Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages

• Can octopuses₁ feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders₂? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury₃ might be suffering? When does a fetus₄ in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain₅, grown from human stem cells? And what about AI₆?
• 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 practice₇. When are we going too far₈? When are we not doing enough?
• The Edge of Sentience presents a comprehensive precautionary framework designed to help us reach ethically sound, evidence-based decisions despite our uncertainty.

0. Summary of the Framework and Proposals
   1. A Walk along the Edge
   2. The Concept of Sentience
1. Part I: The Zone of Reasonable Disagreement
   3. The Mind-Body Problem
   4. Ethics and Religion
   5. The Science of Consciousness and Emotion
2. Part II: A Precautionary Framework
   6. Converging on Precautions
   7. Involving the Public
   8. Debating Proportionality
3. Part III: Sentience and The Human Brain
   9. People with Disorders of Consciousness
   10. Fetuses and Embryos
   11. Neural Organoids
4. Part IV: Sentience in Other Animals
   12. The Clearest Candidates
   13. Pushing the Boundaries
   14. Frontiers of Proportionality
5. Part V: Preparing for Artificial Sentience
   15. Against Complacency
   16. Large Language Models and the Gaming Problem
   17. The Run-Ahead Principle
6. Stepping Back

• A sentient being (in the sense relevant to the present framework) is a system with the capacity to have valenced experiences₉, such as experiences of pain and pleasure.
• A system S is a sentience candidate₁₀ if there is an evidence base that (a) implies a realistic possibility of sentience in S that it would be irresponsible to ignore when making policy decisions that will affect S, and (b) is rich enough to allow the identification of welfare risks and the design and assessment of precautions.
• A system S is an investigation priority if it falls short of the requirements for sentience candidature, yet (a) further investigation could plausibly lead to the recognition of S as a sentience candidate and (b) S is affected by human activity in ways that may call for precautions if S were a sentience candidate.
• Framework Principle 1. A duty to avoid causing gratuitous suffering. We ought, at minimum, to avoid causing gratuitous suffering to sentient beings either intentionally or through recklessness/negligence. Suffering is not gratuitous if it occurs in the course of a defensible activity despite proportionate attempts to prevent it. Suffering is gratuitous if the activity is indefensible or the precautions taken fall short of what is proportionate.
• Framework Principle 2. Sentience candidature can warrant precautions. If S is a sentience candidate, then it is reckless/negligent to make decisions that create risks of suffering for S without considering the question of what precautions are proportionate to those risks. Reasonable disagreement about proportionality is to be expected, but we ought to reach a policy decision rather than leaving the matter unresolved indefinitely.
• Framework Principle 3. Assessments of proportionality should be informed, democratic, and inclusive. To reach decisions, we should use informed and inclusive democratic processes. These decisions should be revisited periodically and whenever significant new evidence emerges.
• An example of an informed, inclusive, democratic process is a citizens’ panel or assembly that assesses the proportionality of possible responses by debating their permissibility-in-principle, adequacy, reasonable necessity, and consistency (the ‘PARC’ tests).

