The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch: Book Launch and Panel Discussion

This event took place on November 11, 2024 and was co-hosted by the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program and the Guarini Center for Environmental, Energy & Land Use Law at NYU School of Law.

About the event

Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells? What about AI?

These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. The stakes are immense, and neglecting the risks can have terrible costs. We need to err on the side of caution, yet it’s often far from clear what ‘erring on the side of caution’ should mean in practice. When are we going too far? When are we not doing enough?

The Edge of Sentience presents a precautionary framework designed to help us reach ethically sound, evidence-based decisions despite our uncertainty. Jonathan Birch will briefly introduce his work, after which panelists L. Syd M Johnson, John Olusegun Adenitire, and Claudia Passos Ferreira will offer comments and discussion, followed by engagement from Jonathan and discussion with the audience.

About the speakers

Jonathan Birch is a Professor of Philosophy at the LSE and Principal Investigator on the 'Foundations of Animal Sentience' project, a European Union-funded project aiming to develop better methods for studying the feelings of animals and new ways of using the science of animal minds to improve animal welfare policies and laws. In 2021, he led a review for the UK government that shaped the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. In 2022-23, he was part of a working group that investigated the question of sentience in AI.

L Syd M Johnson is a philosopher/bioethicist and clinical ethics consultant. Her books include The Ethics of Uncertainty: Entangled Ethical and Epistemic Risks in Disorders of Consciousness; Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers’ Brief; and Neuroethics and Nonhuman Animals. Her interest in all things with brains extends to all kinds of critters, zombies, and robots.

John Olusegun Adenitire is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary, University of London. He completed his PhD in Law at the University of Cambridge. He is co-author of Animals and the Constitution: Towards Sentience-Based Constitutionalism (OUP 2025) and co-director of the Forum on Decentering the Human at QMUL.

Claudia Passos Ferreira is Assistant Professor at NYU Center for Bioethics. She has PhDs in Philosophy and in Public Health. Her current research focuses on the development of consciousness, including what theories of consciousness say about infant, animal and machine consciousness, and how these theories shed light on ethical issues.

Thank you to our co-sponsors for your generous support of this event:
• NYU Center for Bioethics
• NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness