We discuss the biggest questions: "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?" with scientists, celebrities, activists, writers and philosophers. The Sentientism worldview is "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." It's a simple, yet radical, philosophy that's grounded in reality (naturalistic epistemology) and has compassion for all sentient beings (mostly human and non-human animals). Naturalism & sentiocentrism combined.
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Michael is head of philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His current work spans transhumanism, death & meaning. He has written a vast range of topics, including on whether non-human animals can have meaningful lives & “What It Is Like to Be a Bot”. He says of his work: “As a philosopher, I am a generalist, which is a nice way of saying that I have done many different things & I am not really an expert on anything in particular.”
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:42 Michael’s Intro
– What it means to be human, to live a good life, a meaningful life
– Transhumanism & human enhancement
– Meaning & life & death
– When dealing with foundational, broad questions: “It is very difficult to be precise… I hardly ever feel that ‘now I’ve got it'”
06:06 What’s Real?
– “It’s much easier to point at something & disuss whether that is real”
– “If you can name something then in some sense it must be real”
– Raised #Christian & sent to Sunday school & Bible classes & regular confessions to the village priest
– “I sort of believed there was a god when I was little”
– A god watching me “a means of controlling me… Big Brother in heaven… it was just oppressive… a punishing god, a critical god”
– “I didn’t feel the presence… I just believed that there was something because I was told there was something”
– “Very quickly I dropped my religious beliefs… as soon as I started to think for myself I became an #atheist”
– “It just faded away… it was always superficial”
– “Some people take me for a Christian because I share some of the intuitions religious believers have”
– “I’m not entirely comfortable with calling myself a naturalist although I don’t believe in anything supernatural”
– “Naturalism is also very programmatic & ideological”
– “There are a lot of things in this world that we cannot understand…& some naturalists are very confident that we can understand everything & that’s there’s no mystery… there is a lot of mystery.”
– Max More’s #transhumanism … pits science vs. religion
– Origins of the universe & life & consciousness “we don’t know!” Science might figure it out – it might not
– “… whatever there is is part of nature”
– Over-confidence vs. humility
– The subjective & the objective
– Plato & Parmenides: “being is more real than becoming”… “but we live in a world of becoming… how can that be less real?”
– The “normative use of reality”… to “declare something else as not real… a term to deny something else its reality”
– The denial of animal suffering “not so common any more” & the #cartesian model
– “If you see an animal in pain you know it is in pain… it takes a lot of willful blindness not to acknowledge…”
– “One of the reasons… why animals could not possibly feel any pain… because it would then be far too horrible how we treat animals… god wouldn’t allow it!”
– “If we assume the world is good & we see all the apparent suffering… then it cannot be… A moral reason behind denying the suffering of animals”
– JW “An echo of a religious mode of thought that’s then re-built in a humanist mode of thought”
– “If we have evolved naturally… there’s no reason to assume our brains are capable of understanding the universe… what possible use can it have?”
– “A naturalistic perspective should actually teach us humility”
29:03 What Matters?
…and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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