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

Anders Reagan is a peace entrepreneur, philosopher, academic, and technologist. He is founding director of the Peace and Conflict Science Institute (PACS), an academic think-tank and advocacy organisation with special consultative status at the United Nations that aims to put peace and rights mechanisms on more rigorous, evidence-based foundations. Anders is also an AI Consultant at the University of Oxford.

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

01:06 Welcome

02:58 Anders’ Intro

03:58 What’s Real?

– “My upbringing and emotional impetus for initiating the academic journey that I went on… happened because of a clash between a non-theistic, agnostic background and a religious, Christian environment”

– Born in Boulder, Colorado “rather liberal”

– Agnostic parents, father interested in Buddhist traditions

– Moving to Arkansas at 7 yrs old “quite conservative leaning”

– “A sudden transition happened with our social relationships… encountering people who had a Christian religious doctrine at such a core place… in their personality”

– “Oftentimes the first question you’ll be asked is ‘what church do you go to?’… and at the time we didn’t have any answer”

– “It is an ingratiating tactic… These people are so kind and approchable… they’re clearly looking for common ground to build off of”

– “But when you respond with ‘I’m atheist I don’t go to any church at all’… the reaction… would be suspicion, confusion…”

– “My mum… took the tactic of saying we would ‘home church’… either indicating that we have no religion at all or we’re way more intense than the rest of you” 🙂

– At 7 years old: “That was intense… I didn’t have any concept of god or theism or religion – I’d never heard of any of these things… it was like living through a culture clash even though I hadn’t left my own country”

– “We eventually did find a home in a Unitarian Universalist fellowship… very welcoming of what they called liberal religion… people who had found themselves ostracised by other congregations… LGBTQ+… Muslims… the Wicca faith… they would congregate in this space… exchange ideas… trying to find common ground across all of these different religious doctrines… I found that to be very enriching”

– “Sunday School programme which offered a survey of religions. By the time I finished that programme… I felt like I had a pretty thorough understanding of the full range of religious and spiritual traditions”

– Moving to Sweden

– “I was definitely looking for answers… a curiosity that I still carry with me today”

– “In conversations with my peers in junior high and high school they would, almost on a weekly basis, bring up… they believed that because of my lack of a religious tradition… specifically Christianity… that my soul was doomed to eternal damnation and burning in hell… I could kind of tell that their intentions were good.”

– The juxtaposition between their caring concern and the aggression of their words about hell… “it clashed so intensely in my mind”

– Looking to other religious traditions to help answer when they asked “how do you know that you are behaving in a moral way – that you are a good moral, ethical person if you don’t have god to give you guidance?”

– “That’s a very tricky question… I feel it intuitively… but when you try to explain it in a way that’s independent of religion… it can get tricky”

– Not being drawn to religious worldviews because of facts or ethics? “I think it was everything at once”

– Kierkegaard: reason and evidence vs. “just having faith in a deontological system of moral edicts”

– “At a certain point you can’t have a conversation… using reason about religious dogma… they are two totally different, totally divorced modes of engaging with claims”

– “I just intuited that I knew the difference between ethical behaviour and unethical behaviour… I felt that murder was unethical that care was ethical… but then when I was asked to explain it in a way that doesn’t rely on religious doctrine… that has been very tricky”

– “My friends would be like ‘No… you do believe in god even if you won’t acknowledge it'”

– JW: Alternatives to naturalistic epistemology: Fideism, dogmatism, unchallengeable revelation and authority: “Seem to be less likely to give us true or accurate credences about reality because they don’t even pretend to be grounded in reality… They feel very solid to people who lock into them because you don’t have the questioning of a naturalistic approach. You don’t the uncertainty and the doubt… I worry that they are essentially almost arbitrary… if they’re not grounded in information from reality I’m not sure what they’re grounded in.”

– JW: This echoes the illusory solidity of religiously grounded ethics: “It feels solid… but the deity, the divine command theory… ends up being arbitrary and hollow… almost a denial of morality… more about submission and obedience and compliance with an arbitrary set of rules”

– Euthyphro Dilemma (sorry to Socrates for bungling this!)

