Find our conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism podcast here, episode 242. 

Ray Nayler is a Hugo and Locus Award winning author. Born in Quebec and raised in California, he lived and worked abroad for two decades in Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, and Kosovo as a Foreign Service officer, a Peace Corps volunteer, and an international development worker.

Ray’s first novel, The Mountain in the Sea won the Locus Award. It was a finalist for the Nebula Arthur C. Clarke, the LA Times Ray Bradbury Awards, and was named a London Times science fiction book of the year. Mountain was listed as one of the best science fiction books of all time by Esquire. Ray’s novella The Tusks of Extinction won the 2025 Hugo Award, and was a finalist for the Nebula and Locus Awards. Ray’s third book, Where the Axe is Buried, was published in April 2025. Ray’s short stories have won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, France’s highest literary prize for science fiction, the Clarkesworld Readers’ poll, the Asimov’s Readers’ Award, the Bifrost readers’ award, and have been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips:

“If the world is actual and real and their suffering and their thoughts and their perceptions of the world are just as real and important as mine, then I’m tied to them in this way that is real.”

“That’s the core for me. That’s the root of ethics. Ethics is acting in the world as if other beings are just as important as you because that’s a fact.”

“Consciousness arose in a very natural and comprehensible way as a consequence of the existence of life in real space.”

“I always want to end my books on an empowering note. You can have a very dystopic vision of the near future. It should still have something in it that moves people toward positive action because I do think writing has a function in the world and a purpose.”

01:00 Welcome

The Nico Delon Sentientism episode

“I think my reading list extends just out past the heat death of the universe.”

Sentientism’s “what’s real?” and “who matters?” questions. “I’m myself constantly forming and reforming a set of opinions around these things… E.M. Forster’s ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’”

“… these conversations are really helpful for my own thinking… thinking is inherently dialogic.”

“…my frame of reference is generally semiotics… Charles Sanders Peirce… biosemiotics… Jesper Hoffmeyer… within that framework I view life as fundamentally a set of communicative acts that began with the beginnings of life and continues on with all of us…”

“… it implies that there’s more than one self because the way that information theory works… If you take the idea that information is a difference that makes a difference, you can’t communicate anything between two things that are in exactly the same state.”

“All communication, meaningful communication has to involve some sort of a state change… not necessarily in one’s opinion, but at least one’s knowledge.”

“… there are multiple selves coexisting inside us having conversations… quite often you have a conversation with yourself in your mind and you win… there must be more than one of you.”

“… you convince yourself of a thing, but what does that mean?… that’s really a very strange concept… who did I convince when I convinced myself and what part of me was it that was doing the convincing?”

“… you can take those internal dialogues and make them external… the communication between two people is like thinking… in fact it’s a superior way of thinking because if information is a difference that makes a difference and you measure the level of information by the level of difference two different people who have very different worldviews and very different opinions always are receiving more information in an exchange between them, then you internally are able to pass between those different selves.”

“… when I look back at these conversations, when I look at the transcripts of the conversations and I rewatch them, I see that I’m making so many discoveries about my own opinions and so many changes to those to those opinions.”

“… it’s why Plato had Socrates engage in dialogues constantly… And it’s why we find that Socratic method so effective.”

07:50 Ray’s Intro

“I live in many ways an extremely bifurcated existence… there is this author writer self… but I’m also a diplomat.”

“I’m a member of the US Foreign Service at the Department of State. Currently working at the National Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, which is basically one of the red phones between Moscow and Washington DC. We’re a 24-hour nuclear risk reduction watch. We also deal with lots of chemical weapons… other arms control agreements… we’re basically a line of communication between these two states to make sure that we don’t have misunderstandings that lead to nuclear conflict.”

“…before that… I’ve got 15 years in the foreign service. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkmenistan and then worked abroad for about two decades.”

“… all of that feeds back into my writing… the writing is a way for me to process a lot of what I I’m doing in the other job.”

“… the writing is also what fundamentally binds all of me together… it’s where I get the most satisfying sense of who I am and where I think most clearly.”

“… what fascinates me really is mind and sentience and communication and sign systems and how we communicate, how we miscommunicate and how to avoid that which is quite important to my present job.”

“I find memory really fascinating… I don’t believe that it’s something we understand very well. And all of that feeds into my writing.”

“I was a short story writer almost exclusively and a poet for about almost 30 years before publishing The Mountain In The Sea.”

