Jonathan Birch
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birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch
@birchlse.bsky.social
6.3K followers 310 following 820 posts

Professor, LSE. Philosophy of science, animal consciousness, animal ethics. Director of The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience.

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Jonathan Birch is a British philosopher and professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work addresses the philosophy of biology and behavioural sciences, especially questions concerning sentience, bioethics, animal welfare, and the evolution of social behaviour and social norms. .. more

Neuroscience 26%
Psychology 15%
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birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · Mar 25
An emotional day - I can announce I'll be the first director of The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the LSE, supported by a £4m grant from the Jeremy Coller Foundation. Our mission: to develop better policies, laws and ways of caring for animals. (1/2)
www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-...
LSE announces new centre to study animal sentience
The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at LSE will develop new approaches to studying the feelings of other animals scientifically.
www.lse.ac.uk

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 3d
I'll be talking on Tuesday about how animals experience time as part of our Bochum-LSE Animal Minds workshop - and free online attendance is possible! 🦜🐝🕷️🐒 Details here: animal-cognition.philosophy-cognition.com
Joint workshop. Animal Minds: New theories and new observations. RU Bochum and London School of Economics.

Reposted by Jonathan Birch, Elisa Freschi

mind-cognition-rub.bsky.social
Center for Mind & Cognition @ Ruhr-Uni Bochum @mind-cognition-rub.bsky.social · 3d
🐈‍⬛Animal Minds: New Theories and new Observations🐒
09.-10.02. @ruhr-uni-bochum.de
ZEMOS Building & Online via Zoom
animal-cognition.philosophy-cognition.com

@lsephilosophy.bsky.social #LSEPhilosophy #CognitiveScience #AnimalCognition @birchlse.bsky.social @kristinandrews.bsky.social #AnimalMinds
Workshop Poster

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 3d
I think one of the key things that inspires me to work harder is that morally depraved people don't stop - in every city in every country they're putting in long hours on behalf of evil, just look at this staggering example - and so if we stop they win. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
We had sex in a Chinese hotel, then found we had been broadcast to thousands
A couple who stayed in Shenzhen discovered their intimate moments were filmed as spy-cam porn.
www.bbc.co.uk

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 4d
I'm working on a unified theory of epistemic magnetism and epistemic electricity.

Reposted by Michael E. Mann, Rebecca Solnit, Richard E. Lenski , and 8 more

pbump.com
Philip Bump @pbump.com · 5d
Jeff Bezos’s wealth has increased an average of $70 million every day of 2026, meaning that he could have offset The Post’s losses with what he’s made since Monday.

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 5d
People say backbench MPs have no influence but they really make a difference to photos like this.
Keir Starmer with backbench MPs behind him with arms folded, expressing obvious disgruntlement.

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

insectwrs.bsky.social
Insect Welfare Research Society @insectwrs.bsky.social · 6d
This new review in J Agric & Environ Ethics argues that black soldier fly farming's ethical framework hasn't kept pace with its commercial scale. Read to learn about practical welfare concerns, from handling to environmental stressors, and gaps for future research:
Uncovering Ethical Blind Spots and Operational Pathways in Sustainable Maggot-Based Waste Management Systems
Black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) bioconversion has been commercially established for over a decade as an efficient method for transforming organic waste int
doi.org

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

Reposted by Chris Hanretty, Jonathan Birch, Richard Pettigrew

mikebenchcapon.bsky.social
Michael Bench-Capon @mikebenchcapon.bsky.social · 7d
People say that posting has no real-world impact but an article in the Oxford Handbook Of Moral Realism carefully explains one of my hilarious jokes, so
"It is so easy to fail to imagine even relatively obvious possibilities that this fact can be easily exploited for humorous effect:" Screenshot of tweet by MikeBenchCapon on May 8th 2021: "People think that if two people are facing each other then one of them's left is the other one's right, but that's only true if neither or both of them are upside down" Main text continues: "This works as a joke because (sorry, as philosophers we have to explain this) as you read it the words ‘facing each other’ prime you to expect that indeed, one person’s left is the other person’s right, and so when the author describes people as “thinking” this, you think ‘of course they think it – it’s true’. And then the humor comes from obviousness in retrospect that this is not, in fact, generally true, but only true under the ordinary kind of circumstances that we imagine when we imagine two people facing one another. The same thing, we know, has happened repeatedly in the recent history of metaethics. Before Mackie [1977], it was easy to define moral realism in contrast to noncognitivism..."

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 8d
Feeling inspired by Alex Honnold (the Taipei 101 guy) to do things that can be done safely in gratuitously dangerous ways. Just grabbed toast with my bare hands and it felt great.

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

nataliegreenpeer.bsky.social
Natalie Bennett @nataliegreenpeer.bsky.social · 8d
An environmentally and economically broken model.

"Most of what is farmed in Mississippi and the rest of the country isn’t food that goes on Americans’ tables. It is soybeans for animal feed, corn for ethanol, rice to Central America and so on."
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/b...
Hard Times in the Delta as Farmers Consider Letting Crops Rot
www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

aelkus.bsky.social
ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 8d
Wind Rises is a great companion film to Oppenheimer because the main characters have very similar personalities. Once you realize this, its very bracing. It shows that at the end of the day the most important moral issues were really the choices of who they served as weapons designers

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

lastpositivist.bsky.social
lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 8d
The Wind Rises is a film about a creative genius living an absurd failed life that ultimately feels tragic, whereas Millennium Actress is kinda the same thing except it feels triumphant. The main difference lies in the main character's respective relationships to fascism, collaboration vs defiance.

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 8d
But they just mean: the main function of the constitution is to tell the LLM what character to play. Millions will interact with the character but only a tiny minority will read the description of the character (just as the script of a movie is mainly written for the actors).