![]() The 1999 animal welfare law also allowed for additional animals to be added to the list of protected creatures. Mellor discusses the way that in New Zealand policymakers applied existing scientific consensus to law: they adopted the precautionary principle to include “specific invertebrates, namely any octopus, squid, crab, lobster, or crayfish (including freshwater crayfish)” in their definition of protected animals, as well as mammalian fetuses, and pre-hatched birds and reptiles. Mellor explains that the term welfare-aligned sentience acknowledges that scientists have not exhausted their capacity to definitively conclude the sentience of many more living beings. Western scientists have generally focused on the sentience of mammals and birds, with increasing attention given to fish and invertebrate animals such as octopuses, crayfish, sea crabs, slugs, snails, bees, flies, and ants, according to David Mellor in their 2019 review of welfare-aligned sentience. Yet we can see the working of minds in the logic of behaviors.” ![]() Safina validates the emotions of nonhuman animals: “We can see brains, but cannot see minds. Carl Safina describes the emotional experiences of nonhuman animals from an empirical perspective, and gives examples of how they bond with family members, teach each other new skills, and care for each other. The circle of animals generally considered sentient is expanding all the time, and the idea of all animals as sentient would see a convergence of multiple types of knowledge: Western scientific, Indigenous, religious, and the perspectives of animal advocates. Adaora sees Ayodele “not with fear and skepticism-a rejection of the alien as somehow unbelievable or a hoax-but rather with a great degree of curiosity,” Jue states. In her 2017 analysis of Nnedi Okarafor’s “Lagoon”, Melody Jue argues that one of the Afrofuturist novel’s protagonists, scientist Adaora, resists “western paradigms of scientific practice that are centered around the control and domination of nature-based on gendered forms of ‘knowing.’” Adaora does this by calmly confronting Ayodele, an alien whose people resemble coral reefs and Mami Wata deities. ![]() The idea of alien intelligence remains an important way in which authors reflect on prevailing ideas about sentience. In science fiction stories and popular culture, sometimes robots and artificial intelligence machines are also described as free-thinking, sentient beings. ![]() The Sentience Quotient, a term invented by Robert Freitas and published in 1984 in a science fiction journal, was originally meant as a tool through which to consider the intelligence of beings beyond Earth. The Sentience Quotient is measured quantitatively, based on the “amount of data can process per unit time” and “the overall mass needed to do that processing,” according to. ![]()
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