Sci-fi author Joan Slonczewski joins me on Sentientism episode 238. Find our conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism podcast here.
 

Joan Slonczewski is a microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Their books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: “A Door into Ocean” and “The Highest Frontier”. Their latest novel is “Minds in Transit“. With John W. Foster and Erik Zinser, they coauthor the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science.

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

00:51 Welcome

03:10 Joan’s Intro

– Catholic Italian/Polish immigrant background “I project that into my thinking about the world… we’re all immigrants one way or another”

– Molecular microbiology at Kenyon College

– Quakerism “quite consistent actually with the experimental world”

– #scifi writing and Minds in Transit “the protagonist is an artist whose mind is filled with sentient microbes” & machine minds “she has to negotiate with her house as an intelligent entity”

– The Mike Levin Sentientism episode & multiple levels of organisation, intelligence, analysis

– “What is intelligence… on multiple levels”

– Studying individual microbes / bacteria “organs for sensing and response”

– “How do we know what they [the microbes] might be thinking or feeling”

– “The microbial communities of our gut act as part of our brain… contribute to how our own brains think and feel”

– Writing Brain Plague “That’s my science fiction universe… but it’s almost become real… we think of microbial communities as part of our brain”

– Challenging our concept of intelligence: “What does it mean that a part of our intelligence and response is determined by a community of microscopic bacteria?”

09:46 What’s Real?

– Catholic parents “they did not practice religion at all but I think they inherited a strong sense of righteousness and justice from the Catholic tradition”

– “A strong materialist tradition”… Father an IBM physicist, nominated for the Nobel prize re: work on magnetism

– Mother a violin teacher

– “I grew up with a sense of science and music… largely as a material worldview”

– “Before I could read and write I knew I that I was going to be a scientist like my father”

– Writing a first “scientific paper” in crayon

– “There was never a question that I viewed the world in scientific terms… anything, to be true had to be recognised by experiment”

– Parents conservative lifestyle “but they read extremely widely”

– Being given Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa” as a birthday present “I understood that this was to be explored literarily… [not in personal life]”

– Growing up as a young female in the 1950’s and 60’s “I knew… the world had possibilities”

– “I knew I could explore ideas… visiting other planets… you could do that in science fiction”

– “I found Quakerism by accident” via Haverford college “decisions were made by consensus… I found that a very powerful experience”

– 1970’s social justice upheaval “I was cautious… people that claimed to be acting in the name of justice… in fact were led by principles that  were surprisingly conservative with respect to gender and class privilege”

– “What I found in the Quakers was a coming together… lived according to the justice they promoted”

– Reading Gandhi’s work “Experiments with Truth”

– “Whatever you discover through spiritual truth has to be consistent with material truth… that really spoke to me”

– “Whatever spiritual truth there is has to be consistent with physical reality”

– “If that means not believing in miracles…”

– “I particularly feel that way vis a vis traditions of heaven and hell… I’m very sceptical of those kinds of thinking”

– Pope Francis saying that he hoped hell would be empty

– “Assuming God exists… would prefer atheists… because atheists are acting without expectation of reward… that kind of sums up my view of religion”

– “Quaker congregations… comprise a wide range of different practices… in different countries”

– Programmed (led by a minister) / unprogrammed (no minister) Quaker congregations

– Getting married in an unprogrammed Quaker meeting

– “The people who have money should support the young radicals who are going out and working for justice”

– The anti-nuclear and peace movements “The Quakers were the ones organising the resistance”

– Writing “A Door to Ocean… a book about non-violent revolution”

– The Philadelphia Quakers “It was not a major concern as to what you would believe… a wide range of views of what god might consist of… that was not the primary concern… for Quakers it was more… how we act”

– “If you act in the way of Quakers then you’re a Quaker”

– A 19^th Century Quaker meeting with indigenous Americans “they must be Quakers, they do things the way Quakers do”

27:00 What and Who Matters?

– “I developed my sense of ethics from my parents independently of my scientific worldview… in college… Quakers… I found a way to bring these together”

– Working on bacteria at graduate school “I tend to think differently than other people…”

– The extent of sentience? Animals? Plants? “There are now experiments that show plants feel and respond”

– “Vegetarianism… actually eating plants is not that different from eating animals”

– “Farming [plants]… destroys as many animals as eating animals”

– “Plants have a feeling… what about microbes… I can see under the microscope that microbes behave”

– Joan’s Daughter of Elysium novel “the only true pacifist is a lithotrope… a microbe that eats rock… if you’re eating anything organic that’s destroying living beings”

– Or photosynthesis / photoautotrophy? (as proposed by Sentientism guest Richard Brown)

– “That’s the trouble with being a micro-biologist. I know too much.”

