I think the needless hurting and killing of sentient beings is the greatest moral shame of our species—the only species that has any choice in the matter, and the species that is doing all the needless hurting and killing, on a monstrous and still mounting scale.
What follows is an interview/dialogue with Dr. Stevan Harnad, the
founder and former editor-in-chief of the highly influential journal
called Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) and current
editor-in-chief of the new journal
Animal Sentience.
Marc: You’re Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences at
University of Quebec in Montreal and Professor of Web Science at
University of Southampton in the UK: What do you actually do?
Stevan Harnad: I do research on how the brain learns and
communicates categories. Categorization is a very general cognitive
capacity. I think it covers most of cognition. It just means doing
the right thing with the right kind of thing: Eat what’s edible;
avoid predators; and call a spade a “spade” (because most of the
language is categorization too).
And how do you do research on how the brain learns and communicates
categories? Do you study animals’ brains?
No. I study how humans do it, I try to model the mechanism
generating that capacity computationally, and I test for clues and
correlates with brain imagery (event-related potentials). Of these
three methods, the third—observing and measuring brain events—is
actually the least informative.
....
Please read the ENTIRE INTERVIEW HERE (PDF).