“The Mountain In The Sea is my first fully novel length book and it condensed a lot of my obsessions at the time about consciousness, communication, and animal intelligence and other intelligences and how they reflect on human intelligence.”

“Now, I’ve published three books. The latest one was Where The Axe Is Buried… takes up a lot of the political issues of The Mountain In The Sea and sees where they go.”

11:00 What’s Real?

“Memory is not a record for me of events. Memory is a story that the brain, the mind, is telling itself about where it is now and why it is there and what possibilities it has for future movement.”

“… every time you access a memory, you’re always accessing it from a different point in your life. And that memory always reflects what it needs to reflect about where you are.”

“… it is a story. It is a way of navigating. It’s a navigational tool.”

“I grew up in Silicon Valley. I grew up in a family of engineers. My father is a hardware engineer… an electrical engineer that became a hardware engineer in the early days of the PC and even before that building big business computers.”

“My mother is a nurse.”

“… most of my relatives worked on satellite technology, computer technology and things in Silicon Valley or in the defence industry.”

“… my grandfather… worked for Lockheed Martin… one of my uncles as well.”

“I was more interested in books… in reading and discovering things that way. I was always interested in science and marine biology… in an exploratory, storytelling way.”

“…understanding things better through why animals act the way that they do, why things are connected and function the way that they do… I was always interested in systems…”

“… I do remember very clearly always having a very concrete sense that the world is real. That beyond my perception of things and my own existence, there are things in the world… that there is a real world that we all share that is made up of actual things… that even if you stopped believing in them, as Philip K Dick said, you would bump your leg against.”

“… although we may view the world very differently it’s there right?”

JW: “And does that way of thinking exclude the possibility of the supernatural or the transcendent or something beyond or something mystical or religious?”

“I don’t think it makes it impossible to think of those things.”

“… the world being real… fundamentally ties me to the sense of responsibility to other people in the world… if the world is actual and real and their suffering and their thoughts and their perceptions of the world are just as real and important as mine then I’m tied to them in this way that is real.”

“… what created the universe or how it came to be… what consciousness is… what life really is… why I feel like I’m here in this complex way… and I wasn’t and maybe I won’t be but I am here now… where did the capacity for feeling, a hereness come from?”

“All of those things are quite mysterious right? They’re things that science has not answered in any sufficient way and is not very close to answering.”

“I’ve studied… the poly cannon of Buddhism, the early philosophical discourses of the Buddha before it became encrusted with religious aspects, when it was really just someone who had a philosophical idea.”

“One of the things that the Buddha says… about the afterlife… ‘I am trying to treat a wound that an arrow has caused in you. I’m trying to give you the tools to treat that wound. And you keep asking me where the arrow came from. This is not the question that I’m addressing.’”

“… the core of my own belief is that I am trying to focus on how we act in this place and how we do better in those actions and how we better interpret what we are capable of interpreting here.”

“… that question of who fired the arrow… is just outside my ken. I know that it’s not something I’ll ever answer in my very brief experience. And so, it’s not as important to me as the more immediate things of how do I treat my daughter? What’s going to happen to her in the future? What kind of world will she live in? What will nature, you know, look like if we act or don’t act?… Those kinds of immediate questions, right, that I can control.”

“… there’s some sort of stoic aspect to that, too…”

“I’m very wary of the way that stoicism is used, especially nowadays, just like I’m wary of the way that mindfulness is used. I feel like they’re often used to better fit us into a bad system. And that is not supposed to be the point.”

“… the point is not that you work yourself to death, right? And then you do yoga to feel better about it so that you can work yourself to death some more, right?”

JW: “And to avoid actually trying to change anything… you just have to cope.”

“It’s to allow us to see how we might make concrete steps that alleviate suffering in the world in some manner.”

20:22 What Matters?

The detachment vs. engagement themes within Buddhism. The choice of withdrawing from suffering vs. addressing it.

JW: “If you can detach from wanting or caring about anything… things will go better… you can imagine that leading someone to almost a nihilistic place where you shouldn’t care about how your daughter feels.”

“I will say it a little bit more firmly that I believe that interpretation of Buddhism as being non-attachment… as a kind of nihilist detachment from the world is fundamentally and completely wrong… that is absolutely not present in Buddhism… There’s no evidential support for it.”

