Are Snails Sentient?
“Is there any research to suggest whether snails are sentient? I would really like it if they weren’t, due to accidentally treading on them.”
This was the question my creature loving wife posed on the Slido question app at the end of the morning’s three talks on consciousness. The topics covered included how we define sentience and the risks/precautions we should consider in society, whether our microbiota in our gut can influence our consciousness, finishing just before lunch with a session on colour vision and our individual experience of the world around us -perhaps best summed up as “is the red I see the same as your red?”
It had been a fascinating start to the day, with Jonathan Birch taking us through a breadth of questions concerning the ethics of sentience and whether or not as a society we have enough protections in place to prevent sentient systems from suffering unnecessarily. From people in the so-called vegetative state, to animals that are being cooked alive such as lobsters – how do we really know they don’t perceive pain and suffer? One of the most disturbing examples was the previously accepted notion that new born babies don’t feel pain. Therefore until quite recently it was routine to perform operations on them without any anaesthetic, just a paralytic to prevent the baby from moving. Really quite shocking!
His session asked some really difficult questions which are explored further in his book, The Edge of Sentience, which naturally I purchased on the day, as I do love a reason to buy new literature (as regular readers are well aware…).
The pre-lunch Q&A session gave the host plenty of time to ask the panel our questions posed via the Slido app
Just prior to lunch, Jenny Bosten took us through the challenges of understanding how our brains render the light that we see into colour vision. Did you know that there is evidence that implies some women can literally see more colours than men? This is due to a genetic quirk that means some women have four types of receptors in their eyes whereas most people only have three (red, green and blue). This inheritable quirk, termed tetrachromacy, is only seen in women as you need to have two X chromosomes in order to inherit the fours visual receptors, and men always have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome.
If you’d like to know more about this, the paper is freely available to download – The dimensionality of color vision in carriers of anomalous trichromacy.
The sessions that followed were just as interesting, but the one that really piqued my interest was the final session of the day: How Studying Consciousness Can Help Physics, which was given by George Musser and explored the difficulty of doing physics on the universe objectively when we are part of that same universe, or more succinctly, the Inside/Outside Problem. During his talk, George dissected specific puzzles that arise because of this, such as the quantum measurement problem, and that old favourite of physicists everywhere, the problem of time. He did this in a fantastically engaging way and it is clear that he loves his subject, which made his session all the more enjoyable. Much of this topic is explored in more detail in his latest book, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, and yes, I bought this one too…
Kaz and I getting ready to geek out at the start of the day!
Overall, the day was a really fascinating insight into some of the current topics in the field of consciousness and I learned a lot that I didn’t know previously. I’ve included a link below to give more detail on the programme which was superbly put together and included lots of time for Q&A with the presenters and plenty of breaks.
https://www.newscientist.com/science-events/conscious-mind/
It’s definitely put me in the mood for next month’s big science extravaganza, New Scientist Live, at the Excel. I can’t wait!
And are snails sentient?
Well unsurprisingly we don’t know yet, but as Jonathan said in his talk, that does not mean we should discount the possibility that they are.