• The following should be read as proposals for discussion and debate. There is a case for regarding the proposed measures as proportionate, so they merit consideration by an informed, inclusive democratic process, but my aim is not to pre-judge the outcome of such a process.
• People with Disorders of Consciousness
  1. Proposal 1. Assume sentient (specific). Any signs that would be interpreted as signs of pain or distress in a conscious patient should still be so interpreted in a patient with any disorder of consciousness, and pain relief administered. This treatment should not be reserved for a subset of patients, e.g. those diagnosed as minimally conscious.
  2. Proposal 2. Assume sentient (general). A patient with a prolonged disorder of consciousness should not be assumed incapable of experience when an important clinical decision is made. All clinical decisions should consider the patient’s best interests as comprehensively as possible, working on the precautionary assumption that there is a realistic possibility of valenced experience and a continuing interest in avoiding suffering and in achieving well-being, but without taking this assumption to have implications regarding prognosis.
  3. Proposal 3. Avoid line-drawing (general). The diagnostic categories of PVS, MCS−, and MCS+ should be phased out in therapeutic and legal contexts. Clinicians should work with the broader category of ‘prolonged disorder of consciousness’ (PDOC) and with profiles of individual patients, tailoring care to the patient’s individual needs.
  4. Proposal 4. Avoid line-drawing (specific). Decisions about withdrawing life-sustaining treatment should be based on comprehensive assessment of the patient’s best interests, sensitive to the details of their case, and not on the PVS/MCS distinction.
  5. Proposal 5. The need for more humane options. Methods of hastening death other than through withdrawal of clinically assisted nutrition and hydration (CANH) are needed. At minimum, clinicians should not face any risk of punishment for administering large doses of sedatives or analgesics after a decision to withdraw CANH has been made.
  6. Proposal 6. Waiting for more information. If a humane method of hastening death becomes available, there will be no strong rationale for withdrawing life-sustaining treatment within days after injury, before the patient’s condition has stabilized. Given the great uncertainty about prospects for recovery at this stage, the default approach should be to delay the decision until the patient’s condition has stabilized.
• Human Fetuses and Embryos
  7. Proposal 7. Sentience and abortion. The point at which a human fetus becomes sentient is not the point at which abortion becomes morally impermissible. We should separate these issues. The ethics of abortion depend primarily on questions of personhood and bodily autonomy, not on questions of sentience.
  8. Proposal 8. Human sentience candidature begins early. Human fetuses are sentience candidates from the beginning of the second trimester. This line may move as new evidence emerges, but it should always track the earliest scientifically credible, evidence-based estimate.
  9. Proposal 9. Fetal pain relief (in therapeutic contexts). Direct fetal anaesthesia and pain relief should be considered whenever therapeutic fetal surgery is performed. The public should be involved in discussions about general norms of medical practice (not specific decisions), and data regarding current practices should be collected and published to allow such discussions.
  10. Proposal 10. Fetal pain relief (in the context of abortion). Clinicians need to communicate uncertainty about fetal sentience honestly to patients. In some cases, fetal pain relief may be appropriate. Deliberative processes for setting clinical norms must give appropriate weight to the voices of women.
  11. Proposal 11. Sentience and the 14-day rule. If the main goal of setting a legal time limit on human embryo research were that of prohibiting research on human sentience candidates, a significant liberalization of the current 14-day rule would still be proportionate to that goal. However, the issue raises deep value conflicts that have little to do with sentience.
• Human Neural Organoids
  12. Proposal 12. Brainstem rule. If a neural organoid develops or innervates a functioning brainstem (including the midbrain) that regulates arousal and leads to sleep-wake cycles, then it is a sentience candidate. An artificial functional equivalent of a brainstem would also suffice.
  13. Proposal 13. Targeted bans. If organoid research leads to the creation of organoids that are sentience candidates, a moratorium (time-limited ban) or indefinite ban on the creation of this particular type of organoid may be an appropriate response. Bans should avoid indiscriminate targeting of all organoid research.
  14. Proposal 14. Ethical review. When a neural organoid is a sentience candidate, research on it, if permitted at all, should be subject to ethical review and harm-benefit analysis, modelled on existing frameworks for regulating research on sentient animals.
• Other Animals
  15. Proposal 15. All adult vertebrates are sentience candidates. Debates about proportionality are warranted in cases where human activities create risks of suffering to any adult vertebrate animal. Further investigation concerning sentience candidature in vertebrates should focus on juvenile/ larval stages.
  16. Proposal 16. Sentience is neither intelligence nor brain size. We should be aware of the possibility of decouplings between intelligence, brain size, and sentience in the animal kingdom. Precautions to safeguard animal welfare
      should be driven by markers of sentience, not by markers of intelligence or by brain size.
  17. Proposal 17. Sentience is not pain. Although there are pragmatic reasons for the focus on pain in debates about animal sentience, we must be open to the possibility that the class of sentient animals is bigger than the class of animals that feel pain. Other forms of evidence can make an animal a sentience candidate, such as evidence of sophisticated forms of learning, attention, working memory, and planning.
  18. Proposal 18. Some invertebrates are sentience candidates. Coleoid cephalopod molluscs, decapod crustaceans of the suborder Pleocyemata, and insects (all when in the adult stage) are sentience candidates. Debates about proportionality are warranted in cases where human activities create risks of suffering to these animals. Decapod crustaceans of the suborder Dendrobranchiata, insect larvae, spiders, gastropods, and nematode worms are investigation priorities.
  19. Proposal 19. Codes of good practice and licensing. There should be a licensing scheme for companies attempting to farm sentience candidates or investigation priorities for which no welfare regulations yet exist (such as insects). Obtaining a license should be dependent on signing up to (and, where necessary, funding research leading to) a code of good practice concerning animal welfare.
  20. Proposal 20. Octopus farming. It is very unlikely that octopus farming can meet reasonable expectations regarding welfare and humane slaughter. It would be proportionate to ban octopus farming.
  21. Proposal 21. Towards humane slaughter. When an animal is a sentience candidate, it is proportionate to ban slaughter methods that needlessly risk extending and intensifying the suffering associated with dying, such as boiling animals alive without prior stunning.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  22. Proposal 22. Sentience is not intelligence (II). We should be aware of the possibility of a substantial decoupling between intelligence and sentience in the AI domain. Precautions to manage risks of suffering should be driven by markers of sentience, not markers of intelligence. For example, emulations of animal brains could achieve sentience without necessarily displaying impressive intelligence.
  23. Proposal 23. The gaming problem. For any set of criteria for sentience candidature, we need to be aware of the risk of the AI system or its designer learning (implicitly or explicitly) that they are regarded as criteria, leading to gaming of the criteria. We need to discount markers we have reason to think may have been gamed.
  24. Proposal 24. Deep computational markers. We can use computational functionalist theories (such as the global workspace theory and the perceptual reality monitoring theory) as sources of markers of sentience. If we find signs that an AI system, even if not deliberately equipped with such features, has implicitly learned ways of recreating them, this should lead us to regard it as a sentience candidate.
  25. Proposal 25. The run-ahead principle. At any given time, measures to regulate the development of sentient AI should run ahead of what would be proportionate to the risks posed by current technology, considering also the risks posed by credible future trajectories.
  26. Proposal 26. Codes of good practice and licensing (II). There should be a licensing scheme for companies attempting to create artificial sentience candidates, or whose work creates even a small risk of doing so, even if this is not an explicit aim. Obtaining a license should be dependent on signing up to (and, where necessary, funding the creation of a code of good practice for this type of work that includes norms of transparency.

