Double standard in sentience attribution across substrates

Rouleau & Levin argue: behavioral patterns attributed to sentience in animals should be afforded same interpretation in plants and other systems without neural substrate bias.

Source paper

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Multiple ways to implement and infer sentience

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Findings (1)

finding

Plants display goal-directed, anticipatory, flexible, and adaptive behaviors including kin discrimination, cooperation, mimicry, and risk evaluation
supports
Empirical evidence from plant neurobiology showing behavioral patterns historically attributed to animal sentience.

Hypotheses (1)

hypothesis

Sentience Can Be Implemented in Multiple Substrates
gates

Communities (3)

community

Active inference & agent ecology
members_of
Free energy minimization, Markov blankets, trust gradients, and multi-agent rhythm/deferral frameworks
Substrate-agnostic behavioral inference of cognition
members_of
Cognition and sentience attributed solely via observable behavior, not neural substrate or species.
Substrate-neutral sentience criteria
members_of
Challenges anthropocentric sentience frameworks by identifying deep functional invariants applicable across biological, artificial, and non-neural systems.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

double standard in inferring sentienceconcept0.877
Unequal willingness to attribute sentience to animals vs. plants despite similar behavioural evidence.
Current double standard applies behavioral criteria for sentience attribution to animals but not to plants or other non-neural systems.claim0.854
Reducing false negatives in sentience attributionconcept0.814
All attributions of cognition, including sentience, are always inferred on the basis of embodied behaviours, including verbal self-report in humans.claim0.787
Stronger version: all cognition attributions rely on observable behavior.
Double Standardconcept0.784
The inconsistent willingness to infer sentience in animals vs. plants based on similar behavioral evidence.
all attributions of cognition (i.e., mental actions), including sentience, are always inferred on the basis of embodied behaviours, including verbal self-report in humans.quote0.780
Critical verbatim statement highlighting the universal inference basis of sentience.
Cognitive functions, including sentience, can potentially be achieved by very different systems and their disparate substrates.claim0.761
Central multiple-realizability claim of the paper, from abstract and §2.
Eight Sentience Criteria (Crump et al.)framework0.759
Quantitative, flexible framework for assessing sentience: nociception, sensory integration, analgesia, trade-offs, self-protection, learning, preference.