What constitutes "sentience"?

[loinburger]

"Sentience" is defined in this thread as being "possessing the right to life" (I can't think of a less libertarian way of stating it, so Communists et al will just have to suck it up) - i.e. it's not a (particularly heinous) sin to kill an ant without any sort of justification (other than "it was under my foot while I was walking" or whatever), but it's a Bad Thing to kill your average human without any sort of justification. So we've got two classes of entities: sentient entities that we shouldn't kill (like your average human), and non-sentient entities that can be killed with flimsy or zero justification.

So, you meet a new entity, e.g. an alien or an entity claiming to be a cyborg or an artificial intelligence or whatever. How do you determine whether this is a fellow sentient being with the right to life, or whether this is an ant?

[giblets]

The entity should have:
1. Subjective experiences- I can't really conclusively verify this externally but I would expect it to show signs of self awareness and emotions
2. A desire to live- it should tend to care if it lives or not
3. Willingness to respect human life

[Kidlicious]

Rights are political. They would have to negotiate a treaty. To do that they would have to have WMD capable of killing us.

[loinburger]

Rights are political. They would have to negotiate a treaty. To do that they would have to have WMD capable of killing us.

A surprisingly Christian response out of Kidicious!

[Kidlicious]

The right to life isn't Christian. You don't have a right to life unless the rulers of this world give it to you, and it's only until you die.

[Lorizael]

I wrote a slightly pretentious essay on this subject during a brief stint of blogging about transhumany stuff.

The relevant bits:

The only reasonable claim we can make about the ability to perceive qualia is that, for us to know about it, there must be a measurable response initiated by an internal reaction to external stimuli. When applied to artificial intelligence, this should remind us of the ideas behind the Turing test. Without an objective measure of sentience, Occam's Razor would suggest that we have no cause to differentiate between one kind of sentience and another. If both entities appear sentient, we ought to respond to each of them as if that were the case and not add extra variables into the equation.

But by this logic we can grant sentience to nearly everything on the Earth, and maybe even the entire universe. How can we say that one thing is sentient and another not if all things react to the world around them? Many regard this position as absurdly counterintuitive or practically useless. If sentient can be used as a synonym for existent, why bother having the word at all?

It's important now to recognize that nowhere in the concept of sentience is there a mention of mind, intelligence, or self-awareness. I can suggest that a rock is sentient without believing that rock is sad when its other rock friends roll away or that it contemplates the mysteries of the universe on a starry night. A rock's sentience might only be a recognition of cold or not cold, falling or not falling. This brand of sentience would not resemble our complicated sentience, but it might still be a kind of awareness.

Perhaps sentience, then, is best defined as a grouping of types of perception. Inanimate objects may only be aware of the atoms bumping up against them, but more complicated lifeforms react to other qualia: colors, sound, memory, etc. Having a more complex level of sentience does not grant us universal awareness, however. In fact, much of what we perceive is irreducibly complex, as our emotions cannot be broken up into their constituent chemicals nor our music into its disparate vibrations while still maintaining meaning.

When comparing another entity's sentience to ours, then, we must take into account similarities and differences. We cannot sense the Earth's magnetic fields the way birds or cockroaches can, nor do we have any idea what the cells of our stomach are experiencing most of the time. As we develop non-human intelligence, there will be even more categories of perception that do not fall within our level of sentience. Intelligent robots will be able to perceive more of the EM spectrum, sense electrical conductivity, or detect exotic particles.

Going into a posthuman future, we should not base sentience on our anthropocentric limitations but on the concept of mutual sentience. That which we can perceive we can usually impart. Through description, song, or art we are able to transmit to others of our kind the meaning behind a particular perception. Thus if two entities have overlapping categories of perception, they may be able to communicate with each other. Without overlap, two entities may still be sentient but not mutually sentient, and as such unable to communicate.

[ZEE]

I am going to Place a PoliticKlly cKorrecKt Poast here so I do not aPPear too "Evil" and "Prejudiced" and to also make myself look moar intelligent and morally suPerior.

[Egbert]

I would like to place a poast here.

I won't even pretend I am intelligent or have any morals.

I don't understand "politically correct".

Placing poasts

[kentonio]

"Sentience" is defined in this thread as being "possessing the right to life" (I can't think of a less libertarian way of stating it, so Communists et al will just have to suck it up) - i.e. it's not a (particularly heinous) sin to kill an ant without any sort of justification (other than "it was under my foot while I was walking" or whatever), but it's a Bad Thing to kill your average human without any sort of justification. So we've got two classes of entities: sentient entities that we shouldn't kill (like your average human), and non-sentient entities that can be killed with flimsy or zero justification.

So, you meet a new entity, e.g. an alien or an entity claiming to be a cyborg or an artificial intelligence or whatever. How do you determine whether this is a fellow sentient being with the right to life, or whether this is an ant?

If you go out of your way to kill any creature, then there's probably something slightly wrong with you. It's not reasonable to expect people to walk around in a funk of depression because of the microscopic stuff they're trampling, but if someone is just deliberately killing insects for no reason other than ****s and giggles then that would be a mental danger sign for me.

We don't know what sentience is realistically or how little or much of it other creatures possess. All we can do is carry out largely human-centric experiments that show whether they think or react in similar ways to humans. If we start with an expectation that all life has value, then the world would probably be a better place to live.

[kentonio]

"Sentience" is defined in this thread as being "possessing the right to life" (I can't think of a less libertarian way of stating it, so Communists et al will just have to suck it up) - i.e. it's not a (particularly heinous) sin to kill an ant without any sort of justification (other than "it was under my foot while I was walking" or whatever), but it's a Bad Thing to kill your average human without any sort of justification. So we've got two classes of entities: sentient entities that we shouldn't kill (like your average human), and non-sentient entities that can be killed with flimsy or zero justification.

So, you meet a new entity, e.g. an alien or an entity claiming to be a cyborg or an artificial intelligence or whatever. How do you determine whether this is a fellow sentient being with the right to life, or whether this is an ant?

If you go out of your way to kill any creature, then there's probably something slightly wrong with you. It's not reasonable to expect people to walk around in a funk of depression because of the microscopic stuff they're trampling, but if someone is just deliberately killing insects for no reason other than ****s and giggles then that would be a mental danger sign for me.

We don't know what sentience is realistically or how little or much of it other creatures possess. All we can do is carry out largely human-centric experiments that show whether they think or react in similar ways to humans. If we start with an expectation that all life has value, then the world would probably be a better place to live.

[loinburger]

I am admittedly biased against the "all life has value" definition of sentience simply because I really like steak / pork chops / hamburgers / etc. I agree that life shouldn't be destroyed without reason, but at the same time "I'm hungry!" is sufficient reason for me to destroy non-sentient life.

[kentonio]

Same here, I'm an omnivore. I'm not convinced though that the concept of sentience is anything more than a moral excuse we use to justify our love of bacon.

[Kidlicious]

Why do you think there's something wrong with killing bugs for fun? I used to burn ants with a magnifying glass. It was awesome.

[Lorizael]

It's not reasonable to expect people to walk around in a funk of depression because of the microscopic stuff they're trampling...

I'm pretty sure this isn't reasonable only because it would lead to bad results for humans. I'm not at all convinced that a consistent definition definition of valuable life/sentience would necessarily exclude all the things we happen to kill as a matter of course.

[giblets]

Does life have "quantity"? Does a human have as much life as one single cell organism or ~37 trillion single cell organisms?