• In the woods near my home a tiny fly, about the size of Drosophila, landed on the middle finger of my left hand. I usually blow flies away. This time, this book weighing on my mind, I let the fly sit there. Like the octopus in My Octopus Teacher, the fly seemed oddly curious about my skin, exploring the strange textures and odours, raising and lowering its limbs. I walked with them for twenty minutes or so.
• The longer you watch a fly, the easier it becomes to see them for what they are: an exploratory, unpredictable, inscrutable creature with a complex brain. A false perception of the fly as a nondescript nuisance gives way to something more accurate, more attuned to reality. You think at first that a being of that size could not be as complex or interesting as a dog or an octopus. Looking closely makes you think again.
• I am enough of an optimist about human ingenuity to find it likely we will one day build systems as capable and complex as flies. We will create new sentience candidates. Will we use them or co-exist with them? The pressure to let instrumental relations dominate will be overwhelming. Perhaps the only way to avoid that temptation is to never attempt to build such beings in the first place. But there may be a different way: one that involves all of us reflecting intensely and honestly on how we might change our orientation towards sentient life to become more about co-existence than use. Maybe then, when we do work out how to create new forms of sentience, we will be ready.
• This book has been about action, decision, policy: about how we can face up to real-life dilemmas at the edge of sentience and handle them appropriately. Some of these dilemmas are heading towards us at alarming speed. Some are already here. Some have always been with us. I hope the framework and set of proposals I have put forward (summarized at the beginning of the book) provide a platform for further debate about these issues. We need to decide what to do in these cases, and we need to do it calmly, despite the urgency of the problems. We need to think through our value conflicts, listen to experts, stakeholders, and advocates, look for points of consensus and meta-consensus, and design precautions that are permissible in principle, adequate, reasonably necessary, and consistent. Many readers may disagree with my specific proposals, but I hope everyone can agree with that general approach.
• The need for action and decision focuses minds, puts limits on speculation, and forces us to make judgements—judgements about what counts as evidence of sentience and how that evidence should guide us. But the urgency of the problems does not imply a need to rush. Good decisions come not from rushing, nor from procrastinating, but from taking the right amount of time. When faced with the disturbing and often terrible problems at the edge of sentience, we need to be prepared to act fast — but we also need to make time to reflect, deliberate, and listen to views from across the full range of reasonable disagreement. And we must do this while ensuring that the sentience candidates themselves remain at the centre of the picture.

