According to a widespread view, people often anthropomorphize machines such as certain robots and computer and AI systems by erroneously attributing mental states to them. On this view, people almost irresistibly believe, even if only subconsciously, that machines with certain human-like features really have phenomenal or subjective experiences like sadness, happiness, desire, pain, joy, and distress, even though they lack such feelings. This paper questions this view by critiquing common arguments used to support it and by suggesting an alternative explanation. (...) Even if people’s behavior and language regarding human-like machines suggests they believe those machines really have mental states, it is possible that they do not believe that at all. The paper also briefly discusses potential implications of regarding such anthropomorphism as a popular myth. The exercise illuminates the difficult concept of anthropomorphism, helping to clarify possible human relations with or toward machines that increasingly resemble humans and animals. (shrink)

The ethical debate on the moral consideration of non-human animals (hereafter animals) is currently centred on the evidence of sentience in these individuals. Legal protection for vertebrates and cephalopods (and decapods in the UK) has resulted from the recognition of sentience in these animals. Although one should celebrate the significant advances in the legal protection of animals in recent decades, current animal legislation is modulated by an instrumental viewpoint, remaining speciesist and anthropocentric. A sentient being is here understood as one (...) who has the phenomenological experience of awareness, which is the most basic sense of phenomenal consciousness that implies the existence of a subject who is not indifferent to what happens to itself. This paper demonstrates, with reasonable assumptions, that this concept of sentience would apply to many invertebrate species, thus deeming them worthy of increased moral consideration and legal protection. In cases in which sentience cannot be demonstrated clearly, one should assume the precautionary principle and consider the intrinsic value of each animal to designate moral consideration. In considering sentience as the primary condition for moral consideration, science must expand who is recognized as sentient rather than being reductionist. Animal ethics must review to whom the moral consideration should be given. Animal legislation must include legislative innovations and invertebrates in its protective scope. Thereby, a significant improvement in the current political and legislative decisions would be rooted in animal ethics. Opening the ethical perception and broadening the debate are urgent, as moral consideration should be given to all animals. (shrink)

Mentalist view began to lose its standing among psychologists mainly during the first half of the twentieth century. As a result, the enthusiasm to build an objective science began to grow among behaviourists and ethologists. The rise of cognitive sciences around the 1960s, however, revived the debates over the importance of cognitive intervening variables in explaining behaviours that could not be explained by clinging solely to a pure behavioural approach. Nevertheless, even though cognitive functions in nonhuman animals have been identified (...) in many studies, attributing human mental properties to animals is still being criticized as anthropomorphism. Such anthropomorphic attributions have been considered as an open door to the return of subjective methodology. Representation of anthropomorphic attributions as scientific activities within the context of discovery as opposed to the context of justification casts a new light on this problem. The present analysis proposes that anthropomorphic attributions are formed based on top-down idiosyncratic intuitions on the cusp of hypothesis building, outside the context of scientific justification. In other words, an anthropomorphic attribution is a potential creative link between pure observations of behaviours and building testable hypotheses about cognition in the process of scientific discovery. Thus, serving a function within the context of discovery, anthropomorphism does not motivate the return of subjective methodology, simply because it is not inconsistent with the rule-governed path in the context of scientific justification. (shrink)