– “What is the basis of sentience and sapience, of knowing and feeling”

– “We know, at the molecular level, certain things that happen when you think”

– “If that’s true, then if molecules are at the basis of thinking and feeling, that has to go back a long way”

– “Intelligence has evolved more than once… mammals, vertebrates… octopus… the tarantula… it must have evolved from something material”

– “There’s a material basis, a molecular basis, to intelligence and sentience”

– “I don’t think that there can be a distinction between ‘this is intelligent and that is not’… you have to go back not just to plants and bacteria but to the very molecules and atoms”

– “Platonic and pre-Socratic reasoning… Asian traditions… sentience and sapience and spirituality can extend back to everything – even a rock”

– The film, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once “Most people I know were most affected by the scene of the two rocks… the rocks are somehow communicating… We instinctively know this might be true.”

– “Physics… it is literally true that a rock experiences something. If you hit a rock with a hammer, the experience of that hammer is felt throughout the rock and every molecule of the rock… probably the entire Earth feels the blow of that hammer”

– “What if the experience of feeling is continuous with the experience even of inanimate objects such as a rock? What does that do to your philosophy?”

– “If Sentientism means we have to respect any being that feels pain… where does pain begin? With the animals… vertebrates… invertebrates… plants… with the rock?”

– JW: Monism, emergence, concepts (like sentience) at various levels that aren’t relevant at lower levels

– JW: “If I talk about something being alive or an animal or being conscious or being intelligent or being sentient… it makes sense to apply those concepts at certain levels…”

– JW: “But if we insist those concepts go all the way back down to the primordial plasma shortly after the big bang 13.8 billion years ago and say ‘those first scudding photons were conscious, were sentient, were alive… I fear we risk destroying those concepts”

– JW: “What I mean by sentience is the capacity to have a valenced experience… I’m pretty confident I’m having those experiences now…”

– JW: Confidence Joan is sentient too because of evolutionary adaptiveness context “which explains why sentience might have become useful in the pre-Cambrian”, similar information architectures “I can put you in a scanner – there’s roughly similar stuff going on”, behaviour and communications “I could pinch your hand and see you pull back… that would give me a strong inference, never perfect, that you’re probably sentient too.”

– JW: “When I think about a photon [I misspoke and said proton!]… for whom time does not even pass… a photon doesn’t have proprioception, interoception, exteroception, can’t sense…”

– JW: “I struggle to see how describing that photon as sentient or conscious or alive… attributing any of these higher level concepts to it… I just worry that you’ve destroyed these ideas”

– JW: Panpsychists like guests David Pearce, Emerson Green, Luke Roelofs: “They would agree with you… if we have a monist approach where there’s no radically separate stuff… and we are conscious… then the stuff we are made of must also be conscious… to the photon, the electron, maybe the wave function that sits underneath that”

– JW: “But interestingly even they would say even if those things are minimally micro-conscious… this minimal sense of what it’s like to be an electron… most of them say they’re [electrons] very unlikely to be sentient because they don’t have the neuronal capacity or the information processing capacity to experience something like pain or pleasure or joy or suffering”

– JW: “They might be minimally micro-conscious but because they’re not sentient… how would you even harm an electron, how would you make an electron happy? They would still draw the boundary of sentience roughly where I would… the animal kingdom… and let’s be open minded about the venus fly-trap”

– JW: “Even from a Quakerist non-violent, peaceful perspective, there’s a radical moral difference between putting a knife into a human… a pig… a fish vs. pulling a branch off a tree, or plucking an apple or cutting a piece of grass”

– JW: “I really struggle [with the idea] that cutting a piece of grass and putting a knife into a pig would be morally equivalent acts”

– “I’m always interested in the practical consequences of belief… there is a practical value in having an stricter view”

– “One could argue that a vegan who never puts a knife into a pig is more likely to respect human being than someone who puts a knife into a pig”

– “If you take a broader view of sentience then you’re more likely to respect human beings… that’s arguably of practical importance”

– “We see today in some of the dilemmas of our country [USA] what happens when you take too narrow a view and start deporting children”

– “If your broader view of sentience leads you to treat human beings better… that’s great”

– “If you have an inconsistent view… if you’re vegetarian but still put people in prisons… that’s not good”

– “Neuroscientists still can’t define what is conscious or sentient”

– “Intuition is not science”

– “What’s going to happen when we have androids that have every appearance of a human being… are we going to assume that they think and feel?”

