3 ms·

Do you think all humans are sentient? This thread has me wondering if people with dementia, anterograde amnesia, etc. would be able to pass the proposed senti

• tsimionescu 4y ago
  I'm not sure that I would classify humans in the final stages of dementia as being (fully) sentient. I have had the extremely sad experience of helping to care for two different grandparents with late stage memory loss, and while they had moments of lucidity, they had many periods where they were acting almost entirely randomly, or doing nothing at all, barely or not even perceiving the world around them. I struggled a lot to find signs of the person I had deeply loved in them, and there were many times when I can't say I found any signs of a full consciousness in them at all, as troubling as that was. To be very clear, this came after many years of milder forms of dementia, where their sentience could not in any way have been in question, even when forgetting who I was or where they were or other such things. But the disease can progress to a stage where it's not clear what, if anything, they understand of the world or themselves anymore. I can't speak for anterograde amnesia as I have no experience with that disease.