Yes. The bar for sentience is quite low. It only means that one is capable of feeling sensations. (For example, Wikipedia gives the definition, "Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations.")
Does an arduino have sentience? It can certainly sense stuff via its gpio pins. As for "feelings", I don't know, would having a state machine that transitions between "happy" and "sad" based on gpio inputs count?
That's an interesting question, or at least it might be in the future, as it cuts right to the heart of what it means to be alive.
Right now no, an Arduino can't be sentient because it's not alive. If at some future point an Arduino could tick all the "is alive" boxes [0]:
- homeostasis
- organisation
- metabolism
- growth
- adaptation
- response
- reproduction
Then yes, there would be a good case for the Arduino being sentient.
However if you take a look at the list you'll see response is listed, that's because anything that is alive is sentient by definition.
Sentient by definition is really the point, sentient and sapient were defined specifically to codify the uniqueness of humanity.
All these other this are sentient, but only us, humans, and sapient.
The definitions although seemingly scientific are simply a re-enforcement of the biblical idea that the world was created for us, and that we can essentially do as we please, you can see this is the test for sapience, which is, is the specimen a member of the homo sapiens species.
Just for completeness, and to also touch on why this might become an important question; you'll also see organisation on that list.
Organisation is usually defined as being made up of one or more cells, which suggests that an Arduino, or any machine, will always fail to pass that test.
Essentially humans have defined life in terms of itself. This makes sense, we only have a single reference and as such we can't even begin to imagine what other forms of life may exist.
However, as we create ever more complex nondeterministic machines, or if we ever get serious about finding extraterrestrial life, this definition is going to have to change to allow for other possibilities.
> The definitions although seemingly scientific are simply a re-enforcement of the biblical idea that the world was created for us, and that we can essentially do as we please . . .
That's a historic misinterpretation of biblical teaching on the place of people on the world. Genesis 1 gives humanity dominion over the creation, but given that Genesis 2 parallels that command with the twin verbs, "tend and keep" (or sometimes "guard and defend"), the idea can't permit wanton destruction[1]. Rather, humans, made in the image of God the King, have a royal calling to work for the flourishing of life in all the earth.
We're called, not to do as we please, but to do what pleases the Creator. Thus, Proverbs speaks of the tender mercy of a righteous person towards his or her animals, and contrasts it with the cruelty of the wicked. Deuteronomy's rules for warfare forbid destroying fruit trees, for they're the means of sustaining life.
Historically speaking, many of the evangelical Christians who joined Wilberforce to campaign against British slavery also started the first humaine societies, anti-child-labor groups, and the first women's rights organizations.
The Bible calls humanity to compassionate care for all life, including plants, animals and unborn humans.
[1] Lynn White's essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis (1967. Science 155: 1203-1207), contributed to this idea that Christianity caused our ecological crisis. However, Francis Schaeffer's 1970 book in responce to White's essay, Pollution and the Death of Man, explains the Bible's actual teaching on humanity's calling to steward creation for God's glory.
"Aliveness" isn't anywhere in the definition of sentience. I can perfectly well imagine a sentient system that does not grow, metabolize or reproduce.
And "responds to input" isn't really the same thing at all as "capable of feeling sensations" (though, like many definitions, the line between the two is fuzzy, hard to pin down, and possibly context dependent.)
Life itself is a notoriously tricky thing to define definitively.
Sometimes it is necessary. Pest control is inherent. We cannot allow mice, rats, etc to live in urban environments unchecked.
Mice are sentient, does that mean we should only use no-kill traps and then release the mice somewhere far away? Many urban pests have population numbers that are 50-100X higher per square mile in the city than they could sustain in the countryside. So if we could even theoretically capture them and release them in the countryside, most would die due lack of sufficient food, which also seems unethical. And simply releasing a pest on the other side of the city so it isn't bothering your house clearly isn't solving the problem.
Killing animals, particularly pests, seems like an inherent part of urban living. Is this unethical? I don't think so.
To make it simpler: consider the lobster. It's not a pest yet still isn't considered above being boiled alive for no reason other than "that's what paw deid".
There is some thought backed neuroscience that lobsters can't feel pain in the human conception of it because of the lack of a neocortex. I don't know how well that can be tested, but it goes beyond justifying it because "that's what paw deid"
A lobster being boiled behaves the same way a cow or dog or human behaves when being boiled. Seems strange to make the cutoff for acceptable treatment based around a wishy-washy ill-defined notion of "Can this thing that is very different than me feel pain? I promise I am not biased by the fact that I have vertebrae."
