Ramnani: Hi, I am Dr Sapna Ramnani, and you're listening to share it with me and the journalist living with a speech impairment, and that means my voice is a little more difficult to understand. But I didn't want that to stop me from asking the questions that matter in this podcast, I use an AI voice to help me bring those questions to life. The voice is synthetic with the thoughts, the emotions and the intent behind every question and comment are completely my old you'll hear that AI voice throughout the interview, but know that I'm here guiding every moment of the conversation. Hi, everyone and welcome the very first episode of share it with me. I'm so excited to kick things off with Jamie Woodhouse, a brilliant seeker and the creator of sentientism, a philosophy that's all about using evidence and reason when extending compassion to all sentient beings. In this episode, Jamie breaks down what it really means to be sentient, what that matters, and how this idea connects to the way we treat each other and the animals we share this planet with. We also get into the importance of a feeding lifestyle, and while caring for our fellow creatures is more than just a personal choice, it's a global responsibility. It's a thoughtful, inspiring conversation, and I honestly couldn't think of a better first guest to help set the tone for what shares with me is all about. Let's jump in.

Woodhouse: Hi, Sapna, how are you?

Ramnani: Hi, Jamie, I'm fine. Good to hear it. How are you?

Woodhouse: Yeah, I'm doing really well. Thank you doing very good.

Ramnani: Yes, too. So thank you. It is really nice to meet you and thank you for your time. It is an honour to have you here. Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

Woodhouse: Yeah, so my name is Jamie Woodhouse, and I guess my main interest these days is developing and popularizing this really simple world view called sentientism, which I guess we'll talk about today. But I've I had a fairly sort of standard corporate career for many years, and now I do some of that type of work, some of that consulting work that I used to do for a big company, but I also run a range of different projects that are mostly in the NGO charitable spaces. But this sentientism idea is becoming bigger and bigger in my life.

Ramnani: So be good to talk to you about and for people who don't know anything about sentientism, what is it? Can you explain?