– JW: “I know it [religiously grounded morality] feels good – it feels solid… but like a dogmatic belief it’s actually arbitrary and ungrounded”

21:54 What Matters?

– JW: “I’m less suggesting that a naturalistic approach is a 100% solid grounding for ethics… I’m just saying that the fideistic, deistic or divine command theory certainly isn’t”

– “The fact that you’re even questioning… the ability to critically evaluate the whole structure of a fideistic… structure… is itself the anti-matter of that space… introducing doubt into it… removes the value from having faith in the structure… the edicts… the commandments”

– “Their [Christians] seeming belief… that without that guidance they would be lost… meeting me cause them concern…” JW: “You might start pillaging or murdering at any moment”

– Stephen Fry quote: “I do those things [ethically bad things] exactly as much as I want to – which is none…” “I don’t need somebody telling me not to do those things.”

– JW: “I think there’s much more integrity to showing compassion… because that’s who you are and that’s what you want to do… rather than because some authority figure has told you not to do those things under threat of eternal torment.  The former seems to be genuinely moral… the latter seems to be purely to be about compliance and submission”

– Those who examine and challenge our own ethics… “Otherwise we are followers of our own dogmatic emotions and intuitions just as much as somebody with a religious persuasion would be followers of a religious doctrine… and that’s where the philosophy comes in.”

– Hume’s is-ought gap

– JW: “Is there a better grounding [for ethics] than a powerful, threatening god or just how I feel emotionally?”

– “We’re not going to fix it now… job security… a conversation I can have endlessly with myself and with other philosophers living and dead… who are making progress in it one way or another… we are creating a body of work”

– “I didn’t start to really question these things until I myself was questioned by my peers… I was just living”

– “I began to realise that my perspective on the subject was not the only one… there were many, many different perspectives”

– Being a student research fellow with The Global Classroom – visiting schools in New Zealand, Australia, New Jersey, the Shetland Islands…

– Moving to Stockholm and learning Swedish

– Studying for a degree in theoretical philosophy re: epistemology and ontology (vs. practical ethical philosophy)

– “It’s an open question still… the extent to which we can verify that we know something or not… knowledge itself at that point seemed to me to be quite tenuous”

– “If not even the philosophers agree on what facts are… how are we conducting international relations… between different cultures?… if the foundations on which they perceive reality are so ethereal… fuzzy… almost arbitrary at times”

– Studying for a degree in international relations… realism (zero sum, scarcity, competition)… liberalism (value of co-operation, potential for abundance, mutual benefit, win-win) “the interplay between those two ideas was extraordinary”

– Analysing 7 Swedish political parties re: their stance on joining NATO and how their philosophical stance and their policy stance related

– Proposing a third theory “constructivism… your actions align with the lens you use to perceive reality… the way that you are interpreting it becomes your reality”

– “How are we justifying certain paradigms of international relations that are supposed to be universal?”

– Studying for a masters degree in human rights

– Many people turn to rights as the foundation of morality… “it’s certainly what I thought would be the most unshakeable, solid foundation… We have human rights and when you violate human rights you’re doing something bad!”

– “When I actually read the documents [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] that’s when things started to get tricky… ‘the rights exist because we have faith in them’… we’ve just decided… and now we’ll declare them”

– UNESCO’s Committee on the Philosophic Principles of the Rights of Man “brought together philosophers, scientists and dignitaries to figure out what the common ground was for all of humanity that we could base rights upon” post the atrocities of the Holocaust and the Second World War

– “We needed desperately to find some unshakeable common ground to explain why these horrors shocked the world so universally”

– “The committee… came to the conclusion that there is no such basis… they wrote that black on white – which is why the declaration inevitably had to select faith, not as an epistemically justified foundation for rights – but more as a placeholder for what eventually we would hope we would be able to find in order to explain why we have rights”

– “The big problem with putting faith in that placeholder is that it is so tenuous… if a nation… for example like the United States which just pulled out of the Human Rights Council… were to proclaim that they no longer held the faith then suddenly there would be no moral foundation upon which the rest of the world could form an alliance… to issue coercive action against a belligerent force”

