4. Jamie Woodhouse on Sentientism plus Humanist Approaches to Asylum Policy

This week's episode focusses on humanistic approaches to both human and animal rights issues.  Following recent proposed changes to the UK's asylum policy,   AJ, Audrey (Assoc. Black Humanists) & James explore humanistic perspectives on immigration, climate change and the role of empathy in approaching global political issues.

In our guest interview with Jamie Woodhouse of Sentientism.info, we explore  how animals rights should be incorporated into Humanism, the goals of the growing Sentientism movement and Jamie's views on AI, lab grown meat and defining 'Sentience'.

Our panel also share their views on whether Humanists should go vegan and become Sentientists. Finally our mailbag question poses, whether a humanist can retain religious faith.

References:
BBC: Anti-gay discrimination not qualification for asylum, says Suella Braverman
Humanists UK Seeking sanctuary: research into apostate asylum claims
Humanists International: Supporting individuals at risk

More on Jamie Woodhouse:
Sentientism.info
Twitter
Facebook
Sentientism Youtube Channel
Sentientism Podcast
Is Sentientism the future of humanism? Watch Jamie's Talk with CLH, April 2023

Upcoming events:
Central London Humanists Upcoming Events
Association of Black Humanists Upcoming Events

Transcript

James H: 0:00

Hello and welcome to episode three of Humanism, now the podcast brought to you by the Central London Humanists. I'm your host, james, and this week we'll be discussing humanist reflections on the UK's current asylum policy. Should humists consider animal rights as part of their belief system, and can a humanist have religious faith? All of this, plus our interview with Jamie Woodhouse of Sentientism, and to discuss all of this I'll be joined by my regular co-host, aj.

AJ: 0:32

Hi, james, glad to be with you.

James H: 0:35

And returning once again, audrey Simmons of the Association of Black Humanists. How are you, audrey?

Audrey S: 0:39

Hi James, hi AJ, nice to be back.

James H: 0:41

Good to see you both. We're struggling for topics in the buildup to today's podcast, and then we recently saw the news of a change in the UK's approach to asylum for those seeking to stay in the UK based on discrimination for being from the LGBT plus community. Aj, this is something which is very closely tied to our work. I wondered if you'd like to maybe share some of your thoughts and reflections from the past few days.

AJ: 1:11

Absolutely, as, both as a local group and also nationally and internationally as well, the cause of not just apostate refugees but refugees generally, ie, not just refugees who have some kind of a humanist conversion that will then bring them quite close to home for us, but just people who are suffering all kinds of persecution and violence and threats to their way of living. That naturally does fall under a humanist concern. Now, it's quite interesting that you said that this might be related to a change in the UK government's policy. Well, something needs to be said about that, I think. So. We've had a speech from the UK Home Secretary, suela Braverman, in the US to a think tank, which has to be taken into account. I mean, is this in some sense a political maneuver or some kind of ground, standing where she, being right-wing herself, is appealing to certain potential future partners that she may be willing to work with or wishing to work with in the US, or is this actually a political commitment or some kind of policy direction change, or maybe it could be both. So we have to take what's said with a pinch of salt, but not focusing on the person but on the arguments presented generally, because we do, unfortunately, hear some of the arguments that she used in that speech.

AJ: 2:32

I mean the main four points that she brought up, asking for us to rethink the way that we approach asylum seekers and hold and take on refugees. The idea of a national identity crisis or the culture changing too fast was one of them. The administration of sourcing through asylum seekers and integrating and installing refugees in various parts of the country just logistically, we can't keep up. As a second reason, she said we should sort of rethink it and reduce and question who we give asylum and refugee status to. The third one was that somehow they'll pose a national security threat and that somehow mercenaries and potential terrorists and criminals are coming over. And finally, that the influx of migrants could pose a democratic threat or that there could be a political crisis in how these people are engaging or not with the political system. Now, there's a lot that can be said about each of those and we've got limited time today, but I think essentially we have to look at what is the proportion of people that she is actually talking about, because her speech was quite lights on facts.

AJ: 3:43

She specifically looked at a potential, what she causes, and maybe a weakness in the cases made by LGBT plus asylum seekers as compared to, say, the cases made by others who are maybe more worthy in her eyes. Now, this immediately is just quite a callous way to treat human beings. There is a way to triage and sort them, but we're not doing that very well as a country from the past. Evidence has been a massive backlog Only around, I think, 2% of asylum claimants last year actually made a claim based on sexual orientation. Now, and that's with a very well-founded fear from their running from countries and societies such as Pakistan or Nigeria, where you can be killed and homophobia is basically enshrined in the law there. So that's a well-founded fear. But all of this hullabaloo over 2% of the asylum claimants, that's again. We have to think of why this argument is being made right now and what possible distractions are lie behind it and what kind of political considerations in terms of what audience these arguments are intended for. So I think that's the first thing to say about them.

Audrey S: 4:58

I feel you posed a question about why, now you know she's in America, what does that mean? And I do think it's about her trying to make a position that she's actually doing something, when actually what she's actually doing is nothing. And she's the Home Secretary. She has been for a while and still, as you were saying, the backlog and that's the biggest issue that we have, and what people on the ground, ordinary people, are seeing, is that people are being placed in hotels, being placed in situations, difficult situations, that nobody else is making except the Home Secretary and her team. And so when we hear these conversations that she's taken to America, she's basically gaslighting us and she's basically making us feel somehow that the refugees that are coming over here and the asylum seekers that are coming over here, they are bad people.

Audrey S: 5:56

And she's using all of these terms because she's saying that you know these reasons, that you know being a woman is not a reason for seeking asylum. Who ever said that that was? There's never been a question that because you're a woman, you can seek asylum, but there has been a question of how women activists who you know, who stand up in countries where being a woman is not something. Being a woman activist isn't something that's actually allowed, that is in danger into life. So when you use these general phrases, when you say LGBT, what exactly is this you're saying? You're gaslighting, you're saying that there's an influx of people that are using these laws that are actually it which actually isn't true, as you pointed out only 2% of all the people that are seeking asylum, and I also think we just need to remember that people who are coming here are using the dingy because this government has closed down every other route, and it's a bit like saying you can come into my home, but I've closed the back door, I've closed the front door and you know the only way you can come in is if you break a window and and then charge you, as you know, a burglar if you try to come in, and this is what this government has done.

Audrey S: 7:19

So this whole asylum question is not about who has the right to come in, who should be triage, how you know, how do we make those decisions? Because I think everybody would have that conversation about who can come in, under what laws, under what circumstances, what this deals with. None of that and it's really just straw man arguments about the varying adequacies, the money that they have taken out of public services that make everything, not just the asylum seeker, but everything else that around it housing, medical care, everything that are linked to that makes it all fall apart. So she's going to America she didn't do it in Britain because she doesn't have that support she's had to go to America, which is in this right wing sort of Maya at the moment, to seek support, and so I think it's important that we give it context so that we, that everyone, understands where this is coming from.

Audrey S: 8:23

And this is about. This isn't about human beings suffering, and even if they are economic migrants. So what? What is it that we do with economic migrants? How do we treat them? How do we house them? What do we say? She has said nothing about that, so I get pretty mad when I hear this kind of rhetoric. And she's been challenged because obviously her parents came over here and many people's parents come over here not because they were being persecuted, but they came for better lives and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with it at all. But she's actually treating it as if somehow, what she did is something different from what other people are doing, and I think that's again a conversation that needs to be had. We need to take responsibility for our actions and our words, and she isn't doing any of that and she's causing a lot of upset. I'm sorry. A lot was said there. I get quite passionate.

James H: 9:18

No need to apologize, audrey. This is a topic that I think many of us are passionate about Eji. How do you see this linking to humanist principles and the campaigns that we're involved in?