Woodhouse: Yeah, of course. So I describe it as a world view or a philosophy, and in a sentence, you can summarize it as evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings. So like lots of other world views, you know, religious world views, or non religious world views, like humanism. I think it's trying to help us answer some really big, deep questions. And for me, the most important questions are, you know, what's real? How should we understand reality, assuming we want to try and make it better? So that's a question of epistemology. But there's also deep and important question of ethics, you know, who matters and what matters, and how should we live a good life? So sentientism tries to answer both in a very simple way. It says, when we think about what's real, we should use evidence of reason to try and understand reality by engaging honestly with reality. And that question of who matters, the clue is in the name that all sentient beings should get, our compassion and our moral consideration. And in short, a sentient being is any being that can experience things, that can have feelings, that can experience good things, which we might call flourishing, or bad things that we might call suffering. Simply that includes all living humans. You know, all of us are sentient. I'm pretty sure you are, Sapna, I'm pretty sure I am, but also extends out to include, you know, an enormous amount of the animal kingdom, at least, and may even go beyond that. So what's motivated you to become sentient? So I've always had an interest in philosophy and different ways of thinking about the world, and I guess my personal path into this was I grew up originally in England, in a fairly ordinary background, and the dominant world view in that background was Anglican Christianity. It wasn't particularly central to my family's way of living, but it was just, you know, what people did and what people thought and what people believed. And as I grew up in got into my teenage years, I started to dig a little bit into what that really meant. And I started to learn about some other world views, other religious world views, and the sociology and the history of those two. And came to be increasingly dissatisfied with Christianity, partly because it just didn't seem to be well supported by evidence and reasoning, and it just made seemed much more likely that these things were human created stories than they were divinely inspired truths. But also because I was increasingly dissatisfied with some of the ethical problems I was seeing in certain parts of the Christian world view too. You know, I was asking my questions, you know, asking myself questions like, well. So you know, why can't women be priests, for example? And it seemed odd to me. So there were some ethical challenges. And I also didn't like the idea that a perfectly compassionate being would create a place where billions of innocent people would burn in hell for eternity. That didn't seem like a good role model for me ethically, too. So I moved away from Christianity and became a an atheist, I guess, as a teenager. But atheism isn't really that interesting. It just says, you know, I don't think there's a God, and there are so many things that I don't think there's good evidence to believe in. So atheism isn't particularly interesting, and it doesn't really tell us much about ethics, either. So then I that was how I came on to discover humanism, which I think of as you know, takes that naturalistic approach of understanding the world. We use evidence and reason. We don't need a supernatural being to tell us what's good and bad. We can just decide that as humans and as humans, let's decide to have compassion, at least for all human being. I liked humanism, but as the years went by, I started to see a humanism, and again, the clue there is in the name that humanism focuses very much on humans. And I think you know, you ask even a five year old child, and they will tell you that humans aren't the only beings that matter. Surely non human animals that can suffer and can flourish, can feel joy. Surely they matter too. We know that if we have companion animals that we share our homes with. So it was really that frustration with humanism, anthropocentrism, that sort of centre on humans, that made me eventually, in the last few years, think, well, I want to keep that naturalistic way of understanding a world, and I like that universal compassion, but it's got to go beyond humans. It's got to go to all sentient beings. So that was my personal path to thinking about, look, could we develop and share this idea of sentientism as a way of thinking that is explicitly naturalistic but also has this sort of sentient centric compassion that all suffering matters, all suffering beings matter. But other people come to it by very different paths as well. You know, many people come direct to it. Some people come to it through the animal advocacy movements, and then want to layer in something that's committed to using evidence and reason. And other people follow my path, which may have been sort of more from a religion through atheism and humanism and then to sentientism. So I was wondering, why are there not many people that follow sentientism? If I had to guess, out of the 8 billion humans on the planet. I think maybe around 100 million might think this way already, but most of them won't have heard of the word sentientism. It is quite a new word. It's been around since the 1970s but has rarely escaped academia, and I'm trying to change its emphasis a little bit, but, you know, it is still quite new. So I think there's quite a few people out there who agree with it. And in a way, lots of people, when you describe it, say, Well, you know, that makes sense to me, right? So you'd say, well, doesn't it make sense to believe using evidence and reason? Of course, you know, what would be a better way to understand a reality? And you say, Well, shouldn't all beings that can suffer matter? And they might say, well, yes, of course they should, right. So in a sense, a lot of people agree with it in theory. I guess the difficulty is that around the world, there are extremely dominant social norms that clash very brutally with a sentientist world view So most people around the world are taught by parents, by family, by schools, by priests, by society, by governments, that there are certain things we should believe, even if they're not based in evidence and reasoning. So that's one area of a big clash with the sentientist world view And the other is that while people might, in theory, say, non human, sentient beings, particularly animals matter in some sense. We're also taught by parents, by schools, by institutions, by the animal agriculture industry, by the research industries, by our social norms that actually, although we might care in theory about Non Humans, it's really the humans that matter. And what that means is that we can use all of those other non human sentient beings pretty much in any way we see fit, for trivial human ends. And the most egregious example of that, I guess, is animal agriculture. So the short answer, I think, is those very powerful social norms that centre us on human concerns, instead of help letting us be compassionate for all sentient beings, and that centre us on, essentially following dogmatic norms of belief instead of open mindedly and using evidence and reason to work out what to believe. So it's a it's more of a battle against, I think, powerful social norms than it is really any particularly tricky philosophy, the philosophy and the science is actually pretty straightforward.

Ramnani: According to World Animal Foundation, there are approximately 88 million vegans in the world. And according to the UN in 2022, 8 billion global population, what are your thoughts on why tiny percentage of vegans?