– “Philosophers have tried to come up ways to explain why we have human rights… the interests theory… John Finnis and Martha Nussbaum… safeguard universal prerequisites that all human beings have for wellbeing… they hadn’t quite gotten to the point of incorporating sentience at this point. So we all need the same things in order to feel good and live well – therefore rights safeguard those things”

– Criticisms of the interests approach: “Who decides what the prerequisites are?”… “The altruism criticism… what’s to say that we should care about each other’s wellbeing at all?”… “If we all have the same needs it reduces morality… human rights… just to an expression of our biological and social needs… neglects the relevance of the exercise of free will into the ethical question… will plays an enormous role… deciding whether or not to do something ethical or unethical… they carry weight because a choice is being made.”

– The will theory… Alan Gewirth etc… “rights protect our capacity to exercise will… the opposite tack”

– “The greatest disadvantage of will theory is that it doesn’t seem to apply to people who are asleep or in a coma – these people clearly have human rights… but not based on this theory”

– Studying a second masters degree in peace studies in Costa Rica

42:14 Who Matters?

– JW: Grounding rights in subjectivity? “Because not only humans have subjectivity and not only humans have interests”

– Asking professors… “At least we understand what peace is… the distinction between peace and violence? And they said ‘no’”

– Founding the PACS Institute – “A think tank in Stockholm dedicated to directly investigating the natural and social phenomenon of peace… in the same tradition of ethical naturalism… to try to explain what a universal ethics might look like”

– Cognitive neuroscience work by Donald Hoffman and Anil Seth on the relationship between perception, reality and brain/nervous system function

– “I used to believe that everybody – all human beings and all sentient creatures all shared the same objective reality – all lived in the same world”

– “So if I had a perspective… and somebody else had a differing perspective then one of us would inherently be less well informed than the other.”

– “Now I think my approach is closer to something like idealism but still grounded in something like physicalism… in asserting that the reality of our experience… the table in front of me… are all features of my own experience… came to this awakening that there’s nothing I can come in contact with that isn’t a feature of my own conscious world… a phenomenal field”

– JW: “All we experience is our experience… everything else is indirect?”

– Solipsism… “Am I justified in assuming that I am the only conscious living being in existence?… a very lonely god… I create reality… reality creates me”

– JW: “You could be a brain in a vat… and there might not even be a vat!”

– “There may be… other phenomenal fields… containing their own facets of their own world… their own qualia… other people or animals… that I just don’t have access to”

– “A new paradigm of rights and social responsibilities… because it’s inescapable… inescapability sounds like a pretty solid basis for a universal theory of rights… I was able to build the rights on top of that”

– “There is a very good reason for assuming that there are other sentient creatures besides myself… if I were to behave as if I was the only creature in existence when in fact other creatures exist… I might accidentally end up doing irreparable, enormous harm and causing suffering to those other creatures. Whereas… if solipsism is true… then all I’ve really done [by being compassionate towards others] is wasting my own time”.

– “Because I don’t want that harm conveyed to me I choose to go forward with this approach”

– “I don’t really believe necessarily in altruism… [but] every time I treat those bodies, those entities with respect and with compassion then I’m contributing to a version of my own phenomenal field which is full of respect and compassion… and it makes me feel at ease – it makes me feel comfortable and happy”

– “It’s radical self-interested altruism”

– JW: “Even my subjectivity is part of the objective physical world”

– “It’s the probability that there exist other beings… that I have to take as sufficient evidence to behave as though it is true”

– “The things that I experience in my world… are indistinguishable from myself… they literally are my nervous system talking to itself… other people… the chair… the table… the way that things taste and feel is indistinguishable from myself”

– Wallace Steven’s poem Tea at the Palaz of Hoon: “I was the world in which I walked and what I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself”

– “It is all me… I am the only creature in existence that can understand and seek out my own wellbeing… I have to do all of the work of understanding what welfare is for me and going about trying to achieve it – and nobody else can have access to this space”

– JW: Could there conceivably be an “Anders emulator” that means I can, for a time, experience what it’s like to be you or to be a bat?

