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
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. 🌠🛌
Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos
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.
We can’t even really agree on what sentience is.
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 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.
(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