In-Page Footnotes:

• This has been a hot topic for some years now, and I’ve read a book on the subject.
• See:-
  → "Godfrey-Smith (Peter) - Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life"
• Also, rather a lot else (which I now ought to review):-
  → "Humphrey (Nicholas) - Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness"
  → "Aeon - Video - The odd tale of the clever octopus"
  → "Andrews (Kristin) & Birch (Jonathan) - What has feelings?"
  → "BBC, Ghosh (Pallab) - Are animals conscious? How new research is changing minds"
  → "Birch (Jonathan) - Crabs and lobsters deserve protection from being cooked alive"
  → "Borkenhagen (David) - Octopus time"
  → "Conway Morris (Simon) - Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Preface)"
  → "Falk (Dan) - The philosopher’s zombie"
  → "Humphrey (Nicholas) - Seeing and somethingness"
  → "Jablonka (Eva) & Ginsburg (Simona) - Video - Why did Consciousness evolve"
  → "Kagan (Shelly) - How to Count Animals, more or less"
  → "Lavelle (Suilin) - Minds, Brains and Computers"
  → "Lenharo (Mariana) - Do insects have an inner life? Animal consciousness needs a rethink"
  → "Low (Philip) - The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness"
  → "Morell (Virginia) - What do mirror tests test?"
  → "Olson (Eric) - Persistence"
  → "Papineau (David) - Introducing Consciousness"
  → "Papineau (David) - Prospects for the Scientific Study of Phenomenal Consciousness"
  → "Pena-Guzman (David M.) - The dreams of animals"
  → "Price (Huw), Cave (Stephen), Iida (Fumiya), Etc. - Preparing for the future: artificial intelligence and us: Part 1"
  → "Ribeiro (Sidarta) - Ancestral dreams"
  → "Seth (Anil Kumar) - How we build perception from the inside out"
  → "Shanahan (Murray) - Conscious exotica"
  → "Srinivasan (Amia), LRB - The Sucker, the Sucker!"
  → "The Week - Octoculture"
  → "Whipple (Tom) - Can animals think and feel in the way humans do?"
• I think it’s highly likely that they do, even though their nervous systems are distributed and very different to ours.
• I doubt – though – that their sensations are the same as ours. It seems that after spawning the female octopus basically just falls apart. Presumably this isn’t as painful – if at all – as it would be for us.