– “I recognise… the sovereignty of subjectivity… within the space of my own experiences… I am entirely sovereign – nobody can possibly have access…”

– “If I… were to assume that every other sentient conscious being is also sovereign… I have to allow for them… the space to seek out and identify their own welfare and then go about achieving it. I don’t need to know what their interests or perspectives are… in order to simply give them the minimum space necessary to explore wellbeing… and to achieve it.”

– “That’s where my theory of personal rights within my own experience… and social obligations to other beings with nervous systems that we assume to be sentient… comes from.”

– JW: The potential for benevolent interference / maternalism / paternalism where beings might not be capable of acting in their own best interests?

– “We have to start with our own experience as the basis for the assumptions we make about the kinds of treatment that we offer to other sentient organisms. If I think something’s going to hurt me then I have to start from a place of not doing that to some other being.”

– “It’s the Golden Rule 2.0 [or the Platinum rule]… It has to be both… treat them in a way that you want to be treated and in a way that they want to be treated”

– “Negotiation, conflict resolution is inherent in social interaction. It’s always that balance between the rights and the obligations”

– People attributing sentience to things like natural disasters that don’t have a mind at all… or denying the sentience of animals

– Assessing sentience via nervous systems, behaviour

– “I struggle with the idea of using this [sentience] as the endless basis for moral consideration just because the circle seems to be growing so consistently”

– “If we were to also extend that to animals that draws interesting implications for ideas like peace and violence and frameworks like the right to protect”

– “Would we be justified in intervening in natural processes between a lion and a zebra… preventing the lion from hunting… also neutralises the very mechanism which gave rise to sentience which is evolution and natural selection”

– Does treating the “natural” world separately give up on the idea of a universal ethics?

01:09:40 A Better World?

– Extending concepts of war, peace, rights, humanitarianism to all sentient beings

– JW: “Imagine a future United Nations that’s scope is updated to care about all of sentientity not just humanity… a Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights… not just a condemnation of genocide and ecocide but a condemnation of senticide – the killing of any sentient being…”

– The challenges of peace and rights even just for humans in the modern context re: authoritarianism, fascism, theocracy, might makes right leaders and states

– The PACS Institute’s UN special consultative status and publishing of peer-reviewed papers on “the future of human rights and sentient rights”

– “The infrastructure that we’ve currently set up at the UN has a couple of critical flaws… otherwise we’ll be faced with the same cycles of authoritarianism that humanity has always encountered… prevent belligerent behaviour from spoiling this ongoing cooperative process”

– “The paradox of tolerance… if you’re tolerant to all actors then eventually the intolerant ones will corrupt the entire platform and make tolerance impossible”

– JW: “Those who are against ‘might makes right’ themselves have to be willing to apply might to enforce that stance… an unconditional pacifism basically means giving in to the authoritarians and those with a pure ‘will to power’”

– “Systems like the UN could be potentially extremely effective to combat these trends… because they’re relying on means and methods of exerting justice that are ultimately less violent than the behaviour they’re trying to suppress”

– How Japanese police aren’t armed even though they face armed gangs “they refuse to meet the violence on a level that’s commensurate with it because otherwise you would just be contributing to the violence in a cycle”

– “The UN uses methods like economic sanctions to combat armed incursions and violations of international humanitarian law. It’s less aggressive, but just as effective when carried out as a group against one or two belligerent nations – it can work quite effectively”

– The League of Nations and the United Nations – after each world war

– The UN “It has two core defects… the entire paradigm of ethics… is based on faith instead of something that can be evaluated and scientifically explained… The second one is the structure of the Security Council… freezing into place in perpetuity the socio-political relationships that existed straight after the second world war… No matter how much power would be distributed across the world… France, Britain, the United States, China and Russia would always maintain a death grip on the deployment of peace-keeping resources ensuring they would never be deployed against any of those five nations.”

