a threshold into being genuinely sentient in their own right this script has played out on i think on every major science fiction tv show definitely including the star trek the next generation series and numerous others star trek the next generation had one episode where the robot character the android is literally put on trial to determine whether or not he's he's accountable for his decisions in the same way that human being is whether he is in some sense sentient or truly alive or truly aware now that puts in people's mind the expectation that when we are debating animal sentience we look at a dog as if it were a computer or a very advanced robot that the dog mimics human emotions that it mimics human reason and that it follows human instructions that humans can train the dog to perform complex tasks in the same way that we train a computer or train aurora to but only at some higher level do they become sentient and this is completely false the reason why computers and robots are thought of this way and not animals is precisely because sentience is about feeling it's about response to stimuli now even if you did not know that there's a relatively advanced test for self-awareness self-awareness is not the same as sentience which is called the mirror test okay i quote wikipedia a belgian study from 2015 proved that three different species of ant gives the latin names for the three different species of ant did pass the mirror test this is a test where they take an ant and they put a tiny dot of blue paint on the ant's face apparently face is not the scientifically correct term to use for an ant but we continue nevertheless and they see if the ant recognizes that this is a picture of oneself when it looks in the mirror takes an interest sees the blue dot and then feels at its own face trying to get rid of or deal with the blue dot so in other words the ant doesn't just look at the mirror and imagine that it's seeing a different ant it looks in the mirror and realizes this is a reflection of myself and this is proven ostensibly by the fact that the ant doesn't try to scratch the blue dot on the mirror it tries to scratch the blue dot on its own face wondering what this what this double pane is and the test there are tests to make sure that the ant doesn't just know that the blue dot is there anyway whether or not they investigate the blue dot when left to their own devices without a mirror whether they're aware of it somehow by by feeling or what have you this is not the case okay ants ants do not merely have sentience they have an advanced enough level of self-awareness that it shows up in the highly imperfect frankly mirror test for advanced cognitive abilities for self-reflection for self-awareness that's not sentience so unnatural vegan has now repeatedly claimed that insects do not have sentience and she has now suggested she has now recommended eating oysters because she claims some scientists some scientists think that oysters do not have sentience what's really significant here are not the details of the proof that oysters yes even the lowly oyster is indeed sentient what's really worth reflecting on is the motivation of the liar and why she is lying to you in both cases veganism as an ethic is based on doing the best you can possibly do and we all admit in some ways being perfectly vegan in 2018 is impossible i do not know for a fact but i would assume that the the paint on the walls of this apartment is not vegan you can look that up a very large percentage of indoor paints are not vegan the glue that holds my carpet to the ground is probably not vegan i don't know that i didn't buy this carpet i didn't install it um the glue that keeps the sole of my shoes attached to the shoe is quite possibly non-vegan although from my perspective i made every effort to buy a vegan shoe the shoe doesn't have leather we live in a world that is in this way unbelievably imperfect from a vegan perspective we live in a world where i can make every effort to only buy bread that is vegan but when i sit down in a restaurant the bread they serve me the waiter may tell me it's vegan but it actually contains chemical additives like l-cysteine and the waiter probably doesn't even know what l-cysteine is there are trace amounts of things that are non-vegan we all live we struggle with the impossibility of being a hundred percent vegan in a world that is zero percent vegan okay with that having been duly noted if you sincerely believe that an oyster is something inert and unfeeling it puts you in the absurd position of believing that the parasites that live on the back of the oyster have more animal rights than the oyster itself there are smaller sea creatures that have a very hard tongue that affix themselves to the shell of the oyster and gradually drill through the shell of the oyster to eat the oyster within these parasites are somewhat famous in human history because people would intentionally collect them crush them kill them to produce a shade of purple dye that was associated with royalty associated with the purple robes of the emperor in uh ancient rome i believe it was associated with royalty in various medieval cultures in europe they're after this is a famous form of of purple dye coming from a a an entirely sentient creature you know there are tiny little crawfish in the ocean there are tiny little creatures like that if you just want something you can you can imagine that have eyes and a heart and a mouth that have all the moving parts we can recognize as indicating life in a way that oysters do not and there are little creatures like that that literally live on the back of the oyster so if you commit to this pernicious view this excuse that the oyster itself deserves no animal rights because it doesn't meet your ridiculous fictional made-up definition of sentience your definition of sentience that has more to do with the fictional character of commander data on star trek and you goddamn know it your definition of sentience that you didn't even bother to check against a common dictionary let alone look into the medical and scientific literature about how sentience and self-awareness are tested in the sciences you would have to lament the fact that vega that oysters are still not vegan because it is completely inevitable that you are scraping off and killing smaller creatures that live on the back of the oysters as parasites in order to kill and eat the oyster think about how ridiculous that is do oysters feel yes they do they respond to stimuli oysters all oysters have very simple eyes on their top surface for lack of a better an anatomical term here they can detect the difference between shadow and light at low tide when they open when they are yawning if a bird flies overhead such as a seagull they will suddenly snap shut this has been incredibly commonly observed since ancient times if a dog wanders along and tries to eat an oyster again this has been observed and there are fisherman's stories about it what have you tries to stick its nose in most often tries to stick its tongue in the oyster will snap shut in self-defense and the dog will then drown to death when the tide comes in in complete misery as you can imagine this is the sort of thing that in fisherman's villages in seaside villages even though it's only observed once in a while was very memorable for people there were a lot of funny stories around about the oyster that managed to kill a dog obviously if you actually look at videotape of oyster behavior at the bottom of the deep blue sea you see all kinds of other examples oysters actually are motile they actually do relocate they uh go through a procedure of floating up a little bit in the water and then uh slamming shut in order to scoot themselves along and try to get into a relatively relatively advantageous position i have read genuine scientific reports discussing and describing this and how this was how this phenomenon was first discovered and then how in laboratories they tried to figure out how oysters actually relocate the mystery being that oysters have such primitive sensory organs how do they figure out you know how do they figure out their upside down and things like this this was kind of the interest from a scientific perspective but none of those scientific reports had any doubt that oysters qualified as sentient i understand why meteors want to mystify themselves and others as to the meaning of the word sentient because they're people who are to be blunt really into making excuses for murder what i do not understand is why anyone anyone who is ostensibly vegan no matter how little sincerity you may have no matter how little sympathy for the animals you may have no matter how little concern for ecology you may have no matter how small your sense of personal responsibility may be what motivates you to make these excuses to pass off pseudoscience as science to lie now repeatedly about the nature and definition of sentience for insects and oysters to make people feel better about their bad habits to encourage people to eat honey and oysters and mushed up bugs in bug paste i suppose what is it that motivates you to try to draw this line in a way that's ultimately going to flatter and perpetuate the needless exploitation of animals by human beings veganism is about doing the best you can and you may have to kill cockroaches every day you may have to don't make the excuse don't kid yourself the cockroaches are alive they're sentient they desire they feel they suffer and they die and if you've got to kill them don't take any joy in it don't indulge in any kind of self-deception face up to your own moral responsibility accept the imperfections that come with this life buckle down and live it you