• The author has all these down as ‘sentience candidates’.
• His reasons include supposedly analogous brain-regions to those that some theories of consciousness claim to be involved in generating consciousness in humans and behaviour that would indicate ‘valenced experience in humans’.
• I’m suspicious of all this – it seems somewhat anthropomorphising.
• I agree that we need to be cautious, but have hitherto been influenced by neuron-counts – which the author takes to be largely irrelevant.
• Also, I think we should factor in the likely quality of the ‘valenced experience’. Whatever it feels like to be a spider – if anything – won’t be very analogous to what it’s like to be one of us. Or so I would suspect.

• This is – as the author notes – critically important.
• There’s a clear distinction between PVS (a term which the author would like consigned to the dustbin of history) and brain death.
• I agree that the situation of some potentially conscious but immobile and incommunicative individuals may be worse than death, and agree that the legally-acceptable method of bringing their miserable existence to an end (by withdrawing sustenance) might be unconscionably cruel.
• I also agree with the precautionary measures suggested – analgesics where pain is possible; avoidance of careless talk where sentience is possible – are sensible (and compassionate).

• See my Note on Fetuses.
• The arrogance of surgeons in assuming lack of sentience because their pet theories of brain development discount it is well noted. The author is rightly appalled at the practice – now thankfully discontinued – of operating on newborns without anaesthetic.
• I do agree, though, with those on the contrary side that – while sentience may be there – the mental pain usually associated with physical pain will not be, given lack of experience and physical and mental development.
• These thoughts are also relevant when considering the likely distress caused to the less sophisticated forms of life (though arrogant presumptions are also to be rejected in these cases as well).

• This is where things get silly. ‘Feelings’ is a slippery term, having a psychological as well as sensory aspect.
• I suppose we shouldn’t underestimate the self-organising capacity of neural tissue, but in this case there is neither input (of ‘sense data’) nor communicative output. Maybe one day …

• The author notes the ‘gaming problem’ for LLMs.
• He gives an appreciative nod to "Bostrom (Nick) - Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" about the ultimate possibility of whole-brain simulations, but is somewhat inconsistent with his approach to simple animals – where neuron-count isn’t critical, partly because of the physical complexity of the neurons and axons themselves. If these aspects aren’t in the model, we may be missing a lot (even assuming Functionalism).

• There are cases – dogs and most mammals – where the assumption of sentience makes sense and we should assume it.
• But this is a slippery slope and one – if we follow it too far – causes more suffering rather than less, in that it takes our focus away from beings for which sentience is a serious burden to those for which it likely isn’t.
• Also, there’s the issue of incommensurability along the lines of it being better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

• This is an important point to bear in mind.
• The author is not supportive of plant sentience, but is keen on fruit-flies. Either way, we – and all animals – are in competition with such forms of life for their livelihoods. What’s to be done?

• The author admits there are aspects of sentience other than pleasure and pain, but chooses these because they have a clear moral imperative attached.
• Elsewhere, I think, he includes animal flourishing – and relief from boredom – as important.
• As for pain, there is – if I remember correctly – a human pathological condition in which pain is felt but – in one sense or other that’s difficult to fathom – it ‘doesn’t matter’ to the patient.
• So … much of the distress of pain relates to reflecting on it – anticipating it, knowing it will continue and maybe get worse, knowing that it may be symptomatic of some impending doom.
• Higher animals – such as abused dogs – anticipate future ill-treatment; but, I doubt this is true of lower animals which may live more in the moment.

• This category – of sentience candidates – becomes very wide and seems to include almost all animals of any complexity, though the author stops short of including nematode worms and shrimp in this category (they are investigative priorities).
• I think treating ‘valenced sentience’ as an ‘on/off’ switch is too simplistic. There may be something it’s like to be an oyster, but not much.
• The author doesn’t – in my view – face up to the fact that nociception (perception and avoidance of noxious environments) is a necessary property of any organism that has evolved (they would not live long enough to propagate otherwise), and need not be associated with phenomenal consciousness of any sort.