AJ: 9:30

Yeah, well, a fundamental humanist principle apart from using evidence-based reasoning, as we've just shown there, which was not really done in the Home Secretary speech is this idea of empathy and is also considering our friends in humanist climate action, which is another section of humanist UK. Looking ahead to the decades that are going to be ravaged in the future by climate change. This is going to be especially with water scarcity and droughts in Asia. This is going to be a massive problem going forward. So we should be thankful that the refugee convention has, in its wording, has, as the Home Secretary said. Well, she said it was a point of concern that maybe in the past only a few million people worldwide would have been covered by it. Now hundreds of millions of people have been covered by it. Well, that's good because, like it or not, they're going to come in some ways because their societies are collapsing, either through war and conflict, which we're not completely innocent of having a hand in, or, in other cases, droughts and other climate change related disasters. So we're going to have to deal with this at some point. We can't just stick our heads in the sand and expect for that to go away. So that certainly is in the humanist value and having empathy with people who are suffering. That certainly is not also a humanist value. So we it's. I think it behooves humanists to be very, very pointed on this.

AJ: 10:51

I asked the idea that and again an idea of a golden rule and can't categorically imperative. What if we all had the same approach that was outlined in the Secretary's speech? Well, if every neighboring country or neighboring safe country had a bigger neighbor policy where every country just said, well, we can't accept you because the country next to us is a safe country and the refugees have come through there first, then refugees wouldn't spread anywhere. Actually, what the Refugee Convention does is it realizes the universality of mankind, of humans generally as a species, and says that the world is our home and we can mix and form multicultural relationships wherever we go, and especially people in need, but as also, as Audub pointed out, economic migrants. Both groups are entitled to seek refuge in any country that they wish and, yes, many come to the UK because of our colonial past ties, which are now coming to bite us in the backside and are the English language again spread, mostly through colonialism. So because of that, people come here. We should be thankful for that and a good government and a good society should be able to welcome these eager hands to work and to contribute to our society and make use of them, because we certainly need that in our aging society that's unable to fulfill the challenges of the future.

AJ: 12:12

So, rather than living up to that, it's a bit rich to then, instead of administration the state properly to point to the refugee convention and as if that's the problem, without any consideration of again the fact that it's such a minority of the people that she's talking about. There has to be an element of dog whistle politics in this, I think, which we have to be very careful of, not to get drawn into too much of the attention seeking that maybe she wants, but to give the attention to the bad faith arguments that are being put out there by many. I mean, I work with a local refugee group and we still see this even in West London, where I live. In local meetings, in local media, these same tropes and arguments are being trotted out.

AJ: 12:50

So it's very, very important for us to be prepared and to be able to answer these soberly, rationally and with empathy, not just for the refugees but also for the people who make them, because sometimes they're drawn into a web of anti-immigrant feeling and they don't really know why. And actually under this government recently we've had millions of legal migrants and they may be feeling the pressure the quote unquote native population here maybe feeling that pressure, but the government can't really speak against legal migrants, so they use illegal migrants as a scapegoat for the unsolved problems posed by the burden of not properly receiving the legal migrants, ie high speed rail and transport and housing infrastructure. When that's not being met, the easy scapegoat to point out would be to say vote for us, we'll carry on being in power and we'll stop the votes, even though in an arithmetical consideration they're just such a tiny number contributing to whatever burden the public is supposedly feeling by these influx of migrants. So it doesn't make sense on multiple levels.

Audrey S: 13:50

I'm sorry, I just wanted to come back. I think there is another thing that, as opposed to the association of black humanists, I really need to bring up. We're talking about multiculturalism and she said it's failed, and I think what's failed as well asks, as a society, to tackle racism in any positive and real and meaningful way. And so when we see those votes coming over, what is the dog whistle that go out? This is black and brown people coming over to take from us and we don't really deal with that. We just get frightened or we don't really tackle any of the arguments or conversations that need to be had about that. And people coming into this country who have different cultures or whatever. We don't look at that head on and say, yes, people are coming over here with different cultures. How do we deal with that? How do we actually set the table out so that there was a clear understanding of what that exchange is? And it is an exchange. It's an exchange of ideas, it's exchange of cultures, an exchange of all kinds of things, and we don't have that conversation and I think multiculturalism hasn't failed. What we fail to do is really look at what that means and how do we support people to integrate when we have colleges that used to be able to put on in East Soul, colesys, they've all been cut, all of the kind of local things that would have supported people coming over to the country, new who don't know how Britain works, and the most basic level of all of that funding has been cut.

Audrey S: 15:19

And we seem to do this thing of we welcome people, what we don't actually work out how to integrate, how to support. We kind of go you're here and that's it. So multiculturalism has not failed. What has failed is we fail to tackle the real issues of new people coming into the country, and what does that feel like for them? What does that feel like if the people that are already here haven't been informed or have been made to understand why people are here, what they're coming to do and what they contribute? Those conversations don't happen. So as long as we don't tackle racism and we keep pointing the finger at black and brown people for their problems, we then don't move on and then we can say multiculturalism has failed, but we failed. We failed those people that have come over here and we failed our society. We don't actually support people in the round.

James H: 16:16

So really important point to add, audrey. No, thank you both. So much for your contributions there. Now, during that discussion, ada mentioned relying on evidence, reason and compassion as part of the humanist mission, and our guest this week has made that his mantra in a new movement which he calls sentientism. So here is my interview with Jamie Woodhouse, one of the leading advocates and campaigners from sentientisminfo. Jamie Woodhouse is a leading advocate for sentientism, a worldview and a global movement which advocates for evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings. He's the host of the Sentientism podcast and runs several online groups with members in more than 100 countries. In addition to this, he's had a career for more than 20 years as a consultant and advisor, and he lives in London with his family. Jamie, thank you very much for joining Humanism. Now how are you doing today?

Jamie Woodhouse: 17:11

Yeah, great, thank you. It's wonderful to be here with you and good to get the chance to talk to your audience. I hope things are going well in the first few episodes.

James H: 17:20

It's been an interesting start. Yeah, and, similar to yourself, we're finding listeners popping up all around the world, which is great to see, even though this is from the central London humanists that we're having a global reach, just like the sentientism movement. Yeah, that's great. So I guess the best place to start would be what is sentientism and what inspired you to create the network?

Jamie Woodhouse: 17:39

So you've already given a great answer to that question in the intro by saying that sentientism is a worldview committed to evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings. So most of your audience will be familiar with humanism as a worldview and it's similar in some ways. It's trying to answer some of the really big, deep questions what's real, how should we understand the universe, how should we go about believing what's true? But, just as importantly, the big questions of ethics, what matters and who matters. So sentientism, I guess, shares with humanism that sort of naturalistic approach to answering the big, what's real questions. It says look, we should take a naturalistic approach, using evidence and reason, the healthy dose of humility, and engage honestly with the reality to try and understand it. And on the ethical question, the answer is in the name really, that we should have compassion for all sentient beings. And that's where it does differ a little bit from humanism, although I think humanism itself might be shifting in this direction.

James H: 18:37

Yes, I think there's definitely been a shift with the most recent Amsterdam Declaration to include reference to sentience and animal rights as well. How do you define sentience, and is there a consensus amongst the community or globally in terms of how we should define sentience or spot it in other creatures?

Jamie Woodhouse: 18:57

Yeah, there is Like all. I guess human concept is a bit fuzzy, so you will hear different interpretations or different approaches, but there is a core, common center of gravity and I described that as being sentiencies the capacity to have valenced experiences, and by valence I just mean value. Didn't one way or another? You know it could be good or bad. So if you have experiences like you and I are having now, taste this cup of coffee, it tastes good as a positively valenced experience. If I take this pen and stab it into the back of my hand, that's a negatively valenced experience. So that's what I'd describe sentience as being. It's.

Jamie Woodhouse: 19:37

Some people will go a little bit broad and say any experience at all. You know, if you could imagine having an experience that is totally neutral, there's no good or bad in it whatsoever. But most people are focused on valenced experience and you might use really broad terms like suffering to describe any bad or negatively valenced experience, and maybe terms like flourishing or well being to describe any good or positive experience. But it's, it's not just a sort of narrow, hedonic thing, it's not just pain and pleasure. I think of it as being much, much broader than that. Any experience you might value in some way. So it can include existential angst, a sense of loss, you know, love, joy, any feeling you like that has a positive or a negative aspect to all of those feelings should matter, and any being that can experience them should matter. That's the core of it.

James H: 20:27

So do you see that there's a scale, or is this very much a binary? A binary, yes, sentience no, they're not.

