•  39
    Neural networks, AI, and the goals of modeling
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
    Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found many useful applications in recent years. Of particular interest have been those instances where their successes imitate human cognition and many consider artificial intelligences to offer a lens for understanding human intelligence. Here, we criticize the underlying conflation between the predictive and explanatory power of DNNs by examining the goals of modeling.
  •  13
    Evolutionary mismatch and anomalies in the memory system
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
    In order to understand involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu experiences, we argue that it is important to take an evolutionary medicine perspective. Here, we propose that these memory anomalies can be understood as the outcomes of an inevitable design trade-off between type I and type II errors in memory processing.
  •  31
    Studying Introspection in Animals and AIs
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9): 63-74. 2023.
    The study of introspection has, up until now, been predominantly human-centric, with regrettably little attention devoted to the question of whether introspection might exist in non-humans, such as animals and artificial intelligence (AI), and what distinct forms it might take. In their target article, Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) aim to address this oversight by offering a non-anthropocentric framework for understanding introspection that could be used to address these questions. However,…Read more
  •  6
    There is a puzzle in reconciling the widespread presence of puritanical norms condemning harmless pleasures with the theory that morality evolved to reap the benefits of cooperation. Here, we draw on the work of several philosophers to support the argument by Fitouchi et al. that these norms evolved to facilitate and scaffold self-control for the sake of cooperation.
  •  5
    Despite the once-common idea that a universal ideography would have numerous advantages, attempts to develop such ideographies have failed. Here, we make use of the biological idea of fitness landscapes to help us understand the nonevolution of such a universal ideographic code as well as how we might reach this potential global fitness peak in the design space.
  •  11
    Polygenic scores and social science
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
    It is a hotly contested issue whether polygenic scores should play a major role in the social sciences. Here, we defend a methodologically pluralist stance in which sociogenomics should abandon its hype and recognize that it suffers from all the methodological difficulties of the social sciences, yet nevertheless maintain an optimistic stance toward a more cautious use.
  •  10
    Flesh Without Blood: The Public Health Benefits of Lab‐Grown Meat
    with Jonny Anomaly, Diana Fleischman, and Walter Veit
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 1-9. forthcoming.
    Synthetic meat made from animal cells will transform how we eat. It will reduce suffering by eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals. But it will also have big public health benefits if it becomes widely consumed. In this paper, we discuss how “clean meat” can reduce the risks associated with intensive animal farming, including antibiotic resistance, environmental pollution, and zoonotic viral diseases like influenza and coronavirus. Since the most common objection to clean meat is t…Read more
  •  34
    Studying Animal Feelings: Integrating Sentience Research and Welfare Science
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (7): 196-222. 2023.
    The goal of this article is to bring together two fields of research — animal sentience research and animal welfare science — with the aim of advancing our understanding of animal emotions, especially their subjectively experienced or 'felt' component (feelings). While these two research areas share a common interest in animal feelings, they have had surprisingly little interaction. In this paper, we make a call for the integration of these fields and outline some of the ways in which work done …Read more
  •  13
    Social robots and the intentional stance
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
    Why is it that people simultaneously treat social robots as mere designed artefacts, yet show willingness to interact with them as if they were real agents? Here, we argue that Dennett's distinction between the intentional stance and the design stance can help us to resolve this puzzle, allowing us to further our understanding of social robots as interactive depictions.
  •  17
    In order to address why the number of patients suffering from anxiety and depression are seemingly exploding in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries, it is sensible to look at the evolution of human fearfulness responses. Here, we draw on Veit's pathological complexity framework to advance Grossmann's goal of re-characterizing human fearfulness as an adaptive trait.
  •  30
    Defending Sentientism
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 14 (2): 168-170. 2023.
    The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in the possibility of suffering in nonhumans, including animals only very distantly related to us, as well as artificial intelligence systems. Much...
  •  10
    Regulating Possibly Sentient Human Cerebral Organoids
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 14 (2): 197-199. 2023.
    Due to their contested ethical and legal status, human cerebral organoids (HCOs) have become the subject of one of the most rapidly expanding debates in the recent bioethics literature. There is no...