• In the text, the Twinning argument cited in "Warnock (Mary) - A Question of Life - The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology" is rehearsed and found seriously wanting.
• Coincidentally, this argument has also been recently cited in "McGrath (James F.) - Why 'Life Begins at Conception' Is Simply Not True" and found seriously wanting by commentators. Indeed, it is both highly intellectual and – to the ordinary reader – but incomprehensible and absurd.
• It seems to me that this argument – usually the ’Sixteen day rule’ – is misunderstood. The claim isn’t – or ought not to be – that Life doesn’t begin at conception but that you didn’t begin at conception.
• See, most importantly:-
  → "Anscombe (G.E.M.) - Were You a Zygote?",
  → "Smith (Barry) & Brogaard (Berit) - Sixteen Days", and
  → "Damschen (Gregor), Gomez-Lobo (Alfonso) & Schonecker (Dieter) - Sixteen Days? A Reply to B. Smith and B. Brogaard on the Beginning of Human Individuals"
• See also:-
  → "Cohnitz (Daniel) & Smith (Barry) - Assessing Ontologies: The Question of Human Origins and Its Ethical Significance",
  → "Evans (Gavin) - The myth of mirrored twins",
  → "Gomez-Lobo (Alfonso) - Sortals and Human Beginnings",
  → "Kingma (Elselijn) - BUMP: Better Understanding the Metaphysics of Pregnancy (B2)",
  → "Kingma (Elselijn) - Nine months",
  → "Koch-Hershenov (Rose J.) - Conjoined Twins and the Biological Account of Personal Identity",
  → "Robichaud (Philip) - Metaphysics and Morality at the Boundaries of Life", and
  → "Singer (Peter) & Dawson (Karen) - IVF Technology and the Argument from Potential"
• Maybe even this – that you didn’t begin at conception – is difficult to believe given the possibility of Perdurantism as a response to Fission. Birch himself asks whether the twins might not have shared all the same cells prior to the twinning event.
• This relates to "Geddes (Alexander) - Pregnancy, Parthood and Proper Overlap" (though this argues for overlap – between fetus and placenta – rather than total coincidence).

• I get the author’s point, but it seems to move the argument in the opposite direction to that which he thinks it should.
• He points out that some large brain areas – such as the cerebellum in mammals – are taken up with somatic control and have nothing to do with sentience. So, large areas of large brains may not be related to sentience. Hence, simply having a large brain doesn’t in itself imply sentience.
• But this doesn’t make it any more probably that a small brain is sentient. Rather, it makes it even less likely, as large areas – percentage-wise – of the small brain might also be earmarked for unconscious processing. I suspect that this is the case with bees’ relatively large brains. They are intelligent – in that they perform complex navigation and communicate with their ‘waggle dance’ – but none of this need be conscious.
• Another point is that it seems to be a basic assumption of AI – of the ‘neural net’ variety – that pseudo-neuron count – as well as the number of layers in the network – is critical. The ‘neurons’ are taken as contentless points, and it’s the weighting of the connections between them that’s important. I think this is the wrong model of biological brains, but it’s worth bearing in mind.

• I’ve noted spiders that stay in the same spot motionless for days on end waiting for something to happen, and if nothing does, they die. Whatever it’s like to be a spider is nothing like what it is to be a mammal, let along one of us. Do they get bored?
• The author make great play of analogies between humans and lower animals, along the lines of ‘in us, this is evidence of sentience’. Well, if we were making a complex web – or a honey-comb – it surely would. But does anyone thing that spiders and bees suck their metaphorical pencils which working out how to do it?
• Hunting spiders would seem to have more of a blank canvass, but unconscious algorithms would probably work just as well.

