Thoughts On Moving Toward The Acceptance of Sentience and Preference

 

Thursday, January 6 (2022) 11AM  

‘Thoughts On Moving Toward the Acceptance of Sentience & Preference’

 As I reflect upon the interconnected nature of sentience, data measurements, subjective intentions, innate instinct and fixing mistakes I head straight to the dictionary.  Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘sentient’ as "being responsive to conscious of sense impression, being aware or finely sensitive in perception or feelings".  

There is a growing awareness and acceptance of the possibility of a deeper sentient 'beingness' among animals across a wide variet of species formerly considered as not having physical/neuron feeling of physical pain, altruism or emapthic emotion. Our notion of sentience seems to have culturally evolved out of the act of anthropomorphizing our feelings onto animals, plants, things—any non-human.  However, examples of real animal-human interactions has shown behaviorally that animals do exhibit raw feelings, thoughtfulness and cognitive behavior that manifests as what we would find to be ‘expression of feeling’ culturally and in social settings. This has terrific implications for what motivates preference in the animal world as well.  For preference is certainly linked to feeling and emotion, not just instinct, auto-responses or survival.  Looking back on my time spent studying the of acquisition of language among apes, my trajectory of study was leading to this exact question. Namely separating instinctual preference from choosing a preference and how to measure sentience from this perspective. 

 In studying apes that have acquired a common language to humans, ASL (American Sign Language), communication of preference, feelings and cognitive abilities for complicated reasoning would lend itself to more in-roads than in other settings studying animal behavior. Unfortunately, when I expressed my desire to inquire into ‘preference’ I was shut down immediately, told that it was impossible to test for preference—'advised' to stick with studying language use only.  No discussion. 

 Now, years later, after wrestling with my own personal growth, and reflecting upon their reaction to my search for preference within the animal kingdom, with a more mature mind, I realize the path that this line of questioning was heading me towards was indeed a relevant and current line of thought in the rapidly growing vegetarian/vegan consciousness emerging in today’s world. A developing sensitivity to the sentient nature of all living things.