Announcing The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness

Thank you Sofia for your absolutely pivotal role in this initiative. 

Could someone please explain how much extra value this adds given that we already have the Cambridge declaration?

Thanks for organizing the conference, the statement, and the resulting media coverage! Cool to see big names like Chalmers on the list.

Is it random that this appeared in the New York Times yesterday, or are the two related?

How Do We Know What Animals Are Really Feeling? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Regardless, it is great to see more realisation and communication around this topic. Most people just do not make any mental association between "food" and "animal suffering". One day this will all appear utterly barbaric, the way slavery appears barbaric to us today even though some highly reputed figures throughout history owned slaves. 

The more communication we have around animal consciousness and suffering, the faster that will happen. 

The best kind of communication may well be the kind that is not "accusatory" - just informative. Let people think about it for themselves rather than telling them what to think. 

Ultimately, maybe the best hope for ending animal suffering is alternative protein, and it is shocking how little money and effort is committed to this, given that it's also critical for climate, for hunger-reduction, for resilience. Alternative protein offers the potential to tell people "here is a cheaper, healthier, tastier, climate-friendlier... alternative to meat, which also avoids animal suffering." 

There are thousands of people who would jump on that statement and say it's unrealistic, but it's absolutely not. It's just that we're not treating it like the emergency that it is, we're not putting the same resources into it that we're putting into making more powerful iphones. We could choose to. 

 

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

I'm interested in the scientific arguments because, as far as I know, we don't have a good model of consciousness, and many models involve higher-level structures that we don't see in animals with very small brains. I know that some models of consciousness seem to imply that many small animals (or even LLMs!) with "integrated information" are conscious, but it's unclear enough not to pretend that there's a consensus on whether a hummingbird with 100 million neurons is able to instantiate subjective experience! I agree that when in doubt we must take steps to minimise any risk of causing suffering, but this should not lead us to assume an epistemologically questionable perspective. So maybe I'm wrong, and since I'm not a specialist in consciousness, I'm interested in why experts endorse such a statement.

This doesn’t seem very useful. All well and good to declare that lots of animals might have “conscious experience”, but without a way to define “conscious experience” or having any way to compare the value of the “conscious experience” of different animals, where does it get us?

I worry that this is just abstract philosophical noise that distracts from productive efforts like developing alternative proteins, exposing and lobbying against the cruelty of factory farming, and eliminating the poverty and desperation that underlies a lot of the global indifference to animal suffering.