65: “When I adopted a dog – my whole worldview shifted” – Aditya from Animal Ethics – Sentientist Conversation

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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Aditya is the wild animal suffering outreach coordinator for Animal Ethics in India. He works in grass-roots animal activism with a variety of organisations. He is studying Animal Protection Law at the National Legal Studies Research Institute in India.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

0:00 Welcome

1:22 Aditya’s Intro – Animal Advocacy in India

2:10 What’s Real? From Hinduism to naturalism

– Growing up Hindu and vegetarian

– Vedanta. Dualistic theism. Dharma

– Exploring other forms of spirituality after getting into animal advocacy

– Veganism clashed with the culture (e.g. dairy)

– Buddhism

– Jiddu Krishnamurti, embracing naturalism and rationalism.

5:00 What Matters Morally?

– The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would want to be treated

– Learning about sentience, suffering & harm

– “I used to just consider humans… but when I adopted a dog (Gini!) my whole worldview shifted”

– Ahimsa as a theme in many worldviews, but most vegetarians in India don’t have a strong connection with farmed animal suffering

– Sentience as central – the capacity to feel pain or pleasure

– Singer’s Animal Liberation

– Sharing a stress reaction with Gini to fireworks

– “When you realise that all you’ve been taught through your life is wrong”

– Speciesism & arbitrary discrimination

– Going vegan. Practically easy but some social challenges

– Bio, ecocentrism, holism

– Nature as sacred in some traditions

– “We need to focus on sentient beings not abstract entities”

– “Who is being harmed?”

– Don’t harm sentient beings to protect non-sentient things

– A lack of relationship doesn’t justify moral exclusion

– Even simpler sentients might suffer just as much

– It’s not just avoiding harming, its an obligation to help

– It doesn’t matter whether the cause of harm is human or not

 19:00 Wild animal suffering

– We need to correct the belief that “if humans leave nature alone nature will be perfect”. Nature is not idyllic

– High offspring r-strategies drive massive suffering & death

26:15 The Future – dystopias & utopias

– The risk of creating new dystopias (e.g. insect farming, colonising other planets with more farmed/wild sentient suffering, artificial sentients)

– Ending speciesism & granting moral consideration to all sentients

– Technology is a double-edged sword

– We need moral as well as tech innovation

– Fixing current problems & avoiding creating new ones

30:26 Which entities are sentient?

– Sentience as a biologically evolved class of information processing

– Updating our assessment of sentience using science

– Is centralisation of structures required?

…and much more. Full show notes on YouTube and Sentientism.info.

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Thanks Graham for the post-prod.