“The concept of non-attachment is that one understands the temporal nature of all things and that everything is engaged constantly in change and that one cannot control or stop time, suffering, old age, sickness, and death. And the reason why that’s important… is because it makes you value more the ephemeral momentary and changing nature of things and care about them more deeply. More deeply, not less deeply, without grasping or thinking that you can hold on to them.”

“You care about them with… loving kindness which is the best description I’ve heard… It is the feeling that a mother feels for her child… about all things.”

“I have a daughter who’s six… somebody said that being a parent feels like having your heart walk around outside of your body… that is a perfect description.”

“Buddhism as a philosophy… as a practice… is a way of really looking at the world and seeing it for what it is and then engaging with the world as it is as much as that is possible in our limitations as physical beings.”

“Really seeing what’s in front of us without masking it with our own ideas of permanence and control.”

“… when you open up to the temporality of things it makes you value those moments so much more and care about things so much more.”

“Zen Buddhism, you know, properly practiced is completely about being aware… Zen Buddhist meditators quite often don’t even close their eyes when meditating.”

“And the experience of meditation is not supposed to be about going anywhere. It’s supposed to be about fixing it in your head that you are here, really here, with your back aches and your toe that hurts and your leg that’s falling asleep and all of it and then… forcing you to live in that moment and not avoid it.”

“… Stoicism is also misinterpreted as something about avoiding pain… especially if you read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius… about accepting limitation and then moving forward in dignity with limitation… doing what you can to make things better for others and for yourself.”

JW: “…there is also, in both, a rich ethical imperative about concern for others and an imperative to act with that concern in mind.”

“… if you accept that reality exists… that it’s just as real for others as it is for yourself… logically you need to accept that you are no more important than anything else that is living in that space and that is experiencing that space…”

“… every single person is just as important as you. They value their lives just as much. They struggle and suffer the same way that you do.”

“They, and each of us has this ego, that is constantly telling us that we’re slightly more, at least, important… we have to have this, I think, in order to continue to survive”

“What is I and what is you is a boundary… that’s absolutely necessary at the cellular level and even inside it in order for life to function. Systems have to have boundaries and hierarchies.”

“…that’s the root of ethics… is acting in the world as if other beings are just as important as you.”

“… we’re all here together and we’re all just as important as one another and we have a responsibility to treat other people… with the care and compassion that we would want them to treat us… the golden rule… Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

“It is a pretty revolutionary recognition of equality of all beings… it answers a lot of questions about how you should act ethically… it answers them with a kind of certainty that is actually grounded in the real.”

JW: “… the platinum rule where you treat others how they want to be treated not necessarily how I would”

The is/ought, fact/values problem.

Charles Sanders Pierce’s definition: “A belief is an idea that a person is willing to act upon.”

“… you can say whatever you want, about beliefs, but the real beliefs that you have are expressed in the way that you act in the world… You do not believe something if you don’t act on it…”

JW: “What really matters is your expressed belief.”

“… there are many people who claim a certain set of ideas… but those aren’t the ideas that they that they live with and that they act upon.”

“The ideas that they live with and act upon are ideas they may have no access to even… they may be fundamentally confused beliefs right inside them but they are the touchstones of their actions.”

“…you can, for example, say that you believe in women’s equality but then treat women very poorly and not even understand what you really believe.”

“Intelligence is an operation in an environment.”

“There are there are tests that they’ve done on laboratory rats… you put one in a very complex environment and it becomes very smart and capable of solving all kinds of really complex problems. So you put another rat in a very simple environment and they become very dull and unable to solve complicated problems… but then when you take the rat out of the simple environment and you put it in the complex environment, it quickly becomes capable of doing the things the other rat was capable of.”

“…what we call development I think is quite often misrecognized. What it actually is is the operation of intelligence in an environment.”

“People who are intelligent are people who have the ability to express that intelligence in the environment that they’re in… And the intelligence is only meaningful in those environments.”

“…how smart are you when you’re drowning?… All of these ideas that you have…”

JW: “The environment renders that irrelevant.”

34:43 Who Matters?

JW: “…In The Mountain In The Sea you can find the humans struggling with what makes someone matter… so as they’re engaging with the octopus, they are thinking a lot about autonomy and ability to communicate and intelligence and power and resistance… Many of those factors make them go, ‘oh my god, maybe this octopus really matters in a way we hadn’t thought of before.’ Whereas what you were talking about before wasn’t really about any of those factors. It was about ultimately sentience, consciousness and the capacity to suffer.”

