Consciousness, Fish, and Uncertainty

From 2023 & 2016: Should we be concerned with being “right,” or being strategic?

There is a three-part (M, W, F) series on consciousness at MattBall.org this week.

Recently, I received pushback on this piece regarding fish and suffering (also below) from a very big name in animal advocacy. One of the things they said was:

“[Y]ou are risking doing serious harm if you, an animal advocate, suggest that it is unlikely that fish are conscious.”

To be honest, I’m flattered that they think my opinion has any bearing at all in the world. However, the post actually says:

I’m not making a statement about whether fish experience suffering. I’m just pointing out that there are good-faith questions about what creatures have conscious experience, and to what extent those experiences matter relative to the suffering of others.

As covered extensively, we vastly underestimate how mysterious consciousness is. Very often, we ascribe consciousness when it is not there (e.g., this piece). This is true of robots, large language models, and even shapes on a computer screen.

But just about everything can be explained without requiring consciousness. This is why David Chalmers can posit “Zombie World” where people act as they do in our world, but without consciousness. (That isn’t quite right; as I say in Losing, the zombies wouldn’t hypothesize Zombie World. Nothing in that world would ever have known consciousness, so they wouldn’t be able to think about it.)

However, AIs in our world can draw on all our musings on and writings about consciousness. Thus, they will be able to appear conscious without actually being conscious. There will be absolutely no way for us to know if they are conscious.

Importantly, we need to recognize that this is true of other animals. A clam with something like “nerve” cells is not conscious. I am conscious. Somewhere between those levels of neuronal complexity, consciousness emerges. But we don’t know where. (And with regards to ethics, we wouldn’t know how to weigh different levels of consciousness, even if we could measure it. Regular readers know this and other philosophical issues are real problems.)

If I had to bet my life one way or another on a finned fish’s ability to have morally-relevant subjective experiences, I honestly don’t know how I’d bet.

Of course, many (but not all) animal advocates say we should take the conservative approach and ascribe consciousness where there is doubt. But we’ve been doing this for at least half a century, ever since Peter Singer published the article “Animal Liberation.” Yet today, vastly more animals are being used and abused than ever before, even on a per-capita basis.

If we care about suffering and recognize these clear and simple facts, maybe it is time to reconsider how we approach advocacy. Maybe we should be more concerned with actually reducing suffering than being “right” and cautious and thorough.

The original piece

I have previously (2016) written about why One Step for Animals does not focus on fish. (Reproduced below.)

Whenever there is an article claiming fish feel pain, it is forwarded to us by many people. The assumption among advocates is that any particular “fish feel pain” article is definitive.

But of course, any claim of animal pain is going to circulate in the vegan community. However, studies like these don’t make the rounds:

Fish do not feel pain and its implications for understanding phenomenal consciousness

This is not to make a factual claim one way or another - just a note that there are arguments “on the other side” [sic] and thus no one should claim absolute certainty.

OTOH, from this very long discussion of eating animals; note: “We think it is reasonable to say that broiler chickens exist in a state worse than death.”

Again: I’m not making a statement about whether fish experience suffering. I’m just pointing out that there are good-faith questions about what creatures have conscious experience. There are also questions about the extent to which those experiences matter in relation to the suffering of others. This is just one consideration we should keep in mind when deciding how to spend our limited resources.

If I had to pick one lesson I’ve learned in the past 57 years, it might be to be less certain and more curious.

Why Not Fish? (2016)

We’re often asked why One Step for Animals doesn’t focus on fish, given that the number of aquatic creatures killed every year is even higher than chickens.

Several factors have led One Step for Animals to not prioritize fish in our first-line advocacy. Here are some of the factors, in abbreviated form:

1. Some people focus entirely on numbers, and not the reality behind the numbers. But we don’t care about numbers, we care about suffering.

2. Many “fish” that are killed (just based on numbers) aren’t sentient / don’t suffer (clams, oysters).

2a. Relatedly, the level of suffering matters, not just numbers. To a first approximation, the less neural complexity, the lower the level of maximum suffering. That is: the ability to suffer does not appear suddenly and fully and is not equal in all creatures.

Consider, for example, the growth of a human. A fertilized egg can’t suffer. After a certain level of neural complexity develops, a hint of sentience would arise. That level increases as the nervous system grows and matures.

In this sense, a blastocyst is not a shrimp [natch] is not a chicken is not a boy.

3. Most vertebrate fish who are killed are wild fish. Those individuals would have suffered greatly from their “natural” death if they hadn’t been caught. A “natural” death of predation, disease, or starvation, may well be worse than a death by suffocation or decapitation. So catching a wild fish doesn’t clearly increase the suffering in the world.

4. Thus, only farmed vertebrate fish might be adding suffering to the world when people choose to eat them.

Chart by Ben Davidow.

5. The individuals who seem to be most likely to change their diets - youngish women - don’t eat much fish. Elwen says they never saw their high school or college friends eating fish. Always chickens.

The numbers and the suffering are only two of the three factors we must consider. Tractability is also key: will our advocacy actually have an impact? Do we think people will go from a standard omnivorous diet to caring about and ceasing to eat fish?

At this time, we believe that when advocates start saying things like “people eat 500 fish/ year,” we are distracting from where our efforts can, at the margin, have the biggest impact on actually reducing suffering.

And, of course, every time we add something else to our ask (”chicken .. and fish ... and eggs ... and pork ...”) we undermine the point of having a single, reasonable, sustainable impactful action.

Our approach isn’t based on what is “right” or “consistent” or “popular.” We are simply trying to shape our advocacy such that it can have the biggest possible impact in the real world.