4 ms·
How would we ever be able to discover if something knows what we call "pain"? I think the more we learn about life, the more we will see that it's a spectrum,
by runeks 10y ago
How would we ever be able to discover if something knows what we call "pain"?
I think the more we learn about life, the more we will see that it's a spectrum, and can't really be divided into sentient and non-sentient. I see little difference between a tiny insect fledgling in apparent pain and a leaf releasing a chemical as a response to damage. The mechanical reaction happens because the insect can move and the chemical reaction because the planet cannot.
Sentience would appear to be about the ability to move around, which through evolution causes moving life forms to experience pain in response to damage, because it causes them to move away from and avoid the threat. It appears we expect to be able to judge the internal experience of a life form by looking at it. And if it moves, like us, we call it "sentient".
- yomly 10y agoI was indirectly hinting towards this through my posturing. Much of our concepts sentience and intelligence strike me as egotistical and conceited. After all, on the scale of galaxies do our efforts amount to much more than noise? Are we to planets all that different to bacteria on us?
- yomly 10y agoAdding to that - arguably, haven't rats, cockroaches and mosquitoes almost achieved more than us in terms of expansion when we take into account their scale? Or influenza for that matter? I recall a scientific study that suggested the (perceived) passing of time is relative to the size of an organism.[0] So perhaps we can only notice or appreciate phenomena that occur on a timescale that is relative to our size. It's true that with modern techniques we can now study things but our ability to value or appreciate things diminish as the time scale departs from ours... [0]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24078179 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24078179