Sentience

Cf.

• Culture
• Ethics
• Knowledge

Do animals have choices? Can they speak? Cf., Voice What makes one a subject?

Definitions

"Subjectivity is a matter of seeming, of for-me-ness. It points toward experience as something that happens to a person." Cf. Agency

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Evolution of Subjectivity

Types of organisms that can have subjectivity (or #sentience (Private) ) and the simplest forms that have it, such as cells.

Baluška, František, and Arthur Reber. “Sentience and Consciousness in Single Cells: How the First Minds Emerged in Unicellular Species.” BioEssays 41, no. 3 (2019): 1800229. https://doi.org/10/ghm6bk.

Cf. cognition-based evolution

Nagel's Review of Dennet's book, 2017

The task Dennett sets himself is framed by a famous distinction drawn by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars between the “manifest image” and the “scientific image”—two ways of seeing the world we live in. According to the manifest image, Dennett writes, the world is

"full of other people, plants, and animals, furniture and houses and cars…and colors and rainbows and sunsets, and voices and haircuts, and home runs and dollars, and problems and opportunities and mistakes, among many other such things. These are the myriad “things” that are easy for us to recognize, point to, love or hate, and, in many cases, manipulate or even create…. It’s the world according to us."

According to the scientific image, on the other hand, the world

"is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else (dark energy, strings? branes?)."

This, according to Dennett, is the world as it is in itself, not just for us, and the task is to explain scientifically how the world of molecules has come to include creatures like us, complex physical objects to whom everything, including they themselves, appears so different.

He greatly extends Sellars’s point by observing that the concept of the manifest image can be generalized to apply not only to humans but to all other living beings, all the way down to bacteria. All organisms have biological sensors and physical reactions that allow them to detect and respond appropriately only to certain features of their environment—“affordances,” Dennett calls them—that are nourishing, noxious, safe, dangerous, sources of energy or reproductive possibility, potential predators or prey.

For each type of organism, whether plant or animal, these are the things that define their world, that are salient and important for them; they can ignore the rest. Whatever the underlying physiological mechanisms, the content of the manifest image reveals itself in what the organisms do and how they react to their environment; it need not imply that the organisms are consciously aware of their surroundings. But in its earliest forms, it is the first step on the route to awareness.

Sensing and Action

"With this transformation of animal life in our sights, let’s think for a moment about the mind-body problem in the background. Ordinary ways of thinking furnish us with a number of concepts that help us get a handle on what minds do. One is the concept of subjectivity. This concept arrives in a complementary pair with another: agency. Subjectivity is a matter of seeming, of for-me-ness. It points toward experience as something that happens to a person. Agency is a matter of doing, trying, initiating. Agency is by-me-ness; it is being a source of action and its effects. It points toward the things a person makes happen. Interestingly, the word “subject” (though not “subjectivity”) also has another set of connotations, in which a subject is a doer or initiator: subject as opposed to object. This is not the last time that these concepts will become entangled.

As everyday concepts, subjectivity and agency gesture toward different aspects of a person or animal, a more sensory side and a more active side. From an evolutionary point of view, however, these are closely tied together. Sensing has its raison d’être in the control of action. Nothing is gained biologically from taking in information that is not put to use. The evolution of the mind includes the coupled evolution of agency and subjectivity. But not everything has to develop in lockstep. There might be, at some stage, a breakthrough in the particular realm of action. A new kind of agency might come into being alongside simpler sensory capacities."

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Fred Keijzer: the shaping of action as a central concern in the early evolution of nervous systems.

Keijzer, Fred A. Representation and Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Interspecies Communication

Smuts, Barbara. “Encounters with Animal Minds.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 5–6 (2001): 293–309.

Social Subjectivity

The point of social subjectivity seems to be the influence that human societies have because of propaganda, education, and other forms of power. There is disagreement on how it works. The interesting question for me is how it intersects with interspecies subjectivity if we assume interspecies societies and cultures. Cf. Imagination

(Chandra Mohanty advised by Corman, not clear how)

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12/13 (1984): 333–58. https://doi.org/10/csbxr2.

"Poststructuralists view social subjectivity as a cultural construction that is formed in, and through, multiple and diffuse webs of language and power. Critics charge that such a diffuse understanding of power promotes a vision of society as a ‘‘view from everywhere’’" ... Thus drawing on both traditions, Nancy Fraser (1997, p. 219) suggests that a more accurate picture of social complexity ‘‘might conceive subjectivity as endowed with critical capacities and as culturally constructed’’ while viewing ‘‘critique as simultaneously situated and amenable to self-reflection.’’

Attempts to See through the Eyes of the Others

In fiction:

Geen, Emma. The Many Selves of Katherine North. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Popular Literature on the Inner Worlds of Animals

Shanor, Karen, and Jagmeet S. Kanwal. Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals’ Inner Lives. Revised and Updated. 2009. Reprint, London: Icon Books, 2011.

A good overview of how animals see things and also has a chapter on the Anthropocene. Stevens, Martin. Secret Worlds: The Extraordinary Senses of Animals. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Phenomenology

Cf. eco-phenomenology, especially the consequences for animal rights.

Under phenomenology, all living beings share the same sensory environment and what binds all together is that all beings are co-creators of the experiences in the world.

Animals especially have complex inner worlds. This is relevant to the colour project for example as the justification for interspecies cultures, etc.

Animals’ worlds are filled with “multitudinous colours, sounds, tastes, and textures and therefore meaning we may not have access to”

This paper argues that French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Baltic German zoologist Jacob von Uexküll's respective investigations into human and nonhuman ontology can make a major contribution to animal ethics.

Weisberg, Zipporah. “‘The Simple Magic of Life’: Phenomenology, Ontology, and Animal Ethics.” Humanimalia 7, no. 1 (2015): 30.

Smyth, Bryan. “Merleau-Ponty and the Generation of Animals.” PhaenEx 2, no. 2 (2007): 170. https://doi.org/10/gjvj7k.

Uexhull love tone and terror tone for animals, destroyed experience of motherhood

Maybe it is not important or primary that an animal or a human are happy, they can be happy in a mistaken way. It is more important that they are free and can express their potential even if this expression is harmful for them

Importance of judging what others feel and what their lives are like. We share much more than what separates us.

Cognition

Cf. ecophysiology

Greggor, Alison L., Nicola S. Clayton, Ben Phalan, and Alex Thornton. “Comparative Cognition for Conservationists.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 29, no. 9 (2014): 489–95. https://doi.org/10/f6hgdx.

Goumas, Madeleine, Victoria E. Lee, Neeltje J. Boogert, Laura A. Kelley, and Alex Thornton. “The Role of Animal Cognition in Human-Wildlife Interactions.” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020): 589978. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.589978.

Spiders

Jackson, Robert R., and Fiona R. Cross. ‘Spider Cognition’. In Spider Physiology and Behaviour: Behaviour, edited by Jérôme Casas, 115–74. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2011.

References

Meincke, Anne Sophie. “Biological Subjectivity: Processual Animalism as a Unified Account of Personal Identity.” In The Unity of a Person, 100–126. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021.