When and why are motivational trade-offs evidence of sentience?

Brown, Simon ORCID: 0000-0002-5606-6979 and Birch, Jonathan ORCID: 0000-0001-7517-4759 (2024) When and why are motivational trade-offs evidence of sentience? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. ISSN 0962-8436 (In Press)

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Abstract

Motivational trade-off behaviours, where an organism behaves as if flexibly weighing up an opportunity for reward against a risk of injury, are often regarded as evidence that the organism has valenced experiences like pain. This type of evidence has been influential in shifting opinion regarding crabs and insects. Critics note that (i) the precise links between trade-offs and consciousness are not fully known; (ii) simple trade-offs are evinced by the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, mediated by a mechanism plausibly too simple to support conscious experience; (iii) pain can sometimes interfere with rather than support making trade-offs rationally. However, rather than undermining trade-off evidence in general, such cases show that the nature of the trade-off, and its underlying neural substrate, matter. We investigate precisely how.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method CPNSS
Subjects:	S Agriculture > SF Animal culture B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) Q Science > QH Natural history > QH301 Biology
Date Deposited:	28 Feb 2025 16:24
Last Modified:	28 Feb 2025 16:39
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/127469

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