I do a lot of hunting, fishing, etc....there are a lot of misconceptions in this thread. The head of a snapping turtle will still try to bite things up to an hour after it is separated from its body. Its body will still grasp and wriggle and flinch and react to stimuli 30 minutes or longer even after it is decapitated. It reacts as if it was alive and I was to poke it or stab it or scald it.
Hopefully most people can agree that when the turtle is flinching 30 minutes after death, it is not actually "feeling pain", despite reacting the same way that a cow or a dog or does. The argument that "it behaves the same as a cow/dog/human" is flawed. Anybody who's butchered a chicken or a fish can tell you that they can react as if in pain even after they are reasonably considered to be dead.
I assume lobsters are capable of suffering because that’s low cost for myself and has the potential to be correct, but “they respond to harm like a human would” is surprisingly weak evidence given my own reflexes will respond to pain well before the sensation reaches my brain, let alone passes through enough of my brain to reach the level of conscious awareness — if it was otherwise, I wouldn’t e.g. remove my hand from scalding water or stream fast enough to avoid injury.
How is being derived from current understanding of biology wishy-washy? Reaction to stimuli and pain are different phenomena. If you’re stance is “we just don’t know for certain so it’s better to be conservative” that’s fine, but that uncertainty shouldn’t be conflated with actual reason when it’s just based on wishy-washy anthropomorphism.
Your claim of lobsters not being able to feel pain is wishy-washy because it's a convenient assumption based off of an oversimplification. "Invertebrates don't feel pain because they lack the specific machinery mammals use to experience pain". If you just stop there then yes, it does seem silly to worry about a thing that doesn't exist. However, what I've seen of the models suggests that we are far away from being able to confidently say we have a complete model of a lobster's nervous system.
We can’t yet even define consciousness so of course we don’t have a “good” model. But using our current understanding of the “machinery” makes more sense to me than basing the decision on whatever it is you’re vaguely referring to, otherwise I don’t see what stops one from going to full Jainism. If our understanding of that machinery changes so will my opinion.
You haven't really given much rationale beyond "they seem to react to stimuli". At best, your position that they have consciousness or feel pain analogous to humans appears based on intuition; at worst, on dogma. Neither is a particularly reasoned stance.
No, I've already stated that is a completely reasonable position. It was the main reason behind my decision to become vegetarian. I don't think it's no cost to everybody though and some people's health deteriorates, particularly on vegan diets. However, being conservative in the face of uncertainty is a different stance than claiming they experiencing pain. It also doesn't address how you avoid the slippery-slope argument. For example, we haven't proved plants are not conscious so how do you reconcile a vegetarian/vegan diet with that? For me, that's why I rely on the biological argument that started this discussion. I have a feeling many people just resort to their intuition. Meaning it's just the same position of convenience you railed against masquerading as principled, reasoned stance.
My personal choices aside, there are also reasonable arguments against it that I don't think we should immediately dismiss with hand-wavy anthropomorphic arguments.
Because we can only wager hazy guesses as to what it means to experience. If a line is to be drawn, than it must be drawn in seemingly inconsistent and arbitrary ways.
There is a mimosa in a garden near me that will close its leaves when you touch it. Is it experiencing the sensation of touch?
(Edit: mimosa pudica, sometimes also called the shameful plant on account of how tenderly it seems to fold itself)
I mean, my tendon in my knee can "react" to "negative stimuli" when a doctor strikes it with a rubber hammer.
I guess the question is about how these words are being used, and whether they're referring to automatic biological reflexes or something like a conscious experience, sentience, or sapience, depending on how you use the terms.
Sentience always requires more than just reaction, but a memory component. That is, it can take a proactive response to avoid that negative stimuli in the future. However, measuring both of those is generally very difficult, and so determining if something is sentient can be difficult.
The bar for sentience is basically, "is it more than automatic". Which is fairly low and easy to clear. It doesn't even require that there be consciousness.
>However, measuring both of those is generally very difficult, and so determining if something is sentient can be difficult.
That makes sense. So then, we should probably be very cautious about statements that openly entertain such possibilities given that they may be hard to substantiate meaningfully.
>The bar for sentience is basically, "is it more than automatic". Which is fairly low and easy to clear. It doesn't even require that there be consciousness.
Huh, every definition I've seen when I read about this stuff in college, and that I currently see when I google, explicitly relates in some way to consciousness. And anything that means "reaction" "sense" "detect" in a sense pertinent to sentience meant some kind of conscious sensing, conscious reacting. Did the definition change at some point?