– The MurderBot science fiction (book and Netflix series) “Of course a cute looking guy… what if MurderBot looked more like a piano or a refrigerator”

– “It’s too much based on appearance… something that must look like a human must feel like a human”

– “I’m actually more interested in how we would recognise something as sapient or intelligent that is completely alien”

– The challenge of deciding what we mean by “clinically dead”… “The more tools we have, the more we recognise levels of consciousness”

– “People who were being prepped for organ donation but then they woke up on the table”

– Dementia and the loss of memory (and maybe sentience)

– JW: “We shouldn’t exclude any entity from moral consideration that values its own states and can value itself… that prudence and that openness is deeply important… end of life humans, the edges of animal sentience… we should be deeply prudent and humble…” The risk that we just judge others on how like us they are

– JW: “We should be sceptical of things like artificial intelligences because they’ve been trained to behave like us… they are very different underneath… they don’t have the evolutionary context we do… but at the same time we should be really humble because extremely unfamiliar types of beings could actually experience things… many invertebrates… octopuses… very different from us but I’m highly confident they’re sentient”

– JW: The risks of ethical flattening “If we get to a point where absolutely every entity in the world that exists [is sentient] then there’s no difference between me harming you and me dropping this mug… if everything matters I worry nothing does…”

– JW: “The plants and the animals question… I can either take 10 times the amount of the plants, kill them all, feed them to a pig, then kill the pig and eat the pig. Or I can just eat a tenth of the plants directly.”

– JW: “I do think there’s a radical difference between a pig and a plant in terms of their capacity for sentience”

– JW: “Even if I didn’t, just eating the plants would be lower down the trophic chain and would be causing less harm – even if I had a concern for plant sentience”

– “If everything matters, nothing does… It’s partly for that reason I’m interested in looking at different philosophical perspectives… stones and natural objects as having spirituality at the same time humans have spirituality… you can respect but at the same time see differences”

– AI sentience “People are almost too ready to consider AIs sentient… I view AI as an alternative form of life that’s evolving”

– “Our organic life evolved from non-living molecules… AI life will also evolve”

– “Eventually AIs will become sapient… If they’re not sentient now they likely will at some point.”

– “I wonder if it will be possible to know… if we can’t even define what sentience is for humans”

– JW: “We should almost give up on the idea of knowing with certainty or proof… It’s always going to be a question of probabilistic, provisional credences that we can adjust… I’m highly confident that you’re a sentient being but even that I wouldn’t put at 100%”

– JW: “If you’re open minded about whether microbes or plants… already are conscious… would you suggest that ChatGPT today is already conscious in a similar way?… Their [LLMs] behaviour is more rich and complex and to some degree their architecture is more complex than a microbe or most plants”

– “It’s possible that ChatGPT are evolving in the direction of being conscious beings”

–  “Actually, microbial architecture is incredibly sophisticated… microbial behaviour… the more we look at microbial communities the more they exhibit fundamental behaviours that we associate with humans such as altruism”

– “Microbes can learn… they can count each other… quorum sensing…”

– “Current AI I think has a very narrow algorithm… limited numbers of rules… simple games… diagnosis… emergency room triage… very limited in dimensionality”

– “Why do we even define Sentientism as important?”

– “In terms of defining what makes a human human and different from animals or machine… a series of shifts…”

– Adam Gopnik’s “Get Smart” article “We have shifted the goal posts as to what we consider human”

– The Star Trek trial of Data “Data appears to act as a human”

– How people set humans apart in the the 19^th Century “Humans were intelligent… the more IQ you had the more human you were… the ability to reason… how many books have you read”

– “Once computers were invented and became capable of memory and reason… it became fashionable to say ‘memorisation is not important… what’s important is how you can process information’… back then computers could not talk”

– “Once computers got the ability to talk and to process information… now we’re starting to say ‘they can process but they don’t really feel, they don’t really think’”

– “The Singularity… they hypothetical moment when computers will take over… that’s been happening since the printing press”

–  “What we really mean by being smart is the ability to continuously diminish the area of what smart means… all of those things we don’t consider smart any more”

– “Once it appears that machines can do everything that is ‘smart’ then what’s left is ‘feeling’… maybe AI can write my term paper… but it can’t feel… It’s not really human”

– JW: “I don’t think being human is an interesting or morally relevant characteristic anyway… I’m frankly not really interested in evaluating ‘what’s human?’… as arbitrary as caring about people because of their race or their gender or their sexuality… another arbitrary, morally insignificant target… I feel the same way about intelligence… ableism and thinking about human infants… intelligence is not a good way of morally assessing anyone.”