Jamie Woodhouse: 20:34

You'll hear lots of different answers on this and sentientism itself is relatively neutral about those questions. It just says that whatever a sentence is, wherever it is, whether it's bounded or graded, it should matter and any being that has it should matter. But you picked up some fascinating philosophical questions there. Is it binary, Is it on or off? Is it briskly bounded or does it have fuzzy edges? Is it something we can understand with absolute clarity or is it just going to be a probabilistic thing, where never 100% sure? So different sentientists will differ on that, depending on their philosophy of mind and what they think the nature of sentience and consciousness are.

Jamie Woodhouse: 21:14

My personal view, I guess it's grounded in an evolutionary story of why I think sentience came into existence. And in simple terms and other sentientists, just to be clear, you know, may well disagree with me on this story, but this is my personal view is that sentience probably came into existence through an evolutionary process around the pre-cambrian or the early stages of the Cambrian, amongst very simple animals who developed a capacity to assess how they were doing moment to moment and in a way that's the root of sentience. You know how are things going for me now and how are things going for me now, you know, is something bad happening to me, Is something good happening to me? And the reason that was adaptive in an evolutionary sense is because it's pretty useful for an animal that lives in a moderately complex decision environment where you've got options about. You know particularly where to go to be motivated to go towards good stuff and about away from bad stuff. So I think that was probably the sort of evolutionary route. And then you know, a few hundred million years later, here you and I are talking on a podcast.

Jamie Woodhouse: 22:16

But that evolutionary context leads me to think that the boundaries of sentience probably are fuzzy rather than, you know, a crisp phase transition.

Jamie Woodhouse: 22:24

I may be wrong, but at the same time I still think it's true to say that there are some entities that we can say are not sentient and others are, but the boundary between them may well be fuzzy. I don't think it's a binary on-off switch and I personally do think it is graded in some way and that you know the variety of experience that even you or I have day to day is not a simple thing you can put on a zero to 10 scale. You know it's multidimensional and fuzzy and complex and breathtakingly rich when you spread that out across all of human experience, it's even more dizzily multidimensional. And then when you consider the many non-human sentient beings that are out there, the potential range of their experiences, some of which we might even struggle to understand, is enormously rich and varied. So I don't really like approaches that sort of try to put it on a zero to 10 scale. I like to think of it as a breathtakingly rich and complex, you know, range of potential experiences that all sorts of different sentient beings might have.

James H: 23:20

I take from that, do you see it, that it's very much linked to being able to project into the future and compare current situation and emotions and feelings with either what's happened in the past or make decisions related to experience in the future.

Jamie Woodhouse: 23:35

I'm not sure it needs that at the most basic level. I think at the most basic level it literally can be this feels good or this feels bad. It doesn't have to be in the context of, you know, a being being even aware of its own goals. You know, being kind of literally just feel good or feel bad. That is the most basic sort. And of course, as evolution is developed and the family trees moved on and you know, certain types of animals have evolved into different niches. We've laid on extra cognitive complexity onto that, such that you know the ability to plan for the future or think about others or, you know, add cognitive complexity into the way we think about decisions has added richness onto it. But the basic level of the route can just be that essential feel and I think you can think about that in an evolutionary context.

Jamie Woodhouse: 24:22

Going back to, you know, very simple animals and some of them obviously live with us today that maybe do have a very simple experience. But you can think about that in a developmental sense as well, if you think about a newborn baby. They don't do much planning for the future, they don't have an advanced degree of cognition, they don't have a sense of a rich sense of self. You know there's all sorts of these other stuff they just don't have. But they can still feel pain and that should still matter, even if it's you know that simple basic sense that makes sense.

James H: 24:49

I think that that's interesting, though, because there's a growing field of study which suggests that plants, and particularly any plant life that lives within an ecosystem, can communicate or respond to its environments and pass on messages. So would you see that as a low level of sentience?

Jamie Woodhouse: 25:08

I wouldn't. And the reason for that is the first thing I'd say is that sentience itself is very neutral about which entities are sent in. It just doesn't tell us the answer. It just says take a naturalistic approach to work it out. So, in simple ethical terms, if we did come to think that there was a good chance that plants were sentient, we should care about them morally, absolutely. Having said that, my understanding of the scientific consensus at the moment is that I'm not aware of any serious scientists who's even proposed that plants are sentient.

Jamie Woodhouse: 25:38

So when you read the magazine headlines that talk about you know, someone says that plants can feel. That's what the editor and the reporter have written. But when you actually read the content of the article and when you go to the scientific paper that sits underneath, that, if it's a reputable scientist I've not come across any that are claiming that at all. But what that does mean again is that it leaves lots of space for very rich, complex behaviors and interactions that aren't necessarily associated with sentience. So yeah, we're learning all sorts of things about the microbiome and how plants might communicate. They don't seem to have either the evolutionary context for things like motility and mobility and complex decision environment that led to sentience being developed in animals? They don't seem to. Despite their ability to communicate at a basic level, they don't seem to behave and respond in the same way to stimulus and things that you know you might expect them to cause pain, that we see in animals, where tests are done with pain and stimulus responses and anesthetic response and so on, that give us a very strong evidence base for animal sentience. And also they just don't seem to have the right sort of information architecture.

Jamie Woodhouse: 26:49

So for all of the animals where we are confident in a sentience for other reasons, when you think about the information processing architecture they have, including a nervous system, quite often with some degree of centralization, with processes of no sepsis and detection and cognition going on, even at a basic level. Plants just don't seem to have that. You know their cell structure, the cells are isolated from each other, whereas in any being we're already confident of their sentience. There's a rich web of interconnecting chemicals and waves and patterns and firings going on that we just don't see in plants. So we should be open-minded about it and keep following the science and you know, if the science shows us that plants might be sentient, we should care about them too, absolutely, but at the moment I don't think we need to worry about that too much, and anyone who's, you know, compassionate enough to care deeply about plants should, of course, care even more about the beings where we're absolutely confident they are sentient.

James H: 27:46

Yeah, whether we can spot sentience. Obviously, one of the big developing topics that's everywhere at the moment is the increase in generative AI, and you know whether we're past the Turing test already. I guess you're in quite a unique position having thought about sentience for so long. What's your view on how we might be able to sense if an AI is truly sentient, and what do you think that would mean?

Jamie Woodhouse: 28:15

Yeah. So there are some sentientists who think it is in principle impossible for an artificial intelligence to have sentience, either because of their philosophy of mind they think it's just not a physicalist type thing or because they think there are physical processes going on in biological beings which might be to do with propagation waves or things that take it beyond what digital computers are able to do. Personally, I'm not in that camp. I think sentience ultimately is an evolved class of information processing and, given the universality of computation, ultimately you know, if you can have a universal computer it can compute anything. In principle I don't see that there's a reason why an artificial intelligence couldn't be sentient and there's been some brilliant philosophical work done recently by people like the Sentience Institute and various other organizations who've dug really deeply into this topic. But from an amateur perspective, what I'd say is we can use some of the same tools we use with biological beings so we can think about behavior and communications and infer from that you know, I can infer from the fact you're talking to me and we're on a Zoom call at the moment that you're highly likely to be sentient, just like I am. I don't think you're some sort of zombie. I think if I pinched you it would cause you pain. I can again examine your information processing architecture. I could put you in an fMRI scanner and ask you some questions and see similar firings and patterns of things going on in my mind and use that to infer that you're probably sentient to. And again I can look at our evolutionary context and do something similar. The difficulty with artificial intelligence is we don't have that evolutionary context. So you know that piece of evidence is missing. It's difficult to understand how to play that in. You can imagine certain types of artificial intelligence is emerging through some sort of pseudo evolutionary process, but you know that's not how they're really developed at the moment. And it's also tricky because when it comes to thinking about their behavior and communication, we're explicitly training them and designing them to replicate our behavior, which means we're almost trying to get them to the point where they're convincing us of the behavior that might show that they're sentient, but without the underpinnings. And so there is absolutely a possibility. So some people will look at the behavior and the communication and say, look, it's rich, it's complex, it feels like it's sentient. Therefore it probably is, and others will go well, yeah, but we've really trained it to demonstrate those things at the surface layer, but without the similar underpinnings you know, maybe they just isn't feeling there. So that's probably a sort of intro to it.

