Ask the Author: Jonathan Birch
Answered Questions (3)
Jonathan Birch
Thanks for reading! I'm not sure what specific cases you're thinking about. I can say it was a deliberate choice to discuss the human cases first, starting with patients with disorders of consciousness following severe brain injuries. In those cases, the need to take a risk of suffering seriously even when you're not sure, and even when considering a state of consciousness quite different from your own, is extremely easy to see. The thought is a very easy and natural one to have. And the book is structured so as to encourage the reader to hold that thought and carry it with them to harder and harder cases. Few people ask "why should I care at all?" when confronted with unresponsive patients in the ICU; that question only creeps in gradually as distance from humans increases. And I want to encourage the reader to ask themselves: did I have good reasons to have the "why should I care?" thought at that specific juncture (e.g. when we moved from fishes to invertebrates)? Is there a real difference in the cases that can justify the difference in my reactions, or is the difference a bias I cannot justify?
Jonathan Birch
As recently at the the 1980s, surgery was routinely performed on newborn babies without anaesthesia. It took a public outcry to change clinical practice - underlining the value of involving the public in debates about the edge of sentience.
Jonathan Birch
The mystery of how I became a sentient being at some unknown point in fetal development. Was it a sharp transition or a gradual one? Both possibilities seem almost impossible to imagine.
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