Woodhouse: Again, I think. It's those social norms, it's the way we're brought up. And you were also asking, you know, do you think it's possible for change to happen? And I tend it's difficult, because we all know social change is hard, even in the intra human space, anyone who's fighting for social justice or social causes is frustrated because things aren't moving fast enough, and the people resisting are always annoyed that things are moving too fast. But I think when we look back on them historically, changes can happen remarkably quickly, even in a matter of years or decades. And I'm optimistic we can do something similar here, both around naturalistic epistemology and both and around putting our compassion for non human animals and sentient beings into practice. And part of my hope comes from, I guess, the way young children think, even before they learn things before they're, frankly, indoctrinated by these social norms. So I think if you speak to many young people, and I'm lucky to do that, because one of the things I do is give talks and lectures and classroom sessions that talk about world views, often, they seem to be able to think much more clearly than some of the adults that I spent time with, particularly far on Twitter. So I think many young people, intuitively, they're a little bit like little scientists, right? They're exploring the world. They're using their senses. They're trying to understand things honestly they haven't yet been taught fabrications, right? So there, there is an intellectual honesty there, and I think we can get back to that as adults, but there's something similar going on in the compassionate space as well. I don't want to be naive about young kids, because sometimes they will be cruel, but but most young children, I think if you get them to spend some quality time with a pig or a cow or a chicken or a fish in a sanctuary or a safe wild environment, would not want to hurt that animal, and indeed, would, you know, vociferously reject the idea of needlessly hurting the animal. So, so I think the raw material in human ethics is there already that sort of intellectual curiosity and that will to learn, you know, the reality about reality, but also that intuitive compassion that you know we feel, or we intellectualize, that needlessly hurting others, needlessly killing others, is just intuitively and intrinsically a wrong thing to do. So I think that raw material is there in the human psyche. Of course, there's a lot of problems in the human psyche too, and in those social norms. So that's part of the reason I'm optimistic we can drive that change, I guess another reason I'm reasonably optimistic is that it's only really in the sort of dominant Western cultures that industrial animal agriculture has taken centre stage. And indeed, you know, some academics argue that animal agriculture was one of the driving forces behind a lot of colonization and impersonalization through its land hunger and various other related processes. And there's some philosophical links there as well around you know, might makes right ethics and a sort of domination of the landscape and of those weaker than us. So there's some interesting themes there. But again, when you take a global perspective, much of the world outside of the Western educated industrialized economies is already much closer to ultimately a vegan way of living than the industrialized, rich west. So I think there's also some hope there, because the pressures of both simple, ethical philosophical thinking. You look at ideas like Ahimsa, and you look at some of the other themes that run through many of the global religions and other world views already extend compassion beyond the human in a very rich way, much more generously than the sort of anthropocentric West tends to do. But when you layer onto that, the environmental reasons and the human health reasons for transitioning away from animal agriculture. I think there are so many different pressures that actually might force us in a more productive direction. And I'm hoping that, on the one hand, you know, the countries that have already gone down the sort of industrialized animal agriculture route will rapidly transition away from that towards a completely plant based food and production systems, and that the countries that haven't yet gone down that industrialized route will find a completely different and an alternative path, and one that is respectful to the fact that in many of those countries, animal agriculture is much more deeply embedded in a wider range of the population. So you need to have find a very different, sympathetic, just transitional way to make that change happen. But overall, I do think we can get there, partly because most humans want to get there. Most humans don't want to hurt animals, simply speaking, but also because those environmental and health and pollution and land use and water use pressures will, frankly, just force us away from those types of systems over time. As you said, most humans don't want to hurt animals. So I was wondering why people still eat meat. There are so many reasons, and I'm lucky to run my own podcast called sentientism and some of the most fascinating conversations. There have been with psychologists and sociologists who are focusing on exactly that problem. I think the biggest reason is because we've been taught it's norm. So the way most people think about eating meat and dairy and eggs and consuming animal products in general is, I think backwards. So we think, you know, I'm a good person, because I know myself, right, I care and I want to be a good person. The people around me are good people too. So the things we do and the things we think are normal must be good, right? So we start from that assumption, and then we'll use a full suite of human, cognitive and social tools to convince ourselves that is the case, even if we're clearly and obviously causing harm. So I think that's the central reason, is that we're just told it's normal, and therefore normal must be good. But then there's a whole range of different techniques and tools we use. One is that the harm that's being done is not being done by us personally. You know, we don't do the slaughter ourselves. Generally, we get somebody else to do it, which is convenient, because we can step back from the responsibility of what we're paying to have done the industries we're paying to do those things. Hide them from us, quite deliberately, no one wants to see what happens in a slaughterhouse or when a calf is taken away from their mother, or when a carer is artificially inseminated, or where male chicks have dropped into macerators, right? No one wants to see that. So the consumers don't want to look, the industry doesn't want to show and it's a convenient deceit keeping that hidden. And in many cases, the industry will go way beyond that. In the US, we're seeing a wave of what are called Ag Gag rules, where they're actually using laws to try and prevent people looking into the reality of what goes on in animal farms. But then there's a range of things we do in our own heads, so there is a clear incentive for us to not think about the topic at all. That's probably what I did for many years, is just deliberately ignore the topic, because I knew if I engaged honestly with