Jamie Woodhouse: 31:01

I think philosophically it's possible, in principle it's possible. There are, despite what I've just laid out, you know, ways we might be able to probabilistically and provisionally develop an assessment of artificial intelligence, sentience. But we've got to be careful. We can't just do the same thing we do with biological animals. There's some pitfalls there. But sentientism would say you know, we're using a naturalistic approach, developing sort of provisional and probabilistic views of whether they might, you know, be sentient. We should be prudent about that and if we think they could be we should start to care about them.

Jamie Woodhouse: 31:39

And one of the best research reports has come out recently I've been lucky enough to interview some of the people involved in its production concluded roughly what I've just laid out, I think I said look, there are ways you can use to assess sentience. Some of them are flawed and difficult and some of them don't apply across biology and artificial. But here are some other things you can do as well. Their assessment was that current artificial intelligence is at the level of GPT-4, and the similar technologies are highly unlikely to be sentient for some of the reasons I've laid out. But again, they agree that in principle it's possible and that it could be a looming ethical issue that we should take seriously and we shouldn't blunder into. Humanity has already created a range of different awful atrocities by denying the sentience of non-humans. Let's not queue up another one before we've fixed the ones who are already running at industrial scale today.

James H: 32:34

We want to make sure they are trained in compassion as well, if they're going to potentially be more powerful than us.

Jamie Woodhouse: 32:42

This is part of the point. One of the things that really irritates many of the people in the sentientism movement is that they're focused, understandably, on the 8 billion sentient humans, on the maybe 100 billion sentient land animals in our farms that we exploit and slaughter every year, and there may be once 2 trillion aquatic animals that we slaughter and exploit every year, so maybe God knows how many quintillion or sextillion free-ranging, obviously sentient animals that live in the wild as well. So they will sometimes look at this artificial intelligence thing and tear the hair out with frustration because it feels like humanity has this sort of fascination with could AIs be sentient? And that would really matter morally.

Jamie Woodhouse: 33:26

Many of the people in the sentientism movement are tearing their hair out and going why are you so ready to care about potentially sentient artificial intelligence? It's when you show scant disregard, brutal, exploitive disregard for beings we absolutely know are sentient today. So I understand that frustration, but I still think it's important to engage with because the very least it enables us to make that point. It enables us to say well, it's great that you are interested in artificial sentience, it's great that you would care about the sentience of artificial beings. There was a survey that's literally just been released today by the Sentience Institute that I think showed that 71% of the respondents would care ethically about sentient AI. So we can use that latent human compassion to deal with that issue seriously but also draw people back to the issues of animal farming and exploitation.

James H: 34:15

That we need to fix too.

Jamie Woodhouse: 34:17

And you're right that, if we're one of the big central problems with when most people think about artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence risks and ethics, they're not worried about the risks to the AI.

Jamie Woodhouse: 34:27

They're worried about risks to us from the AI because they might kill us or exploit us or do something that causes us harm, and I think that's a serious worry. But one of the answers to that is well, we need to think about aligning them to our values. But in doing that, you've got to think about what are our values and are they actually good values to align a powerful artificial intelligence to? And I would say that the idea that you take a powerful artificial intelligence that may soon be more intelligent and more powerful than we are and suggesting that they use us as an example, given how we treat much less powerful sentient beings, that's not a clever strategy. We are not a good example of how to treat weaker sentient beings by an image, so if AI learns from us, we could be in a whole world of trouble. So there's a bunch of reasons why I think it's still useful to engage in the artificial intelligence topic, even if your primary concern is human and non-human animals.

James H: 35:20

Yeah, I think it's fascinating and I wonder if, similar to as you mentioned these things, it's not a binary indication of whether something is sentient, whether, whilst we expect there'll be a sudden moment when we can see the AI has turned on and it's sentient, it's more likely that this is just something that potentially develops and over time and then eventually we reach a point where there's a general consensus that actually it's conscious or sentient.

Jamie Woodhouse: 35:50

Yeah, and there are some really interesting academics in the field who take a more relational and a more social approach to it and they will almost say, look, in a way it won't matter whether the entity itself actually is sentient. Maybe we'll never really know. In the same ways, you could say you and I might never really 100% know that each other are sentient, we're just sort of inferring it. What they say will matter more is how we come to relate to these entities and how our social norms develop, and people are already starting to treat artificial entities as if they were sentient, as if they were agents, as if they were other beings, even though we know they're not. So in a way, that sort of social and relational context is going to force the issue as much as scientifically independently assessing whether the being is actually experiencing on whether it can really feel pain.

James H: 36:41

What do you see as the role of humans within a sentient worldview? Do they have a special place within the ecosystem, or should we think of humans as separate to other animals?

Jamie Woodhouse: 37:00

I'll say no and then maybe so in a sense, no. I mean, part of what sentientism is trying to do is trying to de-center us as humans. It's trying to move away from anthropocentrism and, more aggressively, a human supremacy, which I would suggest is our dominant stance in the world today. And that human supremacy is, I think, common across most of the religious worldviews and it's common across many of the non-religious worldviews and unfortunately, I think, it's still pretty central to humanism too. And whether it's for scientific reasons or whether it's because we are made in the image of deity, the idea behind human supremacy is this world exists. Either God is most important or put them to the side if you don't believe in a God. But then it's humans, right, and the rest of the world and everything else really is just here for us. So that includes animals, that includes plants, that includes the environment. We might be there to steward it if you like, but really we're there to have sort of dominion over it, control over it, and we can do what we like. Fault our ends, because our ends are the only thing really that matters. It's human wellbeing, human flourishing and so on. Those are the only things that really matter. Everything else is just there instrumentally. So sensitism is deliberately trying to break that and undermine it and move away from it and say, no, all sentient beings matter. We all know this to some extent already. Anyone who's got a companion animal or cares about a wild animal they find injured, already cares, already has compassion. That goes beyond the human. We know that nonhumans, who can feel pain and who can experience things, matter. So in a sense I'm simply trying to pick that up and say, look, and we should care about all of those sentient beings. So it does try and destroy human supremacy and completely undermine it and say, look, humans are distinctive or special. In that sense you know every sentient being matters. But at the same time it's not suggesting that we flatten everything and ignore all of the differences and ignore all the variety. I think you can still recognize the moral salience of every sentient being and then still recognize the dizzying variety of fascinating experiences and power and privileges and situations and contexts and cultures all across all of that sentient kind. So that does still leave space for us to recognize that humans do have some distinctive capabilities. We have a lot of capabilities that non-human animals don't have, but there are many non-human animals who have capabilities we don't, so we're not sort of pinnacle of some list of skill or list of sentience or even intelligence, you know. I think we need to recognize that diversity.

Jamie Woodhouse: 39:36

But one thing that is definitely special about us is the amount of power we've got. Our power is overwhelming and unprecedented and I would argue so far, from the perspective of sentient kind, has been awful and brutal and horrific and exploitative, and it's been that way for quite a lot of other humans as well. So that power is unquestionable. Our track record is pretty awful, I think, within humankind and certainly for wider sentient kind. Whether you're living in the wild or settled, you've been captured in one of our farms or a fishing net.

Jamie Woodhouse: 40:17

And that power has led many people to a sort of misanthropic view where people will say things like humans are the virus or they might be led into sort of eco-fascism where they think that humans are the problem.

Jamie Woodhouse: 40:30

And I prefer a more positive cast, which is to say that we're enormously powerful. But imagine what we could do if we redirected that power for good and we chose a better role we want to play in the world. And in a way I think that's sort of what humanism has been trying to do within the human species is saying look, in a way, we are lucky to have this power, we have this influence, and we have this difficult and terrible history often, but there's potential there as well, as we do have care about each other and we do want to make things better and we can actually change the role of humanity for itself. And I guess my stance on sentientism is saying this is an extra stretch, an extra challenge, but humanity could actually decide to radically shift its role and its influence in a positive way for the whole of sentient kind too. So, yeah, I think it's our power that makes us distinctive.

