I’m a rather amateur, yet avid, reader of the posts here on ILP… and this question has been sitting on my mind for a while. What is the purpose of human sentience? If, as animals, our ultimate goal is to reproduce and keep our numbers the highest for survival, does sentience have a viable explanation? Is it because our numbers became so high that we began to interact with one another in a less primal way, spawning culture? Is it because our need to use tools grew greater and greater over the millenia? What do you think? And in today’s easy, no-work, everythings-at-your-fingertips society could sentience be considered a vestige? Are we, quite literally, losing our minds?
Basically what I am asking is, how does self-awareness factor into humanity’s role on Earth as animals?
For reference:
sen·tience ( P ) Pronunciation Key (snshns, -sh-ns)
n.
The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness.
Feeling as distinguished from perception or thought.
To pose the question ‘What is the purpose of sentience’ is actually, philosophically speaking, quite a precise question in some respects because you are in fact presupposing that sentience has a purpose at all.
Questions of this sort usually coalesce under the theory of functionalism:
It, among many other things, looks at the mind/body question under a framework of purpose and function. It is perhaps dangerous to get into the cosmic workings of this model; but for the individual, his/her brain states are evaluated under the framework that they serve a particular purpose and in turn exist inherently, for that purpose.
As may be apparent now there are free will implications which stem from such an outlook. Perhaps most notedly is that of epiphenomenalism, which posits that consciousness is simply a byproduct of the workings of this functional system; instead of having any real influence on the physical world it ironically has none, but merely gives off the illusion that it does. This is often referred to as ‘the ghost in the shell’ or ‘the ghost in the machine’.
Like I said… there are many derivatives off of this branch of philosophy, many of which deal with AI and things of that nature. Quite interesting stuff… I took a course on it last year.
Yeah I enjoyed it as well, and if I remember correctly, it was during the period of time in which I was enrolled in the computational theory of mind class.
I had DL’ed a copy of Ghost in the Shell 2 but it was in Japanese…
i don’t think sentience means self-awareness - it just means, in its adjectival sense, ‘feeling’; a sentient being is one who possesses the faculty of sense-perception, but not necessarily one who is self-aware. maybe you got confused because your definition includes the word ‘consciousness’, which is a multi-faceted word and should be distinguished from ‘self-consciousness’.
anyway, no matter, it’s an interesting issue! according to richard dawkins, self-awareness/self-consciousness evolved in beings whose mental model of the world became so advanced that the model included themselves. this doesn’t explain its purpose, however - one can only assume that said cognitive faculty developed as animals’ environments developed, in which it provided a better chance of survival - to put it broadly - in terms of increased intelligence. i think it must have evolved in a basic form long before concepts like ‘culture’ existed.
I guess my meds are acting up again, but it seems to me that there is no answer beyond a construct within sentience, and there is no verification of self by saying self. Sooo, there is no answer other than any construct you would prefer. There just isn’t any way to step outside of mind and look back in. Sentience is self so.
I think with sentience we are able to find attractive spouses in order to produce perfect progenies.
Humans are such organisms who need to better their race by procreation.if they have no sentience they couldn’t find desirable spouses and their mating activeties would be in a state of randomness just as other lower organisms.I guess this is at least one of the major roles or purposes of sentience for humanity.
Sentience is a bi-product of the evolutionary ‘need’ for greater creativity in behavioural response to enviromental stimuli. The Tourette’s organon - and imps of the perverse: Novel internal (unreal) responses to already familliar experience sets. Usually these quirky creative ideas are useless - “How about I stick this icecream in my ear…?” But sometimes they’re not - “A whole bunch of bows lined up together makes a harp or vice-versa…”
Loose, quick connectivity and low excitation thresholds between object nodes in neural nets.
Sentience is rooted in the need to have a neural representation of self to attach mnemonic templates of cause/effect to. An mutant abstraction of the somatosense - proprioception perhaps… Or a mirage of linguistics.