it, where that would lead. There's cognitive dissonance, this idea that we can believe different things at once, and it's supposed to be uncomfortable and something we should resolve, but many people use it as an excuse, and then there is also just a sense that people think it's harder than it really is. Now some people do genuinely have challenges. There might be difficulties of food availability or resources or people are in very different contexts. So I don't want to oversimplify, but many people think it's practically harder than it is, when actually it's remarkably simple for most people, and they worry too much about the social context as well. And that's one thing I think, is getting easier all the time. Part of the reason I was vegetarian for many years, and didn't make the final step to vegan was because I was okay being a little bit weird, but I didn't want to be too weird. But actually, veganism now, I think more and more people are understanding it. It's becoming more and more mainstream. It's becoming more acceptable. So the social risk of ultimately, what is doing a good thing is dropping away, and practically, in many cases, places around the world, it's getting easier all the time as well. So those are the again, there's a long answer, and there's some brilliant research been done around that, but I think it's because people think it's normal, and because people worry that it's hard, harder than it is practically and socially. And yeah, I think that's changing quite rapidly now in many places, which is encouraging to see. And my personal experience of it was when I looked towards the decision, there was some trepidation. Now I was nervous, I was hesitant. I didn't know how it would feel socially and practically. And then once I did it, I never looked back. It was easier than I could have imagined, and it was like a freeing and a release. You know, no, no one lives a perfect life, but to be able to give up that cognitive dissonance and at least boycott one really obvious felt wonderful to me. And yeah, there's so it's an enormously positive step. I'm wondering if you think people should go and visit a slaughterhouse once in their lives. Yes, if people want to continue to fund these things, they should understand the reality of what is being done so in an ideal world, they would understand the process end to end. They would understand the forced breeding. They would understand what happens to the young males. They would understand the family separation. They would see the mutilations that are often carried out normally without anaesthetic. They would see the frankly, imprisonment and the constraints these animals live under. And yes, they would also see the slaughter process. And I think that would help, because part of the dynamic with the industry is understandably, the industry knows that consumers care. They know that consumers care about animals, and then consumers care about the environment, so they spend billions of dollars and billions of pounds on convincing consumers and governments that animal agriculture is both humane and sustainable. And again, it's an interesting balance, because the consumers are desperate to believe just as the industry is desperate to convince us. And I think if you. Genuinely saw that process end to end, and it can be very instructive. You know, you don't need to listen to vegans online. You can literally just read the manuals that animal agriculture businesses use to manage the animals in their farms. When you see the reality of those things and you compare them against the very definition of the word humane, which means to be treated with kindness and compassion. It's becomes very clear that there is no such thing as humane animal agriculture, and to describe any method of slaughter as humane is egregious. We're not talking about compassionate euthanasia for a loved pet to save them from suffering. We're talking about shooting someone or electrocuting them or gassing them before cutting their throat so we can eat bits of their body, right? That just doesn't tie up with any definition of the word humane whatsoever. So again, a long answer, but in short, yes, but I think almost maybe as impactful would be for people to visit farmed animals in sanctuaries where they've been saved from animal agriculture, because one of the difficulties about the slaughterhouse visit is that the horror can be so egregious. I think people psychologically disconnect. They can't engage emotionally or intellectually with what has happened, and that can lead them again to just deny or ignore or walk away or just try and forget it so they can go back to their normal lives. Whereas I think if you visit farmed animals in a sanctuary, and you really get a sense of their personalities, their social groups, and the positive potential for the life that they would really love to live with their families. Maybe that's a, you know, another good compliment. Maybe people should do both, to get a real sense for what it might actually be like to be one of these animals and take their perspective. Because I think that's the ethical core here is to as we do with other humans, we never get this right, but to try and understand the perspective of the other and take that seriously and care about it. And that's exactly what a farm to animals actually can help us do, just as you know, we might understand to some degree what it's like to be a dog or a cat by sharing our homes with them. Okay, great. Great. Thank you. Do you have any regrets about becoming vegan? None at all. Never a moment's hesitation. Yeah, I think the one thing I would say, and this isn't a regret about going vegan, but it's, it's, it's not, you know, a dietary decision, it's not a lifestyle. It's a fundamental shift in our underlying philosophy and our way of thinking about the world, and that's one of the things I found most powerful and most freeing about it, because it helped to develop this idea of sentientism, which actually goes way beyond veganism. So veganism, in simple terms, is trying to do what we can, you know, as far as is reasonable and practicable, to avoid causing the exploitation, suffering and death of other animals, and to, you know, boycott the industries and boycott the products that cause those things. So in that sense, veganism is quite focused on human caused harms to other sentient beings. But veganism technically doesn't say anything about, for example, sentient beings that might be living free, ranging in the wild or in other contexts, that aren't harmed by humans. But the philosophical shift of veganism for me comes from this sentientist stance that we should care about all suffering and all sentient beings, whether or not they're being harmed by humans. So that philosophical shift that happened as I took the decision to go vegan has opened up, you know, other VISTAs for me about thinking about, you know, the challenges of wild animal suffering, and maybe even if you want to get into some sci fi ideas, the possibility of alien or artificial intelligences, or whether they might at some point become sentient, and whether we should also have compassion for them too. That's not, that's not a regret, but that's really just something else that I guess the switch to going vegan has helped open up in my own mind.

