3 ms·
If you ask my honest opinion, sentience is a relative concept among living beings : Dogs learn by imitation & repetition. They have a reward function in their b
by srvmshr 4y ago
If you ask my honest opinion, sentience is a relative concept among living beings : Dogs learn by imitation & repetition. They have a reward function in their brain. And also some emotional response. We go few steps further : We imitate the observations but we are also able to extrapolate on it. We are aware of our survival instincts & fear of death/expiration. That I feel is in the spectrum of sentience. Are there beings capable of more sentience? I don't know but its possible. We just don't know what the extra is
Adding to it, a brilliant neuroscientist I heard talk said "we live inside our bodies". We are acutely aware that we are more than our mass of flesh & blood. (As a footnote,that essence somehow has a crossover to spiritual topics where savants talk of mind & body etc - but I try to be within my domain of a regular human being :D)
- majormajor 4y agoThe idea of unembodied sentience adds a fun to wrinkle to things like the transporter scenario "all your matter got destroyed and rebuilt somewhere else, is it the same you?" For instance, there's the Star Trek style "transporter accident" but now with a clear mechanism: if you shut down the servers, dumped all the data, spun up a second copy, who's who? Do they both have claim to the old memories and relationships? Property? Crimes?