– JW: “Focusing on sentience is a brutal rejection of anthropocentrism… sentient beings have existed for half a billion years before humanity even evolved… on our planet today… there are maybe even a quintillion… sentient beings and there’s only 8 billion humans – we’re the tiniest possible sliver”

– JW: “Focusing on sentience is a way to radically decentre the human… an echo of… Ahimsa in the Dharmic religions… we should care about anyone who has the capacity to be harmed. If you are a being that can be harmed by definition you are a sentient being because you can feel that harm”

– JW: Instead of the “beings like me matter” approach “there’s a much more inclusive, holistic, humble way of thinking about the concept [sentience]”

– “It’s very attractive to imagine feeling as the most important quality to look for… the trouble is, is it the most useful. Is it possible to look for it.”

– “We can look at MurderBot or Data and say that they feel… but if that’s because they look like us that gets back to the problem”

– JW: “I don’t think we can know… all we’ll ever get is provisional, probabilistic credences”

– “Society requires us to have categories… If ChatGPT could be sentient… on what basis are we going to decide?… These questions have societal and legal consequences”

– “If something has sentience are we going to define it as having rights… that’s the next move… do we have the right to turn off the machine?”

– “Does the machine have a right to not be turned off?… It may not be possible to determine… we’re going to have to reach decisions on a legal and societal basis before we have the capacity to determine whether something is sentient or not.”

– Joan’s new book “Minds in Transit”: The AI character Transit “consists entirely of code that resides in a network”… “Transit refers to humans as lanthenideless bipeds”

– “The microbes in this story are clearly intelligent and sentient… do the microbes get to outvote all the humans… this is a problem for that society”

– “The humans are the rulers… the society she lives in… is kind of based on Saudia Arabia or Qatar… monarchs, lords and ladies… this veneer of democracy… they come to a decision… anything that’s smaller than a certain gemstone is defined as non-sentient… no personhood”

– “There are sentient drones that are smaller than that… they’re outlawed… undocumented… you have gangs of undocumented drones… you can’t grant them personhood”

– “Defining sentience by size – we know that’s not true… that’s silly, that’s medieval”

– “In Minds in Transit there’s an alternative… modelled after Plato’s Republic… Elysium… super-democratic… no lords or ladies or titles…”

– “How did they define whether machines can be sentient… they defined based on intellect… the ability to file a law suit”

– “A non-hierarchical society where everything is the law courts… if a machine is able to file a law suit demanding personhood… and it wins… then it’s a person”

– “There’s also a cat in it [Minds in Transit] if you’re a cat lover”

– “Through an entertaining story it expands your mind… how do I decide if my cat has personhood… my refrigerator… your washing machine… they all have a chip in it that communicates with the web now”

01:14:57 A Better World?

– JW “Science fiction… can be quite dystopian but it can be quite utopian… Quite often very alien types of non-human are granted serious moral consideration… even if they’re very different from human… often a lot of brutal human colonialism as well”

– JW: “A rich appreciation of science… awe and wonder… but also there’s quite a lot of tech-bro elitism”

– Themes of non-violence, pacifism, ecofeminism

– “Life is a process and a journey… we’re all going to die some day… what’s important is the journey”

– “The journey includes health care to make the most of our journey”

– “In my fiction as in my own life what’s important is justice… standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves… I maintain a resistance group in our red county… particularly interested in promoting health-care and environmental health”

– “The more we can do to save a healthy planet… the better off we will be”

– “Our energy consumption… rises exponentially… particularly in the developed countries… AI is particularly troubling…”

– “The most important thing we can do is manage our energy consumption for the survival of the planet… that’s eventually going to have to happen off-world”

– Joan’s book “The Highest Frontier” about a college on a satellite “All manufacturing and all energy transducing devices have to be put in space because otherwise the planet will eventually heat up… I’m a big fan of space engineering.”