– “It [Security Council veto] may be the critical mistake that leads to the end of this second experiment in international peace-craft and hopefully gives rise to a third iteration of international peace-keeping body… after a potential third world war or if not a world war an ongoing low-level persistence of armed conflict”

– JW: The big tent approach (including bad faith actors to influence them) vs. excluding bad faith actors and “There is a type of United Nations of those who actually in good faith engage with the charter and agree with the charter and commit to human [and sentient] rights… you’re only allowed into the tent if you qualify and you live up to those standards”

– Comparisons vs. the European Union’s membership requirements

– “I hope it doesn’t take a third world war to get there… the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones”

– JW: “Humanity… we do have the ability to learn but we seem to learn late after terrible, terrible things have happened and then we tend to forget quite quickly too”

– JW: “Can you imagine a Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights… work already being done at the UN level… One Health… Animal Welfare… at least in tokenistic ways”

– A more Sentientist UN: “I think it’s pretty obvious that this is the direction in which things are going… this seems like one of the best ways to provide a scientifically and philosophically satisfactory justification of claims affirming the existence of rights and social obligations”

– JW: “If you want to ground rights you can’t restrict them to humans”

– “There’s nothing that’s uniquely human that I can connect to a paradigm of rights… the bridge doesn’t work”

– “What I’m trying to do now through my work at the PACS institute is to engage with these high level bodies in order to try to exert influence and incorporate ideas like Sentientism into these major landmark documents which serve as the foundation for international global peace-craft”

– JW: “Do you think morality can survive?… the universe is amoral, nature is amoral… but as soon as sentient beings come into the world… that’s where we start with the idea of subjectivity and interests… beings that can be harmed or benefitted… the raw material for morality… then social animals… one of the roots of morality… a mother mammal caring for their child… us humans… that descriptive moral baggage of intuitions and emotions… things that feel good and bad… a sense of caring… out-group aggression…”

– JW: “But then we’ve done this weird thing of then switching from a descriptive mode to a normative mode… how *should* things be?… I’m quite comfortable drawing a link between the good and bad of how I feel and the good and bad of morality and ethics… others feel that’s a weaker link… even nice nihilists – maybe it’s just a choice?”

– JW: “Normative ethics – some sort of shared purpose and compassion and caring for each other… has proven to be evolutionarily adaptive otherwise we wouldn’t be here… do you think it will continue to work?”

– “I certainly hope so!”

– “If I can find a way to express the mechanism that lays at the foundation for ethics… simply elucidating it… will make things clearer”

– “I’m not basing the whole thing on a foundation of ‘I want to treat other sentient beings with compassion because it feels good’ because that would exclude people with psychopathy / sociopathy”

– Imagining a sociopathic solipsist who thinks they’re the only sentient entity that exists: “I’d say great – then I would be justified in killing you now… ‘I don’t want to die’… then I’d say great – let’s take the logical approach… that we both treat each other with a minimum level of social obligation to prevent that from happening”

– “Sentience has evolved to convey this distinction between pleasurable experiences and harmful experiences… to seek out wellbeing and welfare and secure it for myself… without that guidance I wouldn’t be drawn towards reproduction – I wouldn’t be drawn towards my own survival”

– “Why are we actively engaged in advancing the evolved trait of sentience?… because it feels good… sentience has evolved to convey to us that advancing it feels good… a cycle with no end to it”

– “If you were to extract sentience from the equation… ‘no we have to build a system of ethics… that has nothing to do with welfare or pleasurable feelings or painful feelings’… you’re left with a nihilistic, meaningless universe – there’s nothing else there”

– “Morality and ethics are inherently linked to sentience – to first-person private subjective experiences which cannot be shared but which necessarily and inherently engender mutual respect and mutually beneficial social interactions once recognised”

– JW: Authoritarianism powered by AI, existential risks, third world war… “But there’s a potential for a positive path”

01:32:30 Follow Anders

– Andersreagan.com
– PACSInstitute.org (see the contact form)
– Anders’ LinkTree
– Anders on LinkedIn

– andersjreagan@pm.me

Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, 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.