To give examples from media properties rather than quizzing everyone on philosophy stuff I only learned this year: Blindsight and Westworld
Personally I find the insistence on this annoying and I think consciousness is really important for correcting errors in vision. Who decides when to loose the arrow on the deer, so you don’t starve? That’s not something which can be handled subsconsciously, training to do it requires presence of mind and imagination.
Let me know if you think I’m misinterpreting it. I am curious what everyone thinks about the fabric of reality.
See, compiling and uploading stuff is good for the brain, it gives us time to reflect. 🧘♀️
Edit: want to add that treating human nature as the driving factor in human extinction (which won’t happen btw we will win) instead of capitalism is Bill Gates tier liberalism. I am deeply skeptical due to having done a little research on why this stuff is promoted, but dismissing it outright wouldn’t make sense, as people with a sufficient amount of money thrown at them in academia tend to produce some valuable nuggets
We can’t even really agree on what sentience is.
That is probably the question to ask before “is it good”
Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos
Personally I think you’re deep into logical fallacy territory. Evolutionary side effect vs. major advantage – these aren’t mutually exclusive things. And the second question makes even less sense, to be honest. Are you high?
Having said that, sentience is an emergent property of our complicated biology, and from that perspective and trying to tie this back to your question, it is kind of like a side effect of our brain structure and biochemical processes. But like all “side effects” that persist in populations through time, it almost certainly has evolutionary advantages for sentient species, or at least, it did at one time. Evolution itself is not a omniscient, self-deterministic, or static process, though.
As for correcting errors in vision, it’s possible. But it’s incredibly unlikely that’s the only advantage consciousness and/or sentience provides. Blind people are also able to process and filter complicated sensory information in order to perform substantially complex behaviors. And, conversely, organisms we consider non-sentient are capable of performing some very sophisticated behaviors, presumably completely by instinct.
It is very undialectical framing but there is a charlimit in title. I almost started yammering about crows using tools but also just enjoying pranks and experimenting with their environment. I think saying stuff like consciousness is just slowing us down is reducing it to its drawbacks.
Yes of course I’m stoned. I’m doing the laundry on a Saturday evening, I have no plans. Here, let me rephrase the title: how much do you hate Richard Dawkins?
I believe your questions would be better directed at the topics of free will and inner monologue than sentience.
The mention of a “conscious” decision to loose an arrow leans more toward those than basic sentience.
Feelings are feelings; they’re a brain chemical response that assists with instinct development/control and reinforcing patterns of behavior. All evolutionary effects are, kinda, side effects, and the ones that help or don’t hurt too too much get kept.
Actual commentary on the topic
But, flipping back to the “you gotta learn when to loose the arrow”–not really? Like, that’s not exactly a conscious thing. You consciously analyze it after the fact, and (until you’re totally awesome at it) make a plan for what to do going into it, but done right it’s mostly a zen/muscle memory thing. Anecdata, sure, but I’m speaking as a decent amateur archer and highly adept firearm user.
I don’t know if my cats have a true train of thought, but I know they got better at pouncing with practice. There’s no inner monologue, but they’re conscious and sentient.
I’ve also been high enough to notice that my body just kind of does stuff without me prompting it, including real useful stuff like grabbing water and food–this goes back to the action potential thing in the neuroscience of free will article. We’re extremely complex systems that continue to exist and survive even when significant chunks of “the norm” are missing. Aphantasics can still create. Anendophasics can still put together stories and design intricate systems. We’re thoroughly redundant systems thanks to the sheer screwiness of evolution.
I look forward to someone using my posts as evidence people can do things automatically without an internal monologue. Glad we have a ranged weapons user in the chat since I mainly miscast spells. I considered that example might be weak, since I don’t hit things with projectiles (or miss them). Comparing it to a cat pouncing is a good rebuttal, but I think that is melee enough that you could do it totally unconsciously. To point to actual blindsight experiments, people were able to point at or move their eyes towards a hand jutted towards them. I shouldn’t even guess about this, but isn’t that just for protecting the face, especially the eyes from pokes and gravel? To hit a living creature with a sling you do better to consider where it wants to go, you could intuit it is going to land on a branch and nail it. To dodge a falling rock you only need to judge basic physics. But again yeah none of that is really falling under why you hunt, practices like deciding to limit what you go for, cultivate foods en masse like Black Soil in the Amazon. Do you think a better question would be if a cat could hunt better with a theory of mind for a mouse? Do you think a STEM student could study philosophy on the side better if he got hit by a fast rock?