When you think of yourself its usually in verbs “I am sitting” “I am eating” “I am thinking.” When you ‘consciously’ still yourself, do nothing, have no ‘verb’ if you like, during meditative exercises, it is then that the self, unable to define itself temporarily through activety, dissolves. The self needs a verb.
The self is the neural-net’s crash-test dummy, forever taking the fall. And Sentience its own apologist.
Soph is correct. Sentience is a low-order of creature consciousness that implies sensation and response. An organism need not be self-aware in order to be sentient.
To attribute purpose to a process that brought about sentience is to fall into an anthropomorphic trap. Purpose necessarily implies a purposeful agent.
But I am inclined to believe the self is a quixotic and thoroughly retrospective affair, a narrative sum of all ‘its’ previous actions and reactions.
The self is made up of statements such as:
“I am that which will do this, but not that, in such a stiuation.”
However, this is pure optimism, if that is the right word, on the part of any itteration of self, a crutch-lending to the necessary belief in free-will. In times of great stress, we suddenly find we are capable of both greater ‘evil’ or greater ‘good’ than we expected - and the resultant period of shock masks a hurried re-incubation of the self. A re-rationalization of actions to date.
And hoping, all the while, that it isn’t thrown into certain situations.
“First comes eating, then comes morality.” Bertolt Brecht
The difference between a benevolent man and a common murder is the degree to which they could be pushed before they would kill.
“And how many there are who may have led a long blameless life, who are only fortunate in having escaped so many temptations?” Kant
Morality is a fiction. Ultimate responsibility is a fiction. The self is a fiction. Our having invented these fictions has made them real. The question is not whether they’re fictions, but whether they are fictions that suit us.
I’m very glad that you put no conditional in the above, it is only a matter of provocation, rather than a choice. Never say never.
If there is anything ‘humane’ within ‘human’ it is I think that we can voluntarily adjust this parameter, this degree to which we have to be pushed before potential collapses into action. We can make a pre-emptive strike against our likelyhood to display a said reaction to a given provocation.
We do many things blindly, from fear - running or killing - flight or flight, but of all the animals, we are that which can haul ourselves up by our own lapels, turn ourselves to face that fear, study it, render it less threatening, and the next time someone or something gives us provocation, threatens us - we will have the luxury of choosing differently…
Your question makes enough sense to me. However, I think your question almost answers itself.
In my humble opinion, the “thing” (or, if you life, the “feature”) that we possess that distinguishes us from all other forms of life is our itellectual abilities.
So far, mankind has yet to find is equal. Perhaps this is only because we are looking in the wrong places, or perhaps we are oblivious to a lifeform that surpasses us.
Self-awareness gives us the ability to be philosophers.
I apologise if this does not answer your question effectively…
This may sound a bit off-topic, but if the self is defined by a person’s knowledge of their language does that mean fetuses “do not have souls”? Part of the whole abortion debate? How can a fetus have a sense of self if it has no knowledge of language?
I like this most. Teleology is an “anthropomorphic trap.” But more, it seems that we, as Hume put it, expect causes, even though we lack any basis (either inductively or deductively) to assure ourselves that events following from each other are anymore than probable coincidences and a set of more reliable post hoc errors.
But to challenge the anthropocentricity of the matter, “purposefulness” is often excluded to humanity, which it does not necessarily have to be if “purpose” is nothing more than the applications of means to arrive at intended ends. All lower animals do this.
Self-awareness is just a feature to our neurology, not exclusive to humans (higher apes and dolphins have self-awareness, too), but also just as problematic to our psyches as it is helpful to our survival. We could project the notion of ourselves into hypothetical scenarios of imagined consequences and live longer (if that is what we desire), or we could linger over ourselves to understand the constant and “unwavering” characteristics to our existence, which in the East is regarded as delusional thinking, but in the West is a cornerstone to philosophy of mind.