JW: “… again Buddhism has quite a lot to say about moral scope and who gets included in ideas like ahimsa.”

“… consciousness arose in a very natural and comprehensible way as a consequence of the existence of life in real space. So as life emerges, it immediately becomes necessary to engage in some kind of interpretive process about the environment around it. And that engagement starts out very, very simply.”

“Think about it on the level of a bacteria. There are sugars over here that I want. And so I read the environment in some way. As a bacteria, I sense the presence of those things in some way. My cilia move and they direct me toward that thing that I’m seeking. Well, already, we start to see the hints of something that we’ll call consciousness later, an interpretive environmental awareness.”

“And then as you get more and more complex animals navigating in more and more complex ways, you have to have a more and more complex interpretive awareness of the environment.

JW: “Because there are trade-offs and different factors.”

“And pretty soon that interpretive awareness starts to get hyper complex. And it gets hyper complex somewhere past the level maybe of bacteria… But already at the level of things like a wolf spider… something that we often would dismiss… making an extraordinary number of choices that are not instinctual, that are quite often learned across its lifespan about how to hunt prey.”

“Wolf spiders… it’s kind of terrifying, will go to where they know the prey is going and ambush it there… think about how much activity has to go on in that animal for it to learn where its prey is going and then go there and effectively ambush it in that place… To wait, to stalk, to plan, to do all of these things.”

“These are words that we use that sound like they’re anthropomorphic. They’re not anthropomorphic. It does involve waiting, planning, anticipating – all of these things.”

“… if you boil all of our senses… all the animals and all of the plants on Earth down to one sense, that sense is proprioception. It is the sense of our location, the locative sense of us within our world.”

“… all senses that we have are proprioceptive senses. We see in order to see where we are in a space and to see how far things are away and to navigate that space. We hear in order to navigate a space… We feel…”

“And that environment is more complex than only space. It can be about where food is…”

“Let’s say you go from wolf spider to animals that have collectives… birds and fish live in these nonviolent encouraging collectives.”

“We are odd, very odd primates because we live in these really big collectives and most primates actually live in very small groups. And there’s a reason for that. The reason is violence. Primates are extremely violent. Even bonobos are extremely violent compared to humans.”

“We’re the least violent of all primates. We’re so nonviolent that we’re actually able to do things that no other primates could do, but birds could do.”

“If you loaded a Boeing 747 with chimpanzees and you flew it for 10 hours, not a single one of those chimpanzees would get off of that 747 with all of their limbs and eyes intact.”

JW: “And you could get the same result with humans, but you’d have to choose the humans quite carefully. Random humans, I think, would do better… As they do most days.”

“If you did the same with crows, all of them would get off that plane doing just fine most likely because crows live together in big relatively peaceful groups. Just like humans do.”

“So that’s a really complex environment to live in… as these relationships become more complex, they become sort of meta relationships with the environment. The environment becomes culture.”

“Remember that a crow doesn’t live in the forest. A crow lives in a flock. A flock lives in the forest. The crow is not navigating the forest. The crow is largely navigating relationships with other crows.”

“And to navigate relationships with other crows… It’s proprioceptive awareness where it is in that abstract sense of culture has to become much more powerful. So already a crow is an extraordinary choice maker.”

“And a human is a very extraordinary choice maker because a human has built its set of capacities within an incredibly complex set of relationships with other humans and other animals.”

“And a dog that has to live with humans is an incredibly complex choice maker.”

“And all of that choice making implies a system that can make choices. A system that can make choices I think would have to have some degree of self awareness because self awareness is proprioception.”

“… it’s this loop back into itself. As the animal has to navigate the environment, it becomes more aware of the environment. It’s able to navigate the environment better. It becomes more aware of the environment because that’s rewarded by evolution. It becomes able to better navigate the environment. It becomes more aware of the environment and you build and build and build and that’s how you get complex consciousness.”

“But it can be built in many, many different ways because what is an animal? An animal is something that lives effectively within its environment. And so living effectively means an animal understands what it needs to understand.”

“… it’s probably always going to understand a bit more than it has to understand because it’s always going to have that capacity to build on understanding. Like the wolf spider… it has to have that in order to be creative… in order to use choice and to move itself in its environment, beyond just survival.”