James H: 41:27

But I guess, as the crux of the question is that we are probably the only species, or we're the human species, with the degrees of conscious freedom to make those kinds of conscious decisions, yeah, so you know, do we have extra responsibilities within the climate that we live in to maintain the rest of the ecosystem, and should there be rights that come with those responsibilities?

Jamie Woodhouse: 41:55

I think so absolutely. And again, I'd say that's true even within humankind, right? The more power you have, I'd argue, if you want to be a moral person, the more responsibility you have to use that power for good. And it's absolutely true across sentientity too. So, yeah, that's the short answer. I think, with that enormous power we have, if we want to be moral and I think we do and if we want to extend that moral consideration to every being that has the capacity to suffer, then we should want to use that power and redirect it to a better end.

Jamie Woodhouse: 42:27

And the irony here is that it's not that hard. It's not as if we need to invent some radical new technology or come up with some completely different philosophy or for science to make a thousand year leap forward. Right, the basics we already know. We have to understand, naturalistically, how to understand reality. We have a pretty solid ethical basis that cares about all sentient beings.

Jamie Woodhouse: 42:49

The science and philosophy are pretty straightforward and with many of the human cause problems around the world, we already have the technological solution ready today.

Jamie Woodhouse: 42:59

So, whether the problem is the environmental crisis or whether it's animal agriculture and fishing, we have the solutions that are ready right now. So in a weird sense. It's not so much a philosophical problem or a scientific problem. It's one of human psychology and social norms and political will. So I think it may sound sort of naive to say humanity has this chance to radically shift our role for the benefit of all sentient kind, but it's also not that hard to do, if only we can capture the will to do it. And, as with any extension of our moral scope, it's good for the people doing the extending to and given the nature of the environmental crisis and public health crises and issues around water use and land use and pollution and zoonosis and antimicrobial resistance and so on and so forth, even in a very selfish human sense, extending our moral scope and shifting this role of humanity, I think, is an imperative even for our own well-being and survival, let alone through the moral imperative of wanting to care about nonhumans too.

James H: 44:04

On the technology side of things. We've had a question that's been sent in by Audrey Simmons, who's one of our regular panellists. Yeah, no, audrey. Yeah, it's the LH and the Association of Black Humanists, and the question is around lab grown meats obviously again, but in the news quite a lot lately and whether these are an acceptable alternative or a happy medium from between animal farming or going all the way to veganism. What's your view on lab grown meats?

Jamie Woodhouse: 44:33

Yeah. So I guess this is probably the most culturally dissonant implication of sentientism is about what we eat and the products we eat and our agricultural systems. Because I think many people would agree with evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings that sounds fine. But when you point out to them that having compassion for sentient beings means that you wouldn't farm them, all of a sudden, you know, the alarm bells go on and people start to realize how radical this world view is. But I think it's a direct implication of taking the perspective of those other beings, if you imagine what they go through.

Jamie Woodhouse: 45:06

And this isn't just factory farming, this is any farming process. In simple terms, it's exploitative and unethical. And the good news is that we don't need to do it, and I will come back to Audrey's question in a moment. So when I say we have the answers already in the agricultural space, the answer basically is plants, and the irony is we already make three or four times more plants than we need to feed humans today. The problem is we feed an enormous amount of that and the land uses the equivalent of a continent and a half. We feed an enormous amount of those plant crops to animals that we then kill to eat, and when you feed the plant crops to the animals, you lose 95% of the nutritional and calorific value. So it's one of the most catastrophically wasteful processes on the planet, even if you put the morality to one side. So in a sense, we have that solution today already, because we could feed all of the humans on the planet with plant-based food at the same time as freeing up half of the world's agricultural land for other environmentally positive and ethically positive uses.

Jamie Woodhouse: 46:10

And the reason I'm focusing on that before answering Audrey's question is because the idea that I'm waiting for clean meat, I'm waiting for cultivated meat or I'm waiting for someone who's made it technically exactly the same product before I'm willing to switch, frankly is a cop-out because we already have plants and plant-based solutions that are nutritionally complete today. But so, to answer your question, you'll get actually some different views from sentientists about cultivated meat and cell-based meat and fermented products and these things that we're actually trying to replicate very exactly dairy, egg and meat products and I think the center of gravity of people will say these are a good thing, because we understand culturally and psychologically and socially how difficult it is for people to switch away from consuming some of these products, even when they see the moral and the environmental catastrophe they cause. We know change is hard for human brains. So practically these products feel like an important step because for those hold out, for those people who find it really psychologically difficult, if we can present them with something which is technically exactly the same, maybe better, right, it would be less environmentally harmful, it will probably be tastier or probably be more healthy. Then it just takes away some of those other reasons and those other blockers and it removes the blockers to free people up to do what they already know is the right thing, which is to end an agriculture. So overall I think the central gravity is quite positive about those products, as long as they are produced in ways that don't cause exploitation, suffering or death.

Jamie Woodhouse: 47:42

And in the early evolution of some of those products they were using animal products in the process and they're increasingly moving away from that.

Jamie Woodhouse: 47:50

But interestingly there are also some people who take a different philosophical stance which says that even if those products are exactly the same, even if they're produced without causing any exploitation at all, there's still an issue about the association, psychologically and philosophically, with something terrible that makes people once turn away from those products and there's also a worry that we might be doing something that I sometimes call ethical bypassing, which is, if we find an alternative which means we can stop doing something bad without ever having to face up to the ethics, that's good, because we're not doing a bad thing anymore, but is there a risk that those ethics remain and we may go on to do something in the future that is equally horrific.

Jamie Woodhouse: 48:41

So I think there's a worry there about ethical bypassing of some of those products, but generally, I think the way it's going to work is that those products, as well as the you know the plants are edible and plant-based products are out already will just become more and more prevalent. To default, the cultural center of gravity will shift. People will move across to them, whether or not they've thought deeply about these issues, and as they do so, it will free people up because it will no longer be complicit in the harms, and once you no longer complicit in a harmful system, it becomes much easier to see it more clearly. You can see through the marketing and the bullshit and you can free your own latent ethic, which is that only a psychopath would want to needlessly harm, kill or exploit another sentient being. Certainly so I think that's a more positive path that you know, as these alternatives and our cultural default shifts, it will just become easier and easier and easier for people to essentially put their latent compassionate, centiocentric ethics into practice.

James H: 49:39

That's the plan. Which are against your position. Do you find the most challenging or difficult to defend?

Jamie Woodhouse: 49:45

Yeah, I break it into two things, because I think most of the challenges are actually about the implications of sentientism, not the core, which I find instructive in itself, because there's an implication that people actually agree with the basics, the philosophy. What they're doing is struggling to come to terms with that because of their own psychology and because of social norms and because of other things that are important to them. So I think it's quite interesting to start with a basic understanding of the philosophical starts and engage with that richly and then come on to think about the implications, because if you start with the implications first, your psychology will just look for excuses to undermine the philosophy. And there are plenty of challenges in those implications. There are challenges about capacity and ability and access, and how demanding should we be about ourselves? Is it enough just to not needlessly harm others or should we actively help, as our moral scope extends beyond friends and family and the 8 billion humans we're in humans to even more mind boggling numbers of other sentient beings? How do we prioritize causes and how do we handle with the sheer complexity of that? So there are plenty of different challenges there which I do find difficult and those are fascinating to engage with. But when it comes back to the core of sentientism, this idea of evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings, this will sound silly, but I struggle to find good quality challenges to engage with.

Jamie Woodhouse: 51:19

Because on the naturalistic front, sentientism isn't saying here's a list of beliefs you have to believe, even though we can fight about that and have discussions about the evidence. It's saying the method we should use to understand reality is to use evidence and reasoning. So to challenge that, either you have to present me with some evidence and reasoning about why evidence and reasoning isn't a good way of understanding things, by which you've defeated your own argument, or you have to present something alternative to evidence and reason. And those the only ones I've come across so far are sort of fideism, a belief based on an arbitrary faith, or a dogmatism which believes a set of things and those dogmas will not change if the evidence changes. Or, frankly, even fabrications, where you just made something up or believe something somebody else has made up. So I struggle to see any of those as serious challenges to a naturalistic approach that uses evidence and reason in a humble way to try and understand reality. So it's difficult, because it's almost tautological to my way of understanding reality to see a valid challenge. But it's similar on the ethical front too, partly because it almost feels tautological to me.