• I think this is where things start to get absurd.
• This applies also to fish and their spawn, and I’ll use them as an example.
• If I understand it correctly, fish produce millions of eggs in the hope of producing one adult. All but one of these therefore get eaten along the way. If they are sentient in any way comparable to us, they die horrible deaths in the digestive bath of a predator’s stomach. Is this at all likely? What good would consciousness be to them? What plans can they undertake to avoid their almost inevitable fate?
• If this really is the case, wouldn’t we – as some nihilists have argued – have a duty to bring all complex life to an end?

Summary of Notes Referenced by This Note

To access information, click on one of the links in the table above.

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References & Reading List

Author	Title	Medium	Source	Read?
Aeon	Video - The odd tale of the clever octopus	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 20 March 2015	Yes
Andrews (Kristin) & Birch (Jonathan)	What has feelings?	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 23 February 2023	Yes
Anscombe (G.E.M.)	Were You a Zygote?	Paper - Cited	Anscombe (G.E.M) - Human Life, Action and Ethics	Yes
Anscombe (G.E.M.), Geach (Mary), Gormally (Luke), Eds.	Human Life, Action and Ethics	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	10%
BBC, Ghosh (Pallab)	Are animals conscious? How new research is changing minds	Paper - Cited	BBC. Published 16 June 2024, 00:04 BST.	Yes
Birch (Jonathan)	Crabs and lobsters deserve protection from being cooked alive	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 03 November, 2017	Yes
Borkenhagen (David)	Octopus time	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 20 April 2023	Yes
Bostrom (Nick)	Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies	Book - Cited	Bostrom (Nick) - Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies	4%
Cohnitz (Daniel) & Smith (Barry)	Assessing Ontologies: The Question of Human Origins and Its Ethical Significance	Paper - Cited	E. Runggaldier and C. Kanzian (eds.), Persons – An Interdisciplinary Approach, Vienna, 2003, 243–59	11%
Conway Morris (Simon)	Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	4%
Conway Morris (Simon)	Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Preface)	Paper - Cited	Morris (Simon Conway) - Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, Preface	Yes
Damschen (Gregor), Gomez-Lobo (Alfonso) & Schonecker (Dieter)	Sixteen Days? A Reply to B. Smith and B. Brogaard on the Beginning of Human Individuals	Paper - Cited	Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Apr. 2006, 31.2, pp. 165-175	22%
Evans (Gavin)	The myth of mirrored twins	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 27 June 2023	Yes
Falk (Dan)	The philosopher’s zombie	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 04 February 2022	Yes
Geddes (Alexander)	Pregnancy, Parthood and Proper Overlap	Paper - Cited	Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):476-491 (2023)	Yes
Godfrey-Smith (Peter)	Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life	Book - Cited	Godfrey-Smith (Peter) - Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life	Yes
Gomez-Lobo (Alfonso)	Sortals and Human Beginnings	Paper - Cited	Medicine and Metaphysics Conference, University of Buffalo, November, 2004	5%
Hains (Brigid) & Hains (Paul)	Aeon: A-B (& General)	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	100%
Hains (Brigid) & Hains (Paul)	Aeon: Follow-up Boxes	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	100%
Hains (Brigid) & Hains (Paul)	Aeon: L-P	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	33%
Hains (Brigid) & Hains (Paul)	Aeon: Q-S	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	29%
Hains (Brigid) & Hains (Paul)	Aeon: T-Z	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	21%
Humphrey (Nicholas)	Seeing and somethingness	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 03 October 2022	Yes
Humphrey (Nicholas)	Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness	Book - Cited	Humphrey (Nicholas) - Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness	Yes