No but seriously, the better example was probably the one I came up with while misreading another guy’s response. Which is you need human writing and culture to manage food storage and production (not entirely strictly as I have read in some anthropology books that humans developed debt systems well before writing, but spreadsheets make that scalable). Unless you are a nonsentient computing blob of orbs in the outer solar system and you don’t need a temple granary at all. Why were there vampires in that book. No really I’m going to bed now you guys are safe.
I wonder if crows are able to keep track of my bread balance sheet or it’s more of a vibe system.
What’s your definition set? Are you using sentience as being the same or different from consciousness and/or sapience? There’s multiple usages for sentient as a term, and this is a complex enough subject that I don’t want to waste your time yammering on about the wrong thing lol
Distinct thing from consciousness and sapience. I am conflicted about, it since there doesn’t seem to be a hard divide between human and animal consciousness, but that has been used to create pseudoscientific justifications for racism. Even if we see some animals on a track that could eventually lead somewhere like this, they’re only just getting started. I said consciousness a few times where I should have said human consciousness. I am the one yammering, so by all means go ahead. 🌠🛌
Hmmm, but that standard, I would err on it being inseparable, and mostly on the side of being a benefit.
Any complex life form needs complex environmental feedback of some kind, because if it’s anything like life as we’ve conceived of it, it needs external energy (food in our case) and avoidance of damage (no matter how mild the environment).
Sentience is just a high grade of that fundamental concept. It’s the difference between something like a plant that grows towards light and away from competitors; and something like a shrimp that makes a constant loop of processing external stimuli vs internal algorithms that predict probable outcomes.
As such, it can only be a benefit on an evolutionary level that the form of sentience become as complex as the niche the organism needs to fill/exploit that niche. A shrimp only needs a low grade of sentience because it’s a fairly simple and small niche. An eagle would be a higher complexity sentience because the scale it functions in is massive and involves wider risk/reward variables, with attendant import to outcomes.
I don’t think any organism will develop more sentience capabilities than it needs for long, nor will it keep it for long once a given level of need is past. If eagles all get sent to a large underground bunker, they don’t need the brain power to process everything, nor the energy it takes to maintain it. You’ll end up with a simpler processing of stimuli. Less flexibility, but also less “stress” from repeated decision making.
None of that requires thought though. Decisions on that scale “is a rabbit going to fight back enough that I should avoid it”, where accumulated data in memory can be used to guesstimate outcomes, they don’t require a conscious process, any more than us catching a ball does. To the contrary, thinking about some things makes them harder to do well. If an eagle had to think its way through snagging a running rabbit, it would be fucked.
And that’s really where sentience ends: thought. When there’s a “self” to make a decision based on conflicting stimuli and memory.
So I don’t think sentience can ever be more of a drawback than a benefit. By its nature, it happened because it was a more successful way of surviving long enough to breed.
I think it (I define conciousness here as the awareness and deliberate examination of one’s own mental processes) is a natural next step after the theory of mind, and a great evolutionary advantage for a social animal like ourselves as it allows us to selfregulate our responses.
I do think individual (not species) inclination played a bigger role than people usually imagine. We frame evolution as kind of a mechanical inevitability when we teach it in schools (at least when I was taught) and this misses some important complexity.
It also misses an opportunity teach the species problem in biology which I find super intriguing.
I think it’s necessary for reproduction. Once we’re no longer automatically reproducing like plants, but need to interact with each other, then we need consciousness to make that happen.
Millions of animal species reproduce without consciousness (though which animals are conscious is hard to pin down).
Saying we now need rizz and romance wouldn’t be a good counter to evopsych (no need to elaborate on the crimes of this field probably) types saying human consciousness becoming necessary for reproduction has turned it into a cancer. It makes more sense when you see the Epstein emails where they’re talking about genetically engineering people to be incapable of love. Guy on Adderall who wanted to turn every worker into a drone was choosing who got funding for this kind of writing.
(I’m agreeing here if that’s not apparent idk)
How would we have invented spreadsheets without human consciousness and writing? You need those to manage the grain!
If nobody has the grain who cares who has rizz or not they’re goners