The Mark Solms Sentientism episode

The Walter Veit Sentientism episodes (one and two re: pathological complexity)

The work of Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka.

Is sentience what makes a being matter morally?

“I think so… I think there’s something it’s like to be a bacteria, but that something that it’s like to be a bacteria probably doesn’t matter very much in the sense of having any sense of suffering or being in a way that is valuable to it.”

“… it does have a built-in sense of self-preservation in some way. All life does. We see that it strives in some basic way to maintain its cohesion. And to remain for as long as it can. But beyond that, I doubt that it’s perceiving very much about its environment or has much of a capacity to do a lot of things.”

“Now, bacteria can do some interesting things. Bacteria in your gut can make you crave more fat in your diet… It can make you eat more sugars. It can control your mind… In some ways that we don’t understand very well.”

JW: “… more of our physical body is, bacteriological and non-human than is actually human cells.”

“Jesper Hoffmeyer says ‘we are swarms of swarming swarms’… which is a disturbing way of thinking about your body…”

“… all of these organisms tied up in this larger organism… our cells are clearly drawn from the same patterns as bacteria.”

“I don’t think our individual cells have much of a sense of self. They contribute to the construction of the larger creature that has a much more profound sense of its environment and its awareness in the world.”

“I think you could say that the more consciousness and awareness something has, the more suffering it’s probably able to experience.”

“I don’t think any of this is certain… but it seems to make some sense to me that killing a bacteria is simply not the same as killing a bird and that killing a bird is not exactly the same as killing a human being.”

JW: “The Jains have quite an interesting approach which, as I understand it, does grade based on the number of senses you have… you can see it’s somewhat analogous… if you have one sense or two senses or three or four or five then maybe you’re moving up some sort of scale of sentience.”

JW: “… there’s something in there about acknowledging the richness or the differentiation of sentient experiences and not wanting to crush them down to something that’s super simple.”

JW: “… that capacity, whatever it is, is morally salient because having that capacity means you can be morally impacted… things can go well or badly for you. And to my mind that link between the good and bad of experience is another bridge to the good and bad of moral action and choice and ethics as well.”

JW: “… the Buddhist idea of ahimsa… sadly many modern Buddhists, for whatever reason, don’t quite get this, but ahimsa, as an idea of nonviolence and doing no harm never meant do no harm to humans. It means do no harm at all to anyone who can be harmed. And anyone who can be harmed is by definition sentient or conscious… there’s a sentiocentric moral scope there.”

“It’s not possible to do no harm… what we’re talking about when we’re talking about our lives… is harm reduction.”

“… a better way of looking at it would be to say… the moral imperative is do no excessive and unnecessary harm.”

“Your existence in the world will harm other living beings. It will… It’s unavoidable.”

“I was at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. One of the things that we worked on very closely was indigenous co-management of marine preserves.”

“… one of my colleagues from the indigenous side of this effort said something to me that was completely revelatory and that finally made so much of this ‘do no harm’ kind of idea that we’re talking about click… she said the problem with the managers of these marine protected areas from the government side, who are good people and care, is that they do not envision the environment as containing human beings.”

“And we, she said… all the indigenous communities I know of, envision an environment in which the human is included and in which human activity is a part of thriving.”

JW: “We’re not separate. We’re embedded and connected.”

“… it finally clicked for me that that was one of the major problems… when we were talking about the environment we’re not including the thriving of the human being in the environment.”

“The indigenous sense of that is that there is a way in which the human can live in the environment in which they are not causing unnecessary harm to the environment… the same way a predator is not causing unnecessary harm. A jaguar doesn’t cause unnecessary harm. It causes harm. Necessary harm…. necessary suffering.”

“Maybe you could even say unnecessary suffering is harm and necessary suffering in some way is not.”

JW: “I’m a little nervous about making that distinction because I think harm, killing, many terrible things can actually, in some circumstances, be justified… my hesitation is that the harm is still being done to the victim or to the being, whether it’s justified or not.”

“It’s all suffering, but some of it is harm in some larger sense… To the world, to the system… And maybe some suffering is not harmful to the systematic functioning and flourishing of life.”

JW: “… An area in the UK where there’s a nature reserve… So the definition of nature is no humans… But it was completely defined by human activity. Thousands of meters of fencing to keep humans out and very active management of the space using bulldozers and diggers and moving things around and shifting shingle beaches back when the waves move them… the amount of human intervention to create this imaginary bubble of a space without humans… something weird is going on there.”

