4 ms·
Thus, since one cannot prove a negative, we can conclude from your statement that, for all intents and purposes, all things are sentient. You sentient-murdering
by admash 6y ago
Thus, since one cannot prove a negative, we can conclude from your statement that, for all intents and purposes, all things are sentient. You sentient-murdering mosquito killer.
Grand assertions made without logical or verbal specificity tend to be of limited utility.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago[..] Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.[..] So yes..robots can be sentient.
- narrator 6y agoHow do you know a mosquito isn't doing that?
- forgotmypw17 6y agoi personally don,t, which is why i,m very careful not to harm them.
- jelliclesfarm 6y agoI hear you. I have been wondering about plants too. I would like to share something I told someone just yesterday about plant sentience. Two years ago, I was doing very brisk business selling chive blossoms. These are the aerial parts of the chive herb. They are pretty and puffy and pink. They have a strong onion’y taste too. And so make great looking garnishes for a variety of dishes. High end restaurants love chive blossoms. And are willing to pay for it. I was selling wholesale to a distributor who was sending them all over the west coast. Growing chives for flowers is a tad tricky in the field tho. Chives are grown for their long stalky leaf parts. To make them flower consistently and prodigiously, I had to ‘torture’ them a bit. Because I had to send at least a 100 clamshells a week with 30 blossoms per clamshell, the chive plant has to believe it’s going to die. The plant sends out buds that will flower quickly to make seeds because it senses that it’s prime directive is done and over. So it’s two seasons worth of making it think it’s going to die and then feeding it. That is outright cruel if it were a cow. In fact that’s what we do to dairy animals. We breed them so they can birth their young so we can milk them. Plants are not mammals. But...just because we can only relate to mammals doesn’t mean that the plant lacks sentience. Human beings are just meat sacs that are directed by the impulses generated by the chemical soup we hold inside our skulls. And we are considered to be ‘sentient’.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI think that's the sort of thing people refer to when they speak of "listening to the heart".
- p1esk 6y agoOh no, you misunderstood me. I meant that if you, personally, can’t decide - for yourself - that something is sentient, then you should assume it’s sentient. Does this make (more) sense?
- jobigoud 6y agoThat's completely different statement. The first one was about the objective state of an external thing, the new one is about interaction with it.
- p1esk 6y agoIs “sentience” an objective state? Its definition is just as fuzzy as definitions of “life” or “consciousness”. For example, there are people in this thread who say a mosquito or even a plant might be sentient. Would you agree with that?
- jobigoud 6y agoI think there are two different aspect to this that are conflated. First, sentience may or may not be a binary thing. That is, some people consider that a mosquito is definitely sentient or definitely not sentient, and other people consider that sentience is a spectrum and that a mosquito is somewhere along that spectrum, being more sentient than a sponge, but less sentient than a mouse. The second aspect is whether sentience is an objective state, an attribute of a particular creature, or if it is a subjective opinion like you seem to imply. Just because it's a spectrum doesn't mean it can't be objective. So the fact that people disagree on whether a mosquito is sentient or not doesn't imply that the whole concept is subjective. They are just collapsing the definition based on a threshold that may not exist. Thus the word "sentient" is subjective but the actual attribute is not. This is the same for "life" and "consciousness". The property of "living" may not be a clear line in the sand. It doesn't mean that something is living or inert depending on the observer. My opinion is that yes, there is a definite, objective sentience "amount" or "quotient" that a creature has, independently of who is asking. This value is not black and white. I do not know this value for mosquito but I can roughly sort a lot of entities and I use that to take decisions (like what I eat for example). With this fuzzy (but objective) definition, there could also exist entities that are more sentient than human beings. In fact, if we figure out machine sentience I don't see why it would stop exactly at human level.