> Huh, every definition I've seen when I read about this stuff in college, and that I currently see when I google, explicitly relates in some way to consciousness. And anything that means "reaction" "sense" "detect" in a sense pertinent to sentience meant some kind of conscious sensing, conscious reacting. Did the definition change at some point?
You're sort of there, and sort of not. Sentience does require feeling, yes. But feeling doesn't require consciousness, no.
Sentience requires that the subject can desire pleasure, and desire to avoid pain, but neither of those things explicitly requires conscious thought. They are feeling, which you'll find in every definition of sentience, but desire doesn't have any need of a conscious mind. Collective behaviours, like in trees, can exhibit desire and can show pain, without the need for a consciousness to exist.
Claiming sentience requires mere feeling and that such cases fall into a different category than consciousness is an interesting intellectual exercise, and I'm quite familiar with that exercise, but as I said in a different comment, I don't think that's actually as consistent with normal definitions as you appear to believe.
>Sentience requires that the subject can desire pleasure, and desire to avoid pain, but neither of those things explicitly requires conscious thought.
I understand this as a recently popular argument that exists in the ether, and at best I can say I think there are numerous problems with it, although it's a legitimate and interesting idea. Whatever it is though, it's certainly not accepted mainstream usage of the term in normal circumstances, it's more a position in an argument seeking to draw distinctions between biological reflexes at one extreme and full blown consciousness at the other.
>Collective behaviours, like in trees, can exhibit desire and can show pain, without the need for a consciousness to exist.
I think that is only the case if you water down the meaning of words like desire and pain in such away that estranges them from sentience, which of course, makes it problematic to invoke the words, used in that way, to illustrate case examples of sentience.
I also have to note that I'm finding it pretty condescending of you to declare that I'm "sort of there, sort of not," and then repeating back to me some pretty bog standard material I'm perfectly familiar with as if its new information, and concluding by endorsing a fringey-at-best definition that is not, despite your protestations to the contrary, the usual or accepted meaning of the term.
I don't think the definition has changed philosophically, but using consciousness as a definition makes decision making very hard. We have no way to prove what animals are and aren't conscious, and what evidence we do have either way is extremely hazy. Using a line like "is more than automatic" to define what we think is probably sapient is pretty reasonable. Maybe it catches some things that are just complex machines with minor learning capabilities, but if you're more worried about excluding sapient beings than including non-sapient it's a reasonable heuristic for decision making.
I do personally think the line can be pulled back a bit to include creatures that's learning ability is extremely inflexible, but in the end it comes down to one's philosophical stance on what is likely to indicate a conscious creature.
Okay, I think this is entirely a different discussion than I was trying to have.
We had one person pretty confidently claiming that "sentience" meant XYZ, which was a definition I had never heard before.
Now we have this, which acknowledges that it's a non standard definition, but suggests we should proceed to use it anyway because, gee, it's hard to get evidence, and what if your objective is [insert objective] and you don't want [insert inconvenience due to strict definition] to happen, so let's use a definition that blurs the lines between speculation and evidence. I have a number of problems with that, but it's a different conversation anyway and it loses sight of what I was asking about.
About six comments up this thread, if anyone can remember that far, we had people putting octopuses, lobsters and even amoeba in the same category. At the bottom, the reason for doing that boiled down to people deciding it was okay to redefine sentience in a way that lowers the bar to include them all.
Trying to get to the end of what was driving that conversation leads to things like this, that aren't quite focused answers, but are just invitations to detour in any number of directions.
I agree, my thought is less that I think an amoeba feels pain (I don't) but that I don't personally believe things with insect-level complexity feel pain. That they react to negative stimuli definitely doesn't prove sentience, and I personally find the totality of how insects interact with the world to be too extremely mechanistic to believe they feel at all. This is true of crabs as well, I've never really looked into lobsters enough to have an opinion on them.
I've enjoyed the Journey into the Microcosmos Youtube channel - This one is Titled "Making Decisions Without a Brain" (subtitled poking protists) https://youtu.be/1LyeWQZ7ZR0
>depending on who you ask and how they define sentience
Natsu was assuming for the sake of argument that the definition of sentience is the one moeris gave, namely "that one is capable of feeling sensations".
That is the well established definition; no need to assume it for the sake of argument.
However, "capable of feeling sensations" is defined in different ways and thus leads to the large differences in when people say a fetus is capable of feeling pain.
