Comment by mentos
5 days 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?
5 days 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?
This 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
Input is input. There's no reason why we should assume that a data source from embodiment is any different to any other data source.
A body
I’d say it’s possible to experience mental anguish/worry without the body participating. Solely a cognitive pain from consternation.
You can’t cognate without a body - the brain and body is a material system tightly coupled
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How does a body know what's going on? Would you say it has any input devices?
Can 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.
We 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.
I'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.
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