“… that early physics paper… the reduction of entropy in thermodynamic systems by intelligent thermodynamic systems… How an intelligent system imagines the maintenance of a system.”

JW: “… there can be a danger in that pattern of thinking… We reintegrate humans into nature, recognize we are part of nature and in that context think about avoiding unnecessary or egregious harms. I think that’s an entirely appropriate framework.”

JW: “Some people will take that pattern… it’s quite common in the environmentalist movement… a more ecocentric view where they’ll say ‘Jamie, you’re wrong to focus too much on the sentient beings, we should be thinking about networks of deeply interconnected and interdependent ecosystems. And we humans should play our natural part in that as we have evolved… there is a circle of life. As part of life, life consumes life. So, I’m going to have my Big Mac… produced on a factory farm’.”

JW: “… saying we as humans will absorb ourselves back into nature. We will absolve ourselves of any moral responsibility. We will ignore the moral harms done unnecessarily to vast billions and trillions of very obviously sentient beings in farms and fisheries… but wrap it up with this bow of, ‘oh, now I’m being reconnected with nature because I’ve just ordered a steak.’”

JW: “… humans are so good at this. We love to take these romanticized views and use them to justify what we do.”

JW: “However we think we’re connected with nature… there is something inviolable about the subjective perspective of each individual sentient entity within that environment.”

JW: “… we can never be perfect. We can never do no harm or cause no suffering, but to avoid the unnecessary stuff and to reduce harm as far as is practical and possible…”

JW: “I think that’s a much more balanced approach, which I think gets the best of both worlds because we recognize our interconnectedness. We recognize we’re not separate from nature, but we still really see that core moral significance of each individual subjective sentient being. They matter in their own right. And unless we’ve got a bloody good reason for harming, exploiting, or killing them, we should be guided by empathy and connection and compassion.”

“I like that a lot… In my in my first tour as a foreign service officer, I was environment, science, technology, and health officer in Ho Chi Min City in in Vietnam.”

“When you work on environmental preservation, you quite often choose a charismatic animal… save the whales… save the rhino…”

JW: “My Octopus Teacher is a classic example.”

“… in order to save the Dugong… this sea cow… very cute, gentle creature… that’s not what you’re saving. What you’re trying to preserve is the entire world that allows the Dugong to live. You’re focusing people’s attention on that animal in order to create a behaviour that allows the entire system, of which we are a part, to function in a harmonious way.”

“In order for the elephant to live, Africa has to live… and be able to have a health in its ecology… and in human interaction with that ecology, that allows for these enormous and wonderful animals to exist.”

“… you can’t say save the bacteria. Or save the mycelium, because people’s minds just bounce right off of it. But that is what you’re doing when you say save the whales. You have to save the krill… You have to save the feeding grounds and the mating grounds. And you have to save their ability to migrate. And you have to save the ocean itself. You have to save all of it together.”

“… maintaining that circle of life is maintaining the health of that entire ecosystem that allows the things that are in that ecosystem, especially those big and complex beings that are experiencing that ecosystem in rich and rewarding ways, to live and thrive in it.”

“And if you’re imprisoning billions of animals in little cages because they’re delicious, well, it’s clear what you believe.”

JW: “The expressed belief is what you actually believe. Whatever you claim about loving animals or caring about animals.”

JW: “Taking the systemic approach… really think about systems and ecosystems and how things connected is deeply important. But the reason I think that’s important is because of my concern for the individual sentient beings within those systems. That’s ultimately why I care about the systems… that does require us to have an enlightened humble approach to the massive, complex, almost inconceivable richness of those systems.”

JW: “The danger I find in popular discourse is that people are so focused on the systems that they no longer care about the individual sentient beings”

JW “…they’re interested in the charismatic animals because they’re fun to watch on nature programs. They’re interested in scarcity. So if your population is not threatened, they don’t care about you. But if you’re one of the last Dugongs, all of a sudden they will. It’s not about the individual. It’s about scarcity.”

JW: “it’s part of a broader pattern… much of environmentalism is really a cynical human aesthetic preference for nature to be pretty and to provide us with the ecosystem services we like… it’s us who are judging whether this ecosystem is healthy or not. And we’re often not connecting with the individual sentient beings within it.”