Is it when the nerve cells responsible for emitting pain signals develop? When a fetus is capable of responding to pain? Is it when the circuits develop to route those pain sigbals to the part of the brain associated with conscious perception of pain?
All of those thresholds are crossed at different stages of fetal development so which threshold you use will change the answer you give for "when does a fetus become sentient?"
Well, I don't think so. I like to think I've studied enough philosophy to be at least somewhat reasonably acquainted with the term, and it wasn't striking me as "well established." And I did a bit of googling yesterday that also seemed to suggest the "well established definition" being used here is not consistent with any of the normal definitions. And just now I consulted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and now I'm convinced it's not even remotely close to well established.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't seen anything cited here to back that up, or even just an appeal to any informal, working understanding of the concept that makes me think "oh, of course, that's the definition." And normally I wouldn't ask for such a thing, except for the fact that, to me at least, a lot of people seem to be confidently wrong about what it is.
>Is it when the nerve cells responsible for emitting pain signals develop? When a fetus is capable of responding to pain? Is it when the circuits develop to route those pain sigbals to the part of the brain associated with conscious perception of pain?
I can't find a single source that doesn't align with the definition provided by moeris. It can be phrased in many ways but the underlying concept is well established. People who are unfamiliar with the words may confuse sentience with sapience, but they are quite distinct concepts and not interchangeable.
That last one makes some big assumptions given the adaptability and complexity of the brain, combined with our still limited understanding of it's inner workings. If I were to pick one, I would lean closer to the "capable of responding to pain" but really all of those criteria have flaws and serve more as heuristics than rigorous criteria. I purposly didn't take a stance in my original comment to avoid descending into uninteresting partisan bickering.
I think I agree with you that the definition provided by moeris is basically on track, and it accords with everything in the links you shared. I would also recommend you review the term as it exists in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
So that's all good. However, you said something along the lines of "doesn't even require that there be consciousness" and merely "more than automatic" which struck me as not being quite right, and that is the idea that I wanted to challenge. I think all the links you shared make some reference or another to consciousness, which to me makes them different from "not requiring consciousness." So I'm not sure how you are looking at those links and seeing something that comports with "not requiring consciousness" and I'm also not seeing how your version of sentience comports either with those or what moeris said. I'm surprised you would look up and post all those links without noticing this, especially in a conversation where that's exactly the thing at issue.
At best, I think you could say, the heartland, normal, well established definition makes reference to some amount of conscious experience, and it is certain fringe definitions could maybe be read as not requiring that. And I think even that would be an exceptionally generous interpretation of the thing you are spuriously claiming is a "well established definition."
>That last one makes some big assumptions
I really don't think it does. It's not making any assumptions about brains, it's taking a position on what sentience means. Maybe brains do a lot of stuff, some of which falls within our idea of sentience, and some of which doesn't. Again, all the definitions you link to are about sensation against the backdrop of consciousness. Meanwhile, only the last of the three of your proposed options was clearly suggesting consciousness. So I don't understand what assumption you think I am or am not making about brains. I don't think the other two options agree with the dictionary definitions you linked to, so I'm not really sure you should be in a position of confidently declaring that those are a "well established definition."
30 weeks?? Obviously these people never experienced pregnancy. It's ridiculous that we argue about lobster intelligence when most people don't even know the basic facts about their own human biology.
(Another common and ridiculous meme is the "pregnancy after having sex once" idea.)
There's only (approximately) two days a month when a human female can get pregnant. It's not about frequency or intensity, rather it's mostly timing. (And sperm quality, but that's another thing people have no clue about.)
Sperm can hang around in the fallopian tube for almost a week. It's also possible to ovulate without a visible period, and it's possible to ovulate in-between "normal" periods.
Don't assume any hard-and-fast rules when it comes to fertility, and definitely don't assume that somebody can only get pregnant two days out of the month. Our species would never have survived if that was really true.
Biology is messy, imprecise, and very subject to external effects.
I was going to say three days, but it doesn’t matter. That’s 7% then turn it into a birthday problem (the world’s full of people having unprotected sex for the first time with someone at any given time) and there you go. Deduct points for bad form or bad sperm and it’s still a crazy number. It’s only a talking point when it’s the case, so it’s bound to sound like it’s happening to everyone.
> Obviously these people never experienced pregnancy.
It's the high end, so that's the threshold if you're using a particularly picky definition of 'sentience'. It seems like a defensible position to me, that if you stopped brain development around 30 weeks you wouldn't see much self-awareness.