Ramnani: As you know, there is a big explosion in AI at the moment. Do you ever imagine a time in the future when AI would be considered sentient?

Woodhouse: It's possible, and it could happen reasonably soon. Now, sentientism is quite neutral on the topic. So sentientism doesn't tell us what sentience is. So there are lots of different philosophies of mind about, you know, whether you take a panpsychist approach or a physicalist approach or something else. So it doesn't tell us what it is. It just says wherever it is and whoever has it. It matters. But personally, I take quite a physicalist approach to consciousness. So I think that consciousness and sentience are really an involved class of information processing that you and I happen to be doing in our brains, and that most other animals happen to be doing as well. And I think it probably evolved sometime in the Precambrian because it was adaptive, in an evolutionary sense, to move towards good stuff and move away from bad things. So I think that's where sentience ultimately came from. But because I have quite a physicalist way of thinking about sentience while it evolved in biology biological animals, because I think it's a physical thing. It's a class of information processing. I don't see any reason in principle why it couldn't exist in an artificial intelligence too, and that could come about because it's gone through some sort of analogous evolutionary process, or because we've. Designed it in or by accident. And there's been some fascinating papers that have come out in the last couple of days where people have taken lots of different theories of consciousness and use them to assess current artificial intelligences like Chat GPT and some of the big, large language models. And their conclusion, which I think I agree with, is that none of them are sentient yet, but it's something that could happen, and I think we need to worry about that, because I can imagine a situation where we stumble into creating artificially sentient beings and causing them to suffer in deeply unpleasant ways, and that would be morally wrong. So, yeah, I think it's something that we shouldn't stumble into. We should be extremely careful about, and that we shouldn't create artificial sentence until we're very confident that, you know, they could essentially have what we might call good lives. And that topic can irritate many people in the animal advocacy in the vegan world, because it sounds like it's a sort of sci fi, intellectual crazy thing, right? And we have bigger problems to deal with today, and I'm totally sympathetic with that, because, you know, we have 80 to 100 billion land animals and a couple of trillion aquatic animals at least, that are being exploited, harmed and killed every year for largely trivial human end. But I do like the idea of having a philosophy that is at least consistent in saying wherever sentences it matters, and it also is a useful way of getting another influential group of people in government and policy and academia to say, Well, yeah, you're absolutely right. We should worry about these potentially sentient artificial intelligences. And by the way, if you're worried about these potential sentient artificial intelligences, of course you have rich compassion for all of the hundreds of billions of very obviously sentient farmed animals we have we're exploiting today. So it's a useful way of drawing people back to that idea of philosophical consistency and saying, Well, if you're even slightly worried about sentient, AI, you should absolutely worry about the farmed animal that's on your plate for lunch today. I was wondering if you had any final thoughts, yeah, so I guess there's probably some closing messages I can give. So for people who are already free thinkers or secularists or maybe atheist or agnostic or humanists, so they already agree with the evidence and reason piece, my message to them is, look, you're already there, or you have a naturalistic grounding for the way you understand reality, and that shows us that non human animals are sentient. They can suffer. You care about other humans because they can suffer and flourish. Now you just need to extend that to all beings that can suffer and flourish, to all sentient beings. So that's my message to people who already agree with me on a sort of naturalistic way of understanding the world. My message to people who are already engaged in animal advocacy and veganism and and care about non human animals is to say that's