Citation

Author Website

https://willalane.com/

https://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/people/nsc22%40cam.ac.uk

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Jonathan Birch, Précis of The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI

Abstract

Birch's (2024) The Edge of Sentience identifies sentience candidates primarily through the pain-focused LSE Criteria. Yet, as Birch himself notes in Proposal 17, sentience is not pain. We argue that statutory welfare protections must therefore reach beyond pain, and that the right tool for doing so is Birch et al.’s (2020) dimensionality framework, which characterises conscious experience across five domains. Used together, the LSE Criteria establish that welfare is at stake, while the dimensionality framework maps what is at stake beyond pain to provide a taxon-specific profile of where captivity impoverishes experience. We apply this approach to invertebrate welfare and call for statutory, expert-informed, and regularly reviewed care standards for cephalopods, decapod crustaceans, and other sentience candidates.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License

Author Biography

Willa M. Lane is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of Cambridge, funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust. Her research focuses on skin patterning, visual processing, and cognition in cephalopods.  Website

Nicola S. Clayton is Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology and Director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Clare College, and Fellow of the Royal Society. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1937