Categoría: Measuring Sentience
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Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’
The question whether decapitation is a humane method of euthanasia in awake animals is being debated. To gather arguments in this debate, obsolete rats were decapitated while recording the EEG, both of awake rats and of anesthetized rats. Following decapitation a fast and global loss of power of the EEG was observed; the power in…
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L’approche systématique de la souffrance: Un entretien avec Robert Daoust
English | French L’algonomie est le nom d’une discipline pour l’étude systématique de la souffrance, proposée par Robert Daoust. L’Alliance Algosphère, lancée par Robert et d’autres en 2011, est un réseau mondial ouvert et transparent d’individus et d’organisations, dédié à l’allègement de la souffrance. Sentience Research: Vous êtes l’un des fondateurs d’Algosphère. Comment l’organisation…
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An empirical investigation of hedonistic accounts of animal welfare
«Many scientists studying animal welfare appear to hold a hedonistic concept of welfare -whereby welfare is ultimately reducible to an animal’s subjective experience. […] analysis showed welfare judgments depended on the objective features of the animal’s life more than they did on how the animal was feeling: a chimpanzee living a natural life with negative…
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Andrés Gómez-Emilsson on Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering
I briefly explain that while some distributions (e.g. the size of the leaves of a tree) follow a Gaussian bell-shaped pattern, many others (e.g. avalanches, size of asteroids, etc.) follow a long-tail distribution. Long-tail distributions have the general property that a large fraction of the volume is accounted for by a tiny percent of instances…
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The systematic approach to suffering by Robert Daoust
“The study of pleasure and pain belongs to the province of the political philosopher; for he is the architect of the end, with a view to which we call one thing bad and another good without qualification. ” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics The systematic approach to suffering will present a collection of lists, a series…
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Farmed Salmon May Be Depressed
Researchers find that growth-stunted farmed salmon show chronic serotonergic activity and do not respond to acute stress — a state that could be interpreted as depression. In the vertebrate brain, serotonin mediated signaling is vital for several key physiological functions such as the body’s energy regulation, neural plasticity, behavioral and emotional control, and responses to…
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The evilness of suffering
“I believe that most of us tend to underrate the evilness of suffering. The reason is that it is difficult for us, when not actually suffering, to recollect what suffering really is. We employ numerous psychological mechanisms to conceal from our consciousness the true nature or meaning of suffering, to falsify and deny it. We…
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The HHHHHMM (H5M2) Quality of Life Scale
«The HHHHHMM (H5M2) Quality of Life Scale provides guidelines for the assessment of a pet so that pet owners can maintain a rewarding relationship that nurtures the human–animal bond, while being confident that the pet is well enough to justify prolonging life. This Quality of Life Scale will relieve guilt feelings and engender the support…
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The “Eternal-Playlist” thought experiment
Privileged beings (students) of the privileged species (human) at privileged time (XXI c.) and privileged space (Germany) ranked only 30% of the recent experiences as «worth living». The “Eternal-Playlist” thought experiment, by Thomas Metzinger: «At Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, we began a first series of small pilot studies with a group of advanced philosophy…