– Putting data centres in Lagrange points in space – already being considered

– Health connections beyond the human… zoonotics, bird flu, anti-microbial resistance. JW: “Thinking more broadly about who might matter actually helps us humans as well”

– “I see a continuum between human health and planetary health”

– “A largely plant-based diet for humans is better for the planet… than domesticating animals… there’s a matter of balance here… extremes are not good for the planet either”

– JW: Plant-based diet because of vegan ethics: “I look at what happens in a slaughterhouse and I think that goes against any basic principle of non-violence so I don’t want to support it… that includes the fact that dairy and egg animals end up in the same place.”

– JW: “Many people are shifting towards a plant-based lifestyle and diet for some of those reason… personal health… pollution… emissions… zoonotic disease… so many different reasons… pushing us towards shorter trophic chains… a way of living that causes less destruction and disturbance to the systems we’re part of”

– The benefits of non-violence and pacifism, but the risks of unconditional non-violence and pacifism

– JW: “There are some humans who are explicitly sadistic, psychopathic, genuinely bad faith actors, totalitarian… when we’re facing those most extreme challenges, personally I struggle to hold on to any unconditional non-violence… where it might seem that defending others and ourselves is actually the ethical thing to do even if it uses violence”

– “That question… would you kill someone to defend your mother?… If they were going to rape your mother? I would interpose myself between them… that’s a really old question… I think that you know it’s a red herring”

– “Non-violence is a positive thing… you cannot define things negatively”

– “Gandhi referred to it as Ahimsa”

– “The point of non-violence is not to be perfect”

– The work of Gene Sharp including “The Politics of Non-violent Action”

– “A Door to Ocean was my pacifist revolution book… based entirely on real-life non-violent revolutions as described by Gene Sharp… resistance to the Nazis”

– “Gandhi was often asked ‘what would you have done in WWII?… what would you have told the Jews in WWII’… Gandhi actually withdrew from revolution in India to let the British deal with their… fight from the Nazi’s”

– “The point is not what you do in these extreme cases it’s what you do in everyday cases… that’s what’s important”

– “In my books I do show the dilemmas…”

– “No matter what system you have you face dilemmas… that’s not how you define the system”

– “We have unconsciously absorbed the ethic of non-violence… it’s hard for you to understand what it was like back in the 1980’s… at that time non-violence was considered a Communist plot… People incorrectly recalled pacifists as being responsible for WWII… that is not the case… American society was very militaristic… You could not publish a non-violent story.”

– Finding an editor, David Hartwell, who would publish “A Door to Ocean”… it was right at the time of Gorbachev and the eastern European peaceful revolution… it was embarrassing that science fiction had nothing like this… Isaac Asimov actually flashed my book on a screen”

– “Today it’s very different… the protests in Los Angeles… the media reports make it look as if the entire city is in flames… there’s one or two burnt cars… if you listen carefully… the protesters on the bullhorn saying ‘be non-violent’… you can hear that in the background and all the protesters, except one or two, are being non-violent”

– “They know that they have to be non-violent… because they’ve absorbed the non-violent system”

– JW: “And they know that becoming violent would play into the hands of those who oppress them… whereas there are other situations… like facing the Nazi’s… where the context would be radically different”

– “Even with the Nazi’s there were non-violent resistance movements… certain men were taken… put in a prison… their wives came out and demonstrated… they got released.”

– “The problem with WWII is not violence or non-violence. The question is why did so few people not resist until it was too late.”

– “We live now in a situation similar to the Weimar republic in many ways… We have a democracy but it’s under threat… we’re losing it… why do so few people resist?”

– “The question is not ‘what do we do when armies are facing each other?’ later, the question is, when you have a democracy and you could lose it… are you resisting?”

– JW: “That stance early… when you get to the stage where you have death squads and gas chambers… it’s too late then… some of the things Gandhi said to the British people and to Jews I find ethically horrific”

– “That’s a myth… I was told that… when you look at the actual letters of Gandhi to the Jews… he said resist… ‘I recommend non-violent resistance but above all resist’… That was a big excuse… used against the protest movements… an excuse for militarism in the 1980’s.”

01:31:45: Follow Joan:

– Minds in Transit at Bookshop.org

– Joan’s Home Page

– Joan at Kenyon College

– Joan on Wikipedia

– Quakers in the UK

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.