Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.

Dr. Mark Solomon is an author, neuropsychologist, musician and radio show/podcast host whose work touches on a wide range of topics. Mark produces a national Street Epistemology radio show/podcast called “Being Reasonable” (beingreasonableshow.com, @B_Reasonable_, @Being Reasonable).

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the video above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple and here elsewhere.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome

01:25 Mark’s Intro

• @Street Epistemology. Conversations about “what you know and how you know it” @Anthony Magnabosco , Reid Nicewonder @Cordial Curiosity

02:44 What’s Real?

• Flat Earth
• Backfire effect
• Talking less about the belief & more about the reasons for the belief
• Improving our epistemology, not just “correcting” beliefs
• “I grew up in a Jewish household that didn’t discuss god”
• Living with two separate epistemologies: naturalism / humanism but culturally Jewish
• “I couldn’t even tell you that my rabbi believed in the supernatural”
• SE as a tool anyone can use
• Evidence & reason
• Objectivity & subjectivity
• Reality, truth, belief & opinion
• Starting conversations with understanding how people think of truth

27:44 What Matters?

• “I don’t know”
• “I try to be a selfless person but sometimes I act selfishly”
• “I just act – I don’t know if I have a choice”
• Uncertainty, psychology & moral foundations
• Suffering vs. flourishing (causing bad feelings in others is bad)
• Moral origins in evolution & psychology
• Determinism & free will
• Pre & non-human morality
• Compassion & co-operation as evolutionarily adaptive
• Virtue, deontology, utility, feminist care, relational ethics
• “If there were no sentient beings there would be no morality”
• Internal (warm fuzzy feelings, reciprocity…) & external reasons to be good
• True altruism & demandingness. “At least don’t needlessly cause suffering & death”
• Emotional & intellectual routes to compassion
• Alleviating suffering vs. enhancing flourishing
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights

48:15 Who Matters?

• Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”
• Getting backyard chickens for eggs & as pets
• “It’s become painfully obvious to us that they are really smart creatures with their own social order… they definitely feel suffering.”
• “There are some really stark commonalities between humans & chickens”
• Inferring sentience (evo, info proc architecture, behaviour/comms, contact & intuition)
• “I’m not vegan but I get it”
• Avoidance, deliberate ignorance (e.g. egg/dairy production) reassuring fabrications (“humane” farming), wishful thinking, cognitive dissonance, akrasia
• “My father in law is a cattle farmer”
• “I don’t really have a good reason [not to be vegan]”
• Veganising meals
• Vegan endurance athletes
• “If theres’s two people in a marriage, & one decides to go vegan…”
• For most atheists, humanists, sceptics, rationalists… animal ethics is like kryptonite
• The best arguments against Sentientism?
• “Whenever someone challenges sentiocentric moral consideration – it’s very hard to do that without excluding some humans”
• What would reduce my confidence in Sentientism?
• What reasons could there be for rejecting reasoning? 🙂
• Insect sentience

01:20:36 How Can We Make a Better World?

• “Having incorrect beliefs… can definitely impact the lives of other people” (e.g. Antivaxx)
• Street Epistemology: if we have a better epistemology we’ll be in a much better place
• Are all human-cased problems due to failures of compassion or epistemology?
• “20 years from now this conversation will seem antiquated”
• Is/ought vs. epistemology & ethics complementing each other
• SE: “Taking the heat off the belief” and talking about how the belief was formed

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info.

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Thanks Graham for the post-production.