Jamie Woodhouse: 52:29

If our understanding of morality is about the choice to care about others and what we mean when we say others is those who have their own perspective, their own existence, their own experiences, their own interests, their own needs and morality is our choice about whether and how to care about them I don't understand why we would exclude any valid other from moral consideration. As soon as there is a being has their own interests, their own needs, their own experiences, values themselves in some way, I've yet to come across a reason for why we should exclude them from moral consideration. So it's part. So it's almost that these two things, this evidence and reason, commitment to naturalism and this centio-centric caring about all sentient beings, I think it's difficult to disagree with because they're almost tautological.

Jamie Woodhouse: 53:22

But again, maybe I've just become trapped in my own worldview. But at the same time there are many, many fascinating and difficult decisions still to take. Because it's such a broad, pluralistic worldview. It doesn't tell us the answer to all of these difficult problems, it just says use evidence and reason to understand reality, take account of every sentient being in your moral consideration and there's still so many really difficult and practical problems we need to work through, and that's, I think, where the real challenge is.

James H: 53:48

Do you have a good case, perhaps if you're trying to convince one who is more conservative minded what the conservative case for sentientism would be?

Jamie Woodhouse: 53:56

Yeah, I think the types of things you can appeal to are conserving the environment plays in well. So if they're the type of conservative that wants to conserve the environment, which unfortunately seems to be quite rare these days, that can play in. You can appeal to conservative values about fairness and justice and talk about how to extend them more broadly than just humans. So I think there are ways you can do it, and it partly depends on what you mean by conservative, because one of the fascinating things about this very amorphous global community or movement and it is very fuzzy and very open is that there's quite. It's pluralistic. So there are lots of different political starts as people can take as well, and they'll have different views on economics. So there are people who think we should have more of a state driven economy. There are people who think we can have more of a compassionate, sort of compassionate version of capitalism. So views on sort of political economy very, quite widely. There are views on different political systems as well. So there are people who think anarchism or some form of socialism or some form of social democracy or, again, well regulated market capitalism might be the right political structure too. So there's a lot of diversity there. But I think where sentientism is narrower in its political stance is it doesn't play well with social conservatism. Because if a social conservatism is thinking about traditional ways of people playing certain roles and restricting them into those roles, if it's more about in, group out, group distinctions and maybe exclusionary ethics where certain groups are deprecated or excluded or not seen as important, sentientism breaks that stuff completely.

Jamie Woodhouse: 55:44

So I think there's quite a lot of space politically for different, you know motor political engagement and economic models and people will still have viciously fiery debates about, you know, which is the right answer to get to a more compassionate world. But there are also certain aspects of, you know, political culture that just crash straight up against sentientism's universal compassion and crash straight up against sentientism's commitment to using evidence and reason to ground our beliefs. So authoritarianism doesn't work, dogmatism doesn't work, exclusionary ethics doesn't work, any form of unfounded discrimination doesn't work, intrahuman or beyond, you know those things go up against sentientism and sentientism rejects them. But there's still quite a lot of other. You know political diversity. I think we can engage with that. What is the end goal for sentientism?

James H: 56:31

and you know particularly the movement that you're advocating for, so this will sound naive right.

Jamie Woodhouse: 56:37

It feels like almost every human cause problem we're facing either comes down to a failure of compassion. You know some group has decided not to care about some other group or some other individual. It's an ethical failing. We've just excluded them. And that might be other humans, it might be farmed animals, it might be wild animals. So, and that leads to obvious problems. If you're an excluded group or discriminated against a group, we know what that leads to. Or it's a problem of facts and evidence and reason.

Jamie Woodhouse: 57:05

You know good, compassionate people can do terrible things if they believe things that are wrong, and you can see that running through, I would argue, religions, but also new religious movements and cults, conspiracies and QAnon, various political movements, where you know even good, decent people. You know these are not psychopaths because they have come to believe in the QAnon myths, or you know spiritual voices told them to do something terrible. They're led astray, right? So it's either because of a failure of compassion or a failure of understanding. So the naive view is that if we can help all humans upgrade their epistemology to being, at least you know, sort of humble naturalism and ensure that they don't exclude any sentient being for any reason from their moral consideration that could solve all the world's problems. So that's the sort of end state, is that pretty much everybody agrees with sentientism and thereby we solve all those problems.

Jamie Woodhouse: 57:56

But in more practical terms, it would be a world where we would have moved to a state where we've ended into human discrimination and radically mitigated all of the causes of human suffering war, poverty, many health issues and would be making positive progress on all of those things. It would have a complete end to animal agriculture and exploitation, and maybe we would even have freed ourselves up to think a bit more intelligently and compassionately about whether it makes sense to help animals that are free ranging and living in the wild too. And maybe by then you know we'd have some artificially intelligent friends to help us out and that we should be caring about too. So it's too broad and vague and naive, right, but at the same time it's supposed to be quite a fundamental intervention, because you know, all human decisions ultimately, whether we know it or not, are based on our worldviews. Those central questions of understanding reality and who do we care about, I think are the absolute core of a robust worldview.

James H: 58:53

I wonder what is something which you've changed your mind on recently, perhaps related to sentientism or otherwise?

Jamie Woodhouse: 58:59

Yeah. So the obvious things I've changed my mind on is and this is going back a while, but one was, you know, moving away from being Christian to being an atheist, to humanism and so on. The other one was, I guess, moving towards sentientism and putting that into practice in veganism. But those are sort of self-serving, obvious answers. I guess within the scope of this sentientism thing, one of the things that's shifted for me personally is I've become more ethically pluralistic.

Jamie Woodhouse: 59:27

So I probably started out being a bit more utilitarian in the way I was thinking about things, and for your listeners who are aware of these different schools of thought, utilitarianism is simply thinking about, you know, well-being or utility as being the good thing we're trying to aim for and we should try and maximize that in some sense, and over time I've moderated that and broadened my own thinking out and I've become more determined to make sentientism ethically pluralistic so that there is space also for a feminist care ethic that is grounded in relations of care for other sentient beings.

Jamie Woodhouse: 1:00:02

It can be a virtue ethic that sees a virtue in kindness and justice, and extending that to other sentient beings can be a sort of Kantian or a dentalogical approach that sees all sentient beings as ends in themselves that weren't rights, and even relational approaches that, in a very open-minded way, recognize that in some sense we have relations with every sentient being and that should lead us to practical care and compassion. So that's probably the thing that's shifted. I've become sort of less focused on utilitarianism and more ethically pluralistic as we think about how to put this into place.

James H: 1:00:38

What is the best first step that anybody can take? And secondly, how can they find out more and get in touch with you?

Jamie Woodhouse: 1:00:44

So if you like to read, then the website sentientisminfo is probably a good starting point. If you want to join a group and these groups are open to anyone interested you don't have to be a sentientist to join them. So we have people with religious worldviews. We have people with all sorts of different moral scopes in there as well. But search for sentientism on your favourite social media platform and you'll find us, but the biggest is on Facebook, so come and join us there if you want to join a group and just get involved in some of the conversations.

Jamie Woodhouse: 1:01:09

If you like watching stuff, then our YouTube is a great place to go. I've been lucky to interview CEOs, philosophers, celebrities, sociologists, scientists, activists of all different strikes. Some of them don't agree with sentientism, but you'll really get a pluralistic sense of what these different ways of thinking can mean. And if you like listening, then the same stuff is on the podcast, the sentientism podcast, too, but I'd love to continue the conversation, where people agree or not. I just want to keep the conversation flying and search for sentientism anyway, and you'll find us, and I'm on Twitter at Jamie Woodhouse, but also at Sentientism too.

James H: 1:01:42

So Wonderful. We'll share all of the links in the show notes, but, jamie Woodhouse, thank you so much for your time and thank you for joining us on Humanism Now. It's been such a pleasure, jamie Woodhouse, there. I wondered, audrey, what are your views? Do you think that we, as humanists, should all adopt a sentientist perspective and become vegan?

