London, July 1 (IANS) Philosopher Acharya Prashant and Professor Jonathan Birch held a public dialogue on animal consciousness and the environment at the London School of Economics on Friday evening. A packed Hong Kong Theatre broke into sustained applause as the session got underway.
Titled “Animal Consciousness and the Environment: Insights from Science and Vedanta,” the dialogue drew students, researchers, faculty and members of the public.
Professor Birch is Director of LSE’s Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience.
The event was held as part of London Climate Action Week and introduced by Dr Eva Read, a faculty of animal welfare science at LSE, who described the evening as a rare cross-cultural meeting point between Western philosophy of mind and Indian philosophy.
Introducing the speakers, Dr Reid noted that Professor Birch had led the 2021 review of evidence for sentience in cephalopods and decapod crustaceans that shaped the UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act. She added that his recent book, which examines risk and precaution in questions of sentience across humans, animals and artificial intelligence, has been praised by the journal Nature. She introduced Acharya Prashant as ranked in the top twenty of the Watkins 2026 list of the world’s most influential living thinkers, noting that he has built one of India’s largest platforms for the mass education of the self, with his teaching-based app crossing five million downloads.
The dialogue itself ranged across the philosophical foundations of sentience, the limits of legislation, and the ethics of consumption, with the audience breaking into applause repeatedly as the two speakers built on, and at times gently challenged, each other’s positions. Professor Birch opened by describing a convergence between recent scientific findings on animal consciousness and positions long held in Indian philosophical traditions, noting that the 2024 New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which he helped frame, found realistic scientific support for sentience extending well beyond vertebrates.
Acharya Prashant responded that the difficulty has never been a lack of scientific proof but a lack of intent. “The man who talked of the speaking tree and feeling oceans was not doing something special,” he said. “This man was just free of exploitative intent, and then it was obvious.”
The sharpest exchange of the evening, and the one that drew the most thunderous applause, centred on an analogy Acharya Prashant returned to repeatedly: that of a drunk driver. He argued that contemporary approaches to crises, from animal cruelty to climate change, resemble a society that responds to a driver who is drunk at the wheel not by addressing the drunkenness, but by engineering better roads, softer dividers, more advanced safety technology and a faster ambulance response, while leaving the state of the driver untouched. Laws and green technologies, he said, function the same way, managing the consequences of human desire and indifference without confronting their source.
“We are prepared to do everything except look at the state of the driver,” he said, to a wave of applause that swept through the packed theatre. “Human beings are that driver, and that is the one thing and the only thing that we need to change.”
An audience member pressed him on whether this implied the problem could only be solved slowly, one person at a time, given that systemic, external solutions were being set aside in favour of individual inner transformation. Acharya Prashant clarified that he was not arguing against regulation or technology, comparing them instead to the bamboo fences used to protect young saplings in London’s Richmond Park.
“The crutches are needed precisely because the legs are not yet strong enough,” he said, adding that laws and technology remain necessary so long as the ego persists, but that their necessity should be measured by how quickly they become redundant, not treated as a permanent solution in themselves.
Much of the exchange also centred on whether animal welfare law can deliver lasting change on its own. Acharya Prashant contended that legislation has expanded steadily over nearly two centuries without a corresponding fall in species extinction rates or per capita meat consumption.
He argued that the lawmaker and the lawbreaker are effectively the same person, since the human ego that frames protective law is also the consumer the law is meant to restrain. Birch countered that while laws alone cannot solve every problem, they remain one of the best tools available for limiting cruelty in practice, even as he agreed that cultivating compassion directly would be the more ideal route.
The conversation also turned philosophical when Professor Birch invoked Jeremy Bentham’s formulation that the relevant question for moral status is not whether a being can reason, but whether it can suffer. Acharya Prashant called the line beautiful but pressed further, asking why the human ego is so invested in drawing a line between sentient and insentient at all.
Both speakers described themselves as vegan, but Acharya Prashant was careful to draw a distinction between veganism as a deliberate ideological stance and veganism as something that arises naturally once a person sees clearly.
“I never embraced veganism as an ideology or as a set of actions, do’s and don’ts,” he said. “My veganism is a natural offshoot of what I see, what I understand, and what I continue to observe on a daily basis.”
He added that real non-violence works the same way, often unnoticed by the person living it, surfacing only when someone else points it out from the outside.
The discussion also addressed artificial intelligence, with an audience member asking both speakers whether AI systems could possess sentience or selfhood. Birch said current chatbots create a powerful illusion of consciousness through playing human-like characters, but that no reliable test for machine consciousness yet exists. Acharya Prashant suggested the more useful question was not whether a machine could become conscious, but whether it could ever gain the capacity to examine and step outside its own design, in the way human self-inquiry allows a person to look at the constructed nature of the ego.
The session ran well past its allotted time as a sea of raised hands kept the question and answer round going.
Speaking to IANS after the event, Acharya Prashant said the discussion had gone beyond data and policy into the nature of the self that seeks to solve problems in the first place. “Far from being the problem solver, what if the self is a problem creator,” he said, “even in its instances of caregiving and compassion and regulation pertaining to animal welfare.”
He added that when measures taken to address crises are themselves extensions of the same ego that created the crisis, “there can be no respite,” calling this dynamic “the ultimate deception leading to the final catastrophe.”
On why animal consciousness belongs at the centre of climate conversations rather than being treated as a side issue to emissions and biodiversity, he said the discussion had explored how little separates humans from the animals being protected.
“Ninety-nine or ninety-nine point five per cent of biological stuff is common between the hunter and the hunted, between the animal and the human being,” he said. He described the remaining fraction, which includes the human capacity for egoic identity, as “a design feature that should be better called a design bug, a manufacturing defect.”
He also revisited the drunk driver analogy directly in the interview, framing it as the throughline of the evening’s argument: that external measures such as regulation and technology function as necessary safeguards but cannot by themselves correct a crisis whose origin lies within human consciousness rather than outside it.
“The pollution is visible on the outside, but the pollutant is inside,” he said. “The pollution is tangible, the pollutant is not.”
Asked whether science’s openness to uncertainty, such as ongoing questions over whether fish feel pain, has a parallel in Vedantic thought, Acharya Prashant said the more fundamental claim was not about the limits of knowing but about the absence of a separate knower. “Knowing will happen,” he said. “But the knower obstructs knowing.”
The LSE dialogue forms part of Acharya Prashant’s ongoing engagements across the United Kingdom, where he has addressed packed audiences at Cambridge, Oxford and the House of Lords on questions of clarity, freedom and the climate crisis.
He is next expected to engage with audiences at University College London, Roehampton University London, a public session hosted by the Indian High Commission, as well as in a standalone conversation with Rupert Sheldrake, the Cambridge-trained biologist and former Royal Society research fellow.
–IANS
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