April 23, 2023
Geoff Hinton said it well. If you don’t know what sentience means, how can you confidently say that something isn’t sentient?
The short effort that follows is meant to clarify as only a first step of what the word means to me personally. Welcome to open discussion.
* 1 : A sentient quality or state. 2 : feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. [1]*
* 2: Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations. The word was first coined by philosophers in the 1630s for the concept of an ability to feel, derived from Latin sentientem, to distinguish it from the ability to think. [2]*
A way to receive data, process it and store it.
I believe a sentient being is one that should have two basic qualities. It should respond to stimuli and it should be guided by a primitive memory mechanism. A being feels a response to a stimuli as primarily a causal sensation. This sensation is expected to be fed back for the purposes of generating new responses. Memory allows it to perform the comparison and to respond. In other words, there must be a way for the organism to receive data about external conditions, process it and store it such that any change in data will render a different response by the organism at a later time. That later time may be measured in seconds, in weeks or in years or longer. Further to this, these responses may occur singly or simultaneously or with time delays such that their starts and end overlap with one another. Atomically however, there should be at least one sensation which is affected by the introduction of at least one form of conditional data.
The ability to understand stimuli in time
Acute pain arguably lies at the extremum of sensations. We can universally and personally imagine recoiling from acute pain which would constitute an immediate response. The effects of pain can last however, muted over time which often require a sequence of future responses. Any other sensation would do as an example, but we’ll stick to something more vivid for now. In deconstructing this topic, we might choose to characterize the word itself more plainly as “that which would have a sense of damage”. Whereas acute pain reminds us of an immediate recoiling, the characterization of simple pain as “a sense of damage” makes us pause and remember all the possible conditions and reactions we could have, the various processes of readjustments, of repair that can emerge whether bodily or mentally or spiritually. A wound begins to heal and a scab forms. You call a friend and feel better. Your leg fracture heals with the appropriate medical care. We pray. These are amazing feats of organized complexity that are influenced by all kinds of concerns which are may include biological, human, societal and emotional concerns. Further, performing any of these readjustments and experiencing repair are possible due to a our ability and in some cases our body’s and our mind’s abilities to compare the cascade of changing states between at least two differentials if not thousands at any given moment in time. Therefore, on a unit basis, sentience involves a stimuli, a storage, a process of understanding the stimuli and a response to this process that can itself be regarded as or can promote new stimuli. This flow is meant to nonetheless be combined in various ways over time.
The ability to self-project and externalize projections
We begin to see here that our existence materializes by the grace of a highly sophisticated feedback mechanism which we can self-project unto ourselves, but also project to an external world. More importantly we can act both as a result of this self-projection and as a result of the externalized projection. Any of your external human observers are privy to the same abilities. The ability to self-recognize and observe these processes may be a necessary condition to sentience.
The ability to understand with speed
Beyond the mechanism of sentience, the degree of sentience might involve a rate or a speed with which two differential states naturally flow from one another. In other words, how fast a person changes his or her shading in generating a sequence of new states versus how fast an observer receives any two given states.
Fundamentally therefore, sentience is a recognition of combinations in time. It requires both a self contained cascade of feelings and sensations promoting active change requests.
[1]
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentience
[2]