Jablonka (Eva) & Ginsburg (Simona)	Video - Why did Consciousness evolve	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 28 November 2022	56%
Kagan (Shelly)	How to Count Animals, more or less	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	6%
Kagan (Shelly)	How to Count Animals, more or less	Paper - Cited	Kagan (Shelly) - How to Count Animals, more or less	9%
Kingma (Elselijn)	BUMP: Better Understanding the Metaphysics of Pregnancy (B2)	Paper - Cited	Southampton University Website	Yes
Kingma (Elselijn)	Nine months	Paper - Cited	Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. (In Press; 18 November 2018)	6%
Koch-Hershenov (Rose J.)	Conjoined Twins and the Biological Account of Personal Identity	Paper - Cited	The Monist, Vol. 89, No. 3, Coming into Being and Passing Away (July 2006), pp. 351-370	11%
Lavelle (Suilin)	Minds, Brains and Computers	Paper - Cited	Ward (Dave), Pritchard (Duncan), Massimi (Michela), Lavelle (Suilin), Chrisman (Matthew), Hazlett (Allan) & Richmond (Alasdair) - Introduction to Philosophy, 2013	Yes
Lenharo (Mariana)	Do insects have an inner life? Animal consciousness needs a rethink	Paper - Cited	Nature News, 19 April 2024	Yes
Low (Philip)	The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness	Paper - Cited	Francis Crick Memorial Conference, Cambridge, July 7, 2012	Yes
McGrath (James F.)	Why 'Life Begins at Conception' Is Simply Not True	Paper - Cited	Patheos, July 30, 2024	Yes
Morell (Virginia)	What do mirror tests test?	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 23 October, 2019	Yes
Olson (Eric)	Persistence	Paper - Cited	The Human Animal, September 1999, Chapter 2, pp. 22-41	Yes
Olson (Eric)	The Human Animal - Personal Identity Without Psychology	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	Yes
Papineau (David)	Introducing Consciousness	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	Yes
Papineau (David)	Introducing Consciousness	Paper - Cited	Papineau - Introducing Consciousness	Yes
Papineau (David)	Prospects for the Scientific Study of Phenomenal Consciousness	Paper - Cited	Papineau - Thinking About Consciousness, Chapter 7	2%
Papineau (David)	Thinking About Consciousness	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	4%
Pena-Guzman (David M.)	The dreams of animals	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 07 June 2022	Yes
Price (Huw), Cave (Stephen), Iida (Fumiya), Etc.	Preparing for the future: artificial intelligence and us: Part 1	Paper - Cited	University of Cambridge Research Horizons, Issue 35, February 2018, pp. 20-29	Yes
Ribeiro (Sidarta)	Ancestral dreams	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 15 March 2022	Yes
Robichaud (Philip)	Metaphysics and Morality at the Boundaries of Life	Paper - Cited	Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Apr. 2006, 31.2, pp. 97-105	No
Seth (Anil Kumar)	How we build perception from the inside out	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 30 June, 2020	Yes
Shanahan (Murray)	Conscious exotica	Paper - Cited	Aeon, 19 October, 2016	Yes
Singer (Peter) & Dawson (Karen)	IVF Technology and the Argument from Potential	Paper - Cited	Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1988) (pp. 87-104)	No
Smith (Barry) & Brogaard (Berit)	Sixteen Days	Paper - Cited	Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Feb. 2003, 28.1, pp. 45-78	7%
Srinivasan (Amia), LRB	The Sucker, the Sucker!	Paper - Cited	London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 17·7, September 2017, pages 23-25	Yes
The Week	Octoculture	Paper - Cited	The Week, 12 March 2022	Yes
Ward (Dave), Pritchard (Duncan), Massimi (Michela), Lavelle (Suilin), Chrisman (Matthew), Hazlett (Allan) & Richmond (Alasdair)	Introduction to Philosophy	Book - Cited (via Paper Cited)	Bibliographical details to be supplied	No
Warnock (Mary)	A Question of Life - The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology	Book - Cited	Warnock (Mary) - A Question of Life - The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology	No
Whipple (Tom)	Can animals think and feel in the way humans do?	Paper - Cited	Times, Friday April 16 2021	Yes

Text Colour Conventions

1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
2. Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)