Audrey S: 1:02:01

I think veganism, yes, I think we can kind of think about it and really look at our values on. What does it mean to be vegan and why we're doing it? I don't I'm not opposed to that. I think what is being asked isn't just about being a vegan, though, and I think this is the struggle that I think we have. It's about a lifestyle, a culture, and, you know, it's not just about the Sunday roast. It's about how we deal with animals in general, how we view them within our society.

Audrey S: 1:02:40

You know, we have, we have certain animals as pets, but others we're quite happy to stamp on. So you know, see, if you know, we've got our little dogs, but we've got our spiders, we've got a whole range of animals, and we have to. We have to then not divide them up and say, well, you're okay, we can love and care for you, but there are others we don't actually like. You're ugly, you know what I mean, or whatever. We decide that we don't actually want you.

Audrey S: 1:03:07

So what he's advocating is that, actually, this isn't the way that we need to be thinking of.

Audrey S: 1:03:12

You know, they're not there for our enjoyment when they're not just there for us, they have their own place, they have their own space with and we share that space and we need to treat them better.

Audrey S: 1:03:25

They're not beasts of burdens. We, you know, we need to be doing better with them. And I think it sounds simple and when you hear it you kind of go, yes, but when you're looking at how society has been constructed over centuries, over, you know, millennia, how we have constructed as society, that is a huge, huge change, huge, massive, and whole economies and whole ways of being are being asked to be changed, and that's a generational thing. We can see veganism has now become much more accepted and you know it's easier to be a vegan than it was in the 1970s or 60s or even further back, and veganism itself isn't new. But this whole idea of changing how we view our animals and our friends and you know, the ones we like, the ones we don't like, and the whole way we use animals in our life and in our society, that's a bigger, that's a bigger job, and I wish him all the very best.

James H: 1:04:32

It is quite a big mission that he set himself. Aj, I think you're part of the Sentientism community. How have you found it?

AJ: 1:04:38

Well, I've actually been on a journey as well the past couple of years transitioning to veganism. You know I will always say that I try and be a humanist I wouldn't declare myself to be a humanist and to be sort of suddenly perfectly in sync with all the values and goals. In the same way, veganism as well, it's a very high bar to set. I think it's a good challenge that I've taken on personally. It may not be for everyone and I think there is a certain compulsion that I think some people feel rightly or wrongly, and there is a veganism and sort of vegan trend and lifestyle on almost like a trope now that some people are trying to react against. So we have to be careful about how this may be turned into an identity and the politics around it. But for me personally, veganism it was the right choice to make, I think, morally, for the care of and the consideration of animals and other sentient creatures that we share this planet with. So I would also consider myself a humanist and a sentientist. We mentioned before the declaration on modern humanism, which replaced the Amsterdam declaration, when we were defining what humanism is, and here's an example of maybe an attack or a challenge to humanism coming from one aspect which is why only humans? Why do you only care about humans or why humans the most important? And we actually answered this and the declaration of what human answer. Modern humanism answered this before by saying it's not that we value humans as somehow the high water market creation, but it's just that we value the human perspective and human values as giving us the best window into being the best partners with other creatures on this planet. So human values such as empathy, such as in curiosity, investigation, free expression which are also there, and other members of the animal kingdom as well, and communication and flourishing we can see, depending on how you define it, in plants and so many other organisms. So it's not that humans are somehow unique or we have an exceptionalist approach to humans, which sometimes sent into challenges with it's not that. It's just that through the human lens and of course we are all humans, so we have a bias perspective towards the human lens. Admittedly, maybe the dolphins lens is a much better place to have. We don't know and we'll never know until we sort of solve consciousness and the spectrum of consciousness as well, which we don't have time to get into at the moment, but maybe in future episodes. So I think it's an important challenge that humanism should take on and for me personally it's it's been very rewarding I've improved in my health, in my mental faculties and for focus. Psychologically it's been very helpful for me.

AJ: 1:07:26

And it's interesting to link back to the previous topic on refugees and asylum seekers. I would say maybe a massive challenge for the human species is to first treat all of us, each other, with equal respect and recognize that we all have a common home globally in this planet, and we're not all just me. Some of us aren't just means to an end or aren't just political tools to be used. So we should probably start there. So I think maybe there's also a humanist challenge to humanists, let alone the sentientist challenge to humanists as well, because if we can't even come to a place where we're treating each other with equal respect, then you know what hope is there for us to sort of convince ourselves and have the necessary debates to make sure that we're taking care of other sentientist, sentient organisms in the way that they deserve as well? So I would say in terms of maybe a demand or a requirement that all humanists should be vegan.

AJ: 1:08:22

I wouldn't put it that way at all, and we'll come to this in in the next part of the episode as well. We talk about maybe some religious people using the label humanist. So we don't define and we don't control and we're not jealous about who uses the word humanist. We as a humanist movement define it ourselves and we try to give the most sensible way of defining it and using it. So if someone wants to attach that as a necessary and sufficient condition that you need to be vegan in order to be humanist, okay, that can be them. But it's not in any of the leading humanist organizations definitions and it's not a key pillar of the movement that all that, all humanists, need to be vegan. Because we're not a doctrinal movement, we don't have that kind of enforcing nature as other belief systems have. But given the evidence base and given the climate change and carbon utilisation considerations with a non-vegan diet and given the empathy side of humanism and empathy for sentient organisms, it could be a very, very good idea to be vegan.

James H: 1:09:20

I think every time I speak with Jamie it he makes a very good case, but I absolutely agree that I think the biggest challenge, that and potential argument against the position is let's sort out the human problems first and I think with with so many that are so pressing, as we've already covered it, it makes or the more bad news there is out there, but particularly around the treatment of other humans, the more difficult it makes his case, and we did kind of touch on that during the during the interview as well. I think that I mean he very much sees it that everything we should be taking into account all of these issues in parallel. You know there's no reason to stop one and favor the other. But I think in everybody's day to day, you know, when you, when you only have a limited number of hours and and energy to to spend, I think there is a natural bias towards humans or the flourishing of the human species, even amongst humanists at the moment. But I agree that I think it's changing.

James H: 1:10:24

I think it's sometimes a good exercise to project into the future as well and think what will people in like 100 or 1000 years time looking back on us? What will they see as our big moral, ethical blind spots, the way that we judge those in the past as well, and I think we've touched on two of the key areas today, one being national borders and how we treat those from different backgrounds of different countries, and I think the second being the rights of non-human animals. I suspect in the future people will look back on us and think that the treatment of animals is barbaric.

Audrey S: 1:10:59

Didn't agree more yeah, I think we are. That's a very true statement.

AJ: 1:11:04

I mean even the word aliens that we use, and especially in America it's still used, I think. Well, they're using it less now for illegal immigrants. I think in Japan they used to call it an alien card or alien registration card. Now they call it a foreign registration card. So I think all over the world and you can quite easily see, people are afraid of change.

AJ: 1:11:21

It's quite a natural human instinct to resist change, or is this something that you don't know the other in group and out group dynamics. So it's part of our human nature. We just have to understand it and try to compensate for it. And I absolutely agree with what we said earlier. We can walk and chew bubblegum, we can do many things at once and actually some of the same societal, psychological, cognitive skills that we need to overcome the barriers in alienation between humans are also the same things that we need to overcome the barriers in alienation between us and chickens, or us in the way that we treat cows or fish. It's the same psychological resource that we have to draw on. So, even though human nature can be sort of a gift and a curse, we have to remember it can be a gift and a curse, so we're not completely disabled by just our natural you know instincts to be a tribalistic and to be afraid of change.

AJ: 1:12:13

I think we humans do have the power to solve the problems that the future presents in that way.

James H: 1:12:19

Thanks AJ, thanks, audrey. Now, every week we source a question from our listeners to put to our panel here, and this week we've been sent a question from Stephen in north London and he asks is it possible for a humanist to have a religious faith? So, audrey, maybe I'll come to you first on that one.