JW: “… our food systems or exploitative animal systems… there the contrast is so much more brutal and egregious. There isn’t really even a story you can tell about why we still do that stuff.”

“I completely agree with that… I’ll tell you why your set of beliefs is a great and rewarding one… The existence of truth and beauty and all of those amazing concepts that sentient beings can recognise is only achievable within this functioning ecosphere.”

“… it’s not about service and separation and culture and nature… in order to have that sentient experience, there has to be a world in which it can thrive. And so even if you didn’t care about those larger networks, you would have to understand them and build out your understanding and protect them in order to protect the sentient beings within them.”

 “… that Sentientist viewpoint rhymes almost perfectly with an ecological viewpoint. As long as the person recognizes the things that science has shown us … demonstrated to us that the interconnectedness of all things is what allows sentient beings to thrive.”

“You can focus your care on the sentient beings. You still have to care about the environment.”

“It’s a wonderful thing because it says if you’re engaged with the world in that way you have to be engaged with the complete world and be nurturing of the complete world.”

JW: “And it’s unavoidable because that’s what the evidence and reason tells us about how the universe works. It’s not some sort of mystical thing about how we’re all connected or we all are one… That is just reality… of how things work.”

JW: “So if you want to care about sentient beings, all of those quadrillions, quintillions of them, and recognize their perspectives are morally salient and important in their own right, you have to care about the systems in which they in which they live.”

01:06:55 A Better World?

JW: “… we’ve got this broadly naturalistic way of understanding the world, trying to engage with the facts honestly…. the world out there probably does exist. We are all connected. We have this way of thinking about ethics that is grounded in empathy and compassionate connection. We recognize that all beings that have some meaningful sort of consciousness or sentience matter… that’s the raw material of understanding the world and who should matter within it. What the hell do we do?”

“Inside us are the voices of the dead. We carry them with us constantly throughout our lives. The people that we grew up with and people that might be gone, in one sense or another, they live inside us.”

“And one of the voices I carry is my grandfather’s voice… he said to me once, semi- sarcastically, while I was failing to do something… He said, “You know what, Ray? The first step is giving a shit.”

“The first step is always going to be care. And the way we build a better future is by caring about one another, about other beings, about our planet, about improving things, and about our children or other people’s children and the world they will live in.”

“… one of the great logical fallacies that’s built into our systems is thinking that people who came before us were dumber than we are and less important and that the people who come after us are also less important… it goes back into that egotism.”

“… so maybe one question we should ask ourselves is are we being good ancestors?”

“We’ll all be dead. Other people will have to carry on in the world that we make for them and that our actions produce. The first step is giving a shit about what that world is going to look like.”

“And if we can’t make the first step… then we can’t do the rest of it. We can’t build a better future. And we’re still at that first step in many, many ways. But we’re there… we’re making it. I feel it.”

JW: “You feel optimistic?”

“I do… I feel there’s a difference between the way people think about the world. If you looked at the way I grew up and the way we thought about the environment and the way people think about it now, the general zeitgeist, there’s a better understanding of limitation of resources… of systems and how they can fail, of the damage that we can do to things.”

“People thought they were drawing from an endless well of resources and they now understand that that is not the case.”

“We have to care about what we’re doing and when we care we’ll change.”

“When we really believe, then our actions will change. And we’re starting to believe, but we don’t really believe yet…”

JW: “But when we do, we will express those beliefs.”

JW: Other Sentientism guests who’ve said “our long-term prospects for playing a positive role in the world are pretty good as long as we can get to the long term.”

JW: A quote from “The Mountain In The Sea”: “All beings shall find refuge here.” “I just thought that was a lovely way of setting out a potential vision.”

“I always want to end my books on an empowering note that gives things back to the control of the reader and makes them feel as if positive action is possible.”

“I really dislike dystopias that disempower people… you can have a very dystopic vision of the near future, [but] it should still have something in it that moves people toward positive action.”

“… writing has a function in the world and a purpose and I hope that people see that in my work.”

JW: “We do have power. Particularly if we work together.”

01:13:20 Follow Ray

rayaylor.net (including Ray’s short stories free to read)

Ray on Wikipedia

“I just would encourage everyone to read widely and act on what they learn… Act in the world, read and learn, experience some more, try things out… And give a shit.”

Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop. Sentientism is proud to now be part of the iRoar podcast network – go check out some of the other wonderful podcasts there.