wonderful. We share this sentient compassion, but let's not limit it just to the animals that humans harm. Let's consider all sentient beings. But I'd also call their attention to the importance of epistemology too, because even if we have a really rich, generous compassion for other animals and for other human animals, if we are wrong about reality, that can lead us to make terrible mistakes. So we see that in, you know, a classical, religious setting. So to sum up, sentientism is, again, it's evidence reason and compassion for all sentient beings. So my message to, I guess, humanists and atheists and agnostics and free thinkers and sceptics and secularists and maybe the people who already agree with the evidence and reason part, is to say, Look, you already care about other humans because they can suffer and flourish. You just need to take that one extra step to show that you care about all sentient beings, not just the humans, and that it's easier to put into practice than you might think, and getting easier all the time, and never be more urgent. I guess. My message to those who are already convinced on the compassion for all sentient beings side, they might be animal advocates or vegans or people who are involved in helping animals in some way. Again, we agree on this compassion for all sentient beings, but my message is, don't just focus on the sentient beings that humans are actively harming. Let's think about all of the sentient beings. So let's make sure we are expansive enough in our moral scope. But I'd also make an appeal to them on the epistemology side and say, Look, we do have to ground our beliefs and our Credences in evidence and reasoning, because if we don't do that, we're more likely to be wrong about reality, and we'll make mistakes, and it also undermines the credibility of our movement. So if people are either allowing religious or supernatural or spiritual beliefs to warp their compassion, to maybe lead them into in group, out group thinking, or think that certain things are justified because the deity has told them to do something. Even compassionate people can do terrible things, and as we see in, you know, the perennial misinformation and disinformation spaces. Again, even compassionate people, if they come to believe in Qanon or untested supplements or homeopathy or flat Earth, or, you know, the. Goes on right even compassionate people can come to do terrible things. So that's why I think compassion itself isn't enough, and naturalism isn't enough. We need both evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings. So that would probably be my closing appeal to either of those camps, and to anybody else who's just interested in a really simple but radical world view that I think has a good shot at helping us make a better world. Then, yeah, have a look at sentientism. And I'd love to know what people think. We have a podcast, we have a YouTube, we have a website and a range of different online, global communities and forums, but they're open to anyone interested. They're not just for people who agree with sentientism. So we have plenty of fiery debates there, and our biggest is on Facebook. So if people want to join those, they're extremely welcome. Be great to see people there.

Ramnani: How would people find your podcast?

Woodhouse: If they search for the word sentientism anywhere, they'll find it. So if you go to YouTube and type in sentient with ISM on the end, you'll find it. If you go to your podcast player and type in sentient with ISM, you'll find it. If you go to Facebook or discord or telegram or signal or Reddit or any other platform, Tiktok, even, don't tell my kids and search for sentientism, you'll find it there too. But our website is called sentientism dot info, so if you're not sure that's the one place to go and you can find all of the links from there.

Ramnani: Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure talking to you today, and I am looking forward to having your podcast out there.

Woodhouse: Yeah, thank you. It's such an honour to be your first guest. I'm looking forward to many more in the future, and I hope maybe I can even count you as a celebrity sentientist too.

Ramnani: I don't think I will ever be that famous, only a matter of time. Now you have a podcast. It's only a matter of time. Okay, great. Thank you for your time.

Woodhouse: It's such a pleasure. Thank you. Please stay in touch.

Ramnani: Me too.

 

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