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There is exactly one good reason, at least for consciousness and sentience. And the reason is that those are such a vaguely defined (or rather defined by protot
by runarberg 1y ago
There is exactly one good reason, at least for consciousness and sentience. And the reason is that those are such a vaguely defined (or rather defined by prototypes; ala Wittgenstein [or JavaScript before classes]). And that reason is anthropism.
We only have one good example of consciousness and sentience, and that is our own. We have good reason to suspect other entities (particularly other human individuals, but also other animals) have that as well, but we cannot access it, and not even confirm its existence. As a result using these terms of non-human beings becomes confusing at best, but it will never be actually helpful.
Emotions are another thing, we can define that outside of our experience, using behavior states and its connection with patterns of stimuli. For that we can certainly observe and describe behavior of a non biological entity as emotional. But given that emotion is something which regulates behavior which has evolved over millions of years, whether such a description would be useful is a whole another matter. I would be inclined to use a more general description of behavior patterns which includes emotion but also other means of behavior regulators.