4 ms·
What’s crazy to me is the mechanism of pleasure or pain. I can understand that with enough complexity we can give rise to sentience but what does it take to ach
by mentos 11mo ago
What’s crazy to me is the mechanism of pleasure or pain. I can understand that with enough complexity we can give rise to sentience but what does it take to achieve sensation?
- spicyusername 11mo agoA body
- mentos 11mo agoI’d say it’s possible to experience mental anguish/worry without the body participating. Solely a cognitive pain from consternation.
- AndrewKemendo 11mo agoYou can’t cognate without a body - the brain and body is a material system tightly coupled
- vidarh 11mo agoIgnoring that "cognate" isn't a verb, we have basis for making any claim about the necessity of that coupling.
- exe34 11mo agoHow does a body know what's going on? Would you say it has any input devices?
- kbrkbr 11mo agoCan you tell me how you understand that? Because I sincerely do not. I have frankly no idea how sentience arises from non sentience. But it's a topic that really interests me.
- mentos 11mo agoWe have examples of non sentience everywhere already with animals. And then an example of sentience with humans. So if you diff our brains the difference lies within a module in our prefrontal cortex. It’s a black box of logic but I can ‘understand’ or be willing to accept that it’s owed to ‘just’ more grey matter adding the self awareness to the rest of the system. But to me the big mystery is how animals have sensation at all to begin with. What gives rise to that is a greater mystery to me personally. There are examples of people who have no ability to feel pain yet are still able to think. Now I wonder if they ever experience mental anguish.
- DoctorOetker 11mo agoI'd like to see a vote here, what percentage of HN readers believe animals have sentience or no sentience? Clearly most animals are less educated, and most are less intelligent, but non-sentient? That sounds like 200-year old claims that "when one steps on the tail of a cat, it does indeed protest loudly, but not because it feels anything or because it would be sentient, no, no, it protests merely due to selective pressure, programming reflex circuits, since other creatures would show compassion, or back off due to a potential reaction by the cat." Anyone who has had a pet like a cat or a dog knows they are sentient... if we consider ourselves sentient.
- kbrkbr 11mo agoI'm with you on this. But asked for reasons I can only point to the social nature of their societies, where love and anger make sense, or of their hurt-behavior. I also find it very hard to believe that everything else is slow evolution of components, and here all of a sudden something super complex comes into being out of nowhere. But I still have no idea how it could work. What are the components and their interplay?
- mentos 11mo agoI should have been more exact and said sentience vs sapience in animals vs humans.
- dontwearitout 11mo agoThis is the "hard problem of consciousness". It's more important than ever as machines begin to act more like humans, but my takeaway is we have no idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- vidarh 11mo agoInput is input. There's no reason why we should assume that a data source from embodiment is any different to any other data source.