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  1. Consciousness, Machines, and Moral Status.Henry Shevlin - manuscript
    In light of recent breakneck pace in machine learning, questions about whether near-future artificial systems might be conscious and possess moral status are increasingly pressing. This paper argues that as matters stand these debates lack any clear criteria for resolution via the science of consciousness. Instead, insofar as they are settled at all, it is likely to be via shifts in public attitudes brought about by the increasingly close relationships between humans and AI users. Section 1 of the paper I (...)
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  • Should Animal Welfare Be Defined in Terms of Consciousness?Jonathan Birch - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):1114-1123.
    Definitions of animal welfare often invoke consciousness or sentience. Marian Stamp Dawkins has argued that to define animal welfare this way is a mistake. In Dawkins’s alternative view, an animal with good welfare is one that is healthy and “has what it wants.” The dispute highlights a source of strain on the concept of animal welfare: consciousness-involving definitions are better able to capture the normative significance of welfare, whereas consciousness-free definitions facilitate the validation of welfare indicators. I reflect on how (...)
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  • (1 other version)The ant colony as a test for scientific theories of consciousness.Daniel A. Friedman & Eirik Søvik - 2019 - Synthese (2):1-24.
    The appearance of consciousness in the universe remains one of the major mysteries unsolved by science or philosophy. Absent an agreed-upon definition of consciousness or even a convenient system to test theories of consciousness, a confusing heterogeneity of theories proliferate. In pursuit of clarifying this complicated discourse, we here interpret various frameworks for the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness through the lens of social insect evolutionary biology. To do so, we first discuss the notion of a forward test versus (...)
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  • Science, sentience, and animal welfare.Robert C. Jones - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (1):1-30.
    I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue (...)
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  • (1 other version)Animal consciousness.Colin Allen & Michael Trestman - 2005 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Cross-Species Neuroaffective Parsing of Primal Emotional Desires and Aversions in Mammals.Jaak Panksepp - 2013 - Emotion Review 5 (3):235-240.
    The primal motivational systems of all mammals are constituted of the evolved affective brain networks that gauge key survival issues. However, since progress in functional neuroscience has historically lagged behind conceptual developments in psychological science, motivational processes have traditionally been anchored to behavioral rather than neural and affective issues. Attempts to retrofit neuroaffective issues onto established psychological-conceptual structures are problematic, especially when fundamental evidence for primal affective circuits, and their neural nature, comes largely from animal research. This article provides a (...)
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