  •  3
    Optimism about Measuring Animal Feelings
    Asian Bioethics Review 15 (3): 351-355. 2023.
    While animal sentience research has flourished in the last decade, scepticism about our ability to accurately measure animal feelings has unfortunately remained fairly common. Here, we argue that evolutionary considerations about the functions of feelings will give us more reason for optimism and outline a method for how this might be achieved.
  •  19
    Positive Wild Animal Welfare
    Biology and Philosophy 38 (2): 1-19. 2023.
    With increasing attention given to wild animal welfare and ethics, it has become common to depict animals in the wild as existing in a state dominated by suffering. This assumption is now taken on board by many and frames much of the current discussion; but needs a more critical assessment, both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we challenge the primary lines of evidence employed in support of wild animal suffering, to provide an alternative picture in which wild animals may often ha…Read more
  •  13
    Validating Indicators of Subjective Animal Welfare
    Philosophy of Science 1-13. forthcoming.
    Measurement of subjective animal welfare creates a special problem in validating the measurement indicators used. Validation is required to ensure indicators are measuring the intended target state, and not some other object. While indicators can usually be validated through looking for correlation between target and indicator under controlled manipulations, this is not possible when the target state is not directly accessible. In this paper, I outline a four-step approach using the concept of r…Read more
  •  10
    The scaffolded evolution of human communication
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
    Heintz & Scott-Phillips provide a useful synthesis for constructing a bridge between work by both cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists studying the diversity of human communication. Here, we aim to strengthen their bridge from the side of evolutionary biology, to argue that we can best understand ostensive communication as a scaffold for more complex forms of intentional expressions.
  •  88
    Darwinian and Autopoietic Views of the Organism
    Constructivist Foundations 18 (1). 2022.
    Our goal is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.
  •  98
    The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) that serve to match offspring phenotype with predicted future environmental conditions. When these predictions fail, a mismatch occurs between offspring…Read more
  •  157
    Has the Socio-Political Role of Neuroethics Been Neglected?
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 13 (1): 23-25. 2022.
    Alongside the rapid global advances in neuroscientific research, neuroethics has been one of the fastest growing sub-fields within bioethics. With this rapid expansion, bioethicists struggle to kee...
  •  146
  •  129
    On the evolutionary origins of the bifocal stance
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.
    In this commentary we advance Jagiello et al.'s proposal by zooming in on the possible evolutionary origins of the “bifocal stance” that may have enabled a major transition in human cultural evolution, arguing that the evolution of the bifocal stance was driven by an explosion in cultural complexity arising from cooperative foraging, which led to a feedback loop between the ritual and instrumental stances.
  •  209
    Autism and the preference for imaginary worlds
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.
    Dubourg and Baumard mention a potential role for the human drive to systemise as a factor motivating interest in imaginary worlds. Given that hyperexpression of this trait has been linked with autism (Baron-Cohen, 2002, 2006), we think this raises interesting implications for how those on the autism spectrum may differ from the neurotypical population in their engagement with imaginary worlds.
  •  27
    Welfare comparisons within and across species
    Philosophical Studies 180 (2): 529-551. 2023.
    One of the biggest problems in applications of animal welfare science is our ability to make comparisons between different individuals, both within and across species. Although welfare science provides methods for measuring the welfare of individual animals, there’s no established method for comparing measures between individuals. In this paper I diagnose this problem as one of underdetermination—there are multiple conclusions given the data, arising from two sources of variation that we cannot …Read more
  •  197
    Darwinian and Autopoietic Views of the Organism
    Constructivist Foundations 18 (1). 2022.
    Our goal is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.
  •  148
  •  132
    The importance of end-of-life welfare
    Animal Frontiers 12 (1). 2022.
    The conditions of transport and slaughter at the end of their lives are a major challenge to the welfare of agricultural animals. • End-of-life experiences should be of a greater ethical concern than others of similar intensity and duration, due to their position in the animal’s life. • End-of-life welfare can have both internal importance to the animals and external ethical importance to human decision-makers. • We should pay extra care to ensure that the conditions during transport and slau…Read more