Audrey S: 1:12:40

I think we kind of see humanism I, whether I view my humanism, is my life without the ideal concept of living with the god. What or how I do? What do the what are the principles that I use to then live my life? But I suppose there are aspects of of of humanism that are very much part of of the religious thinking, altruism, all of these kinds of things, kindness, that we don't have a monopoly on any of those things. So I suppose it would be difficult for me to say you can't be a religious person and be a humanist. I just think that it just becomes. The religion already has all of these things that they're supposed to be doing anyway.

Audrey S: 1:13:34

So I'm wondering why commandeer that word? So what's the? So it's just. I suppose that may be just to be about language, but it's also about who you want to sit with and how you want to be seen, and being a humanist and you know being, but still being religious, it kind of it doesn't. It doesn't sit well with me. If you're religious, you're doing things, you're doing them for a god, you're doing them with with all of that in mind, and that doesn't stop you from doing things that we would consider, not even consider, but are part of the humanist, humanist thinking. They're not devoid of each other. The the main separate, separate thing that separates us is the belief in a god. But I say we got, the humanist principles are human, is are human principles, so you can't really separate them. But the bit about god doesn't then kind of make you a humanist in in the sense that I live my life.

James H: 1:14:33

Yeah, I think I'm with you on most of that, audrey, and I actually think this might be one we could pull out into a full episode at a future date. But yeah, I, I guess, briefly, I feel in a similar way. I, I think I think of humanism as a kind of ideal to strive towards, as I think, as AJ mentioned, it's always aiming to to do better, and to me, what it mostly comes down to is how we treat each other. It's it's more about how you treat your fellow human. So I don't like to stake a sort of uh claim that you have to be atheistic in order to treat people well. I don't think that's true and I don't think it would be right to suggest that.

James H: 1:15:10

Um, and when I in the past, when I've had discussions on what is a humanist with with friends of faith and I sent them some of the brief descriptions, some of the definitions and what humanists tend to believe, they'll generally say, yeah, I agree with all of that, with the one caveat that they, they have a some form of religious belief or they believe in a god or gods, and I think there can be conflicts, that I agreed that. I think that there can be contradictions in holding both views. But who amongst us doesn't have contradictions? So, yeah, I lean more towards the side of saying no. I don't think it excludes people who have some form of faith and of course we know there are lots of people who are culturally religious. They may maintain a lot of religious culture but still be very humanistic in their beliefs and their actions. But hey, jay, you have studied many faiths and are involved in interfaith dialogue, so what's your opinion?

AJ: 1:16:17

This question reminded me of a friend that I have. He's a Catholic priest but he calls himself a humanist. He calls himself a Christian humanist. He's also an extrakskiist and he has quite a colorful background in all kinds of politics and activism and radicalism. But I think he might be an example of someone who's confusing and I have had the discussion with him humanism with humanitarianism or just being humane or just being humankind, which I mean all of these are not alien to humanism itself either and I think points us towards an important lesson that we shouldn't be being quite jealous about the terms and being very guarded about. Oh, no one else can use humanism in ways that they want to, apart from us. Is not the way that we want to go down. That path leads to language policing and it just weighs a lot of energy, I think, a lot of hot air. We as a humanist movement can be very open and transparent about what our mission is, what our goals are and how we see ourselves, because if you don't define yourselves, then your opponents may define you for you, which we don't want. So I think it's important to be clear about what the humanist movement stands for, and the declaration of modern humanism does that and it includes things like, for example, sentience that we mentioned in the previous discussion.

AJ: 1:17:39

In the interfaith groups that you speak of, I mean, I studied the Quran weekly and the Gita as well. We just finished in a community study class online that we started just amateurs using online, that we started over the pandemic. So I'm very, very interested in how people form their beliefs, the wisdom and the content of holy texts and other texts and what aspects of humanism I can see in that and what aspects of cooperation I can see, because that's my natural instinct and I have been called by Muslim friends that I respect a Muslim myself in a lower case, with a lower case M. So, like a small C conservative and small M Muslim and other Baha'i friends of just presumed that I'm Baha'i without me actually saying anything until it was only when they asked me and I say no, I am, I've been agnostic, I'm a humanist, they would say, oh, let me be quite surprised, but I think that's ultimately for me that's quite flattering, because that's what I want to get to, even though I am a humanist that that facilitates my access to a common humanity that other religions and faith and beliefs should be facilitating their adherents and their followers to get to a common humanity, and they can meet me in the middle, they can meet me at that common kitchen table of humanity. But if their religion and their faith is preventing, that is proving an obstacle to them accessing a common humanity rather than being a facilitator, then that's a problem.

AJ: 1:19:03

And again, humanism can also be an obstacle. Any belief system practice in a very jealous, wrong, immoral, greedy way, a non empathetic way, can become an obstacle, and that's exactly what we want to avoid. So in doing that, I think this allows me to work with an interfaith projects and other social justice projects, for example, in helping refugees, the refugee support project, the charity that we found seven years ago locally in West London, where I live. It's an interfaith charity. I'm the only humanist on the board and there's Christians, there's Muslims, there's Buddhists, there's Unitarians and other Christian nominations there on the board and we can make some real change. If we fell out over each other, over what terms that we use or about our theological differences, then that would have been a real shame and we'd never have been able to achieve whatever small good that we managed to achieve in helping people in need.

AJ: 1:19:57

So I think, sure humanists can be, and especially if we take into account the idea of belief, belonging and behavior, which is a sociological definition of what a religion slash belief system is football teams, humanists, religions, the major world religions, islam, christianity, hinduism they all fall within that common definition because they all exhibit common beliefs, common belonging and a common behavior and rituals and ceremonies, etc. So that sociological definition may suggest that humanism actually is itself a religion. But, as Audrey said, we don't have a belief in the afterlife or a belief in a supernatural power, so that that's a key difference to other other religions. And if this has to be the, if this is the sort of hill that we want to die on, I think it's not worth it. I mean, if you want to call themselves a Christian humanist or a Muslim humanist, okay, you know the words. Words are free to use in whatever they like, especially if it's an opinion, and as long as they're not making a claim that affects me and my life as a humanist, sure you know, more power to them.

James H: 1:21:00

Plenty more to cover there. As mentioned, this might well be a topic for another day, and thanks for getting us started on what is a religion, AJ. That's certainly another one to add to the list With that, I think that brings brings to a close this week's episode. Aj, audrey, do you have anything going on in the next couple of weeks that you'd like to mention?

Audrey S: 1:21:21

We have our study group that we. That happens every two weeks, so we just had one this Thursday and we have another one in two weeks time. That happened online. So you can find us on Meetup Association of Black Humanists and it's a study group. We're looking at the little book of humanists humanism, sorry, at the moment. So pages 101 onwards. You don't have to read the whole book but it does help if you've read some of it and know what it's about and how it's constructed and stuff like that. And we're just going through it and just talking about how it affects us and you know what our views are and just kind of discussing humanism generally. So for people who don't really know about humanism or want to discuss it in a, you know, a deeper way, please do come along. As a say, we're on Meetup Association of Black Humanists 10th of October, so I look forward to seeing everyone there.

James H: 1:22:11

Fantastic. We will add the link to the show notes. And, aj, what have you got going on at the moment?

AJ: 1:22:17

Oh, that.

AJ: 1:22:17

There's a lot that we're doing in London Humanists, especially as it relates to socials.

AJ: 1:22:21

We've just had our monthly Sunday lunch meet which we try and do because a lot of people aren't available in our weekdays socially with other humanists and like-minded people, which we find is very important, especially again for apostates and people questioning their faith.

AJ: 1:22:35

We've just had that, so the next one will be at the end of September and all of the other dates will be on our socials. And then this next coming week we've got an online discussion group on should the burning of religious texts be allowed, and our discussions are online spaces for key current affairs issues to be debated and picked apart, and we've chosen this one because of what's been happening in the Nordic countries recently with the resurgence in the debate on how far should we go in terms of religious tolerance and also Islamophobia claims as well, and what role the state should have in that, in symbolic protest that may offend people of religious faith. So that should be a lively one and very much looking forward to that. If any listeners do want to join again, just follow central London Humanists on Meetup or Instagram and we'll have the details there.

James H: 1:23:24

Wonderful. So, aj Audrey, thank you once again for your time. Thank you very much, listeners, and we'll speak to you next week.