What is Sentience?

In the future we may encounter or create minds equal to our own, smarter, or somewhere in the gap between human and animal. And yet we still barely understand what concepts like intelligence and sentience truly are.

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Credits:
What is Sentience?
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 283, March 25, 2021

Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur

Writers:
Isaac Arthur
Jerry Guern

Editors:
Darius Said
Jason Burbank
Matthew Campbell
S. Kopperud

Cover Art:

Graphics:
Jeremy Jozwik

Music by
:
Miguel Johnson,
"Far from home"
Reign Pagaran,
" Distant Voyager"

Aerium,
"Fifth Star of Aldebaran"

Stellardrone,
" An Ocean of Galaxies"

Epic Mountain,
"Space Travel"

[ManiusCuriusDenatus]

Sentience: Knowing to grab a cup of coffee and snack before watching the next installment of SFIA.

[wurmpond]

Easily one of your best and most important episodes yet. Showing a very broad, careful, and deeply contemplating mind and intent. Your cross-field awareness should be the envy of many prominent people in specialised fields.

[EpicMathTime]

1:30 It is a logical implication. It is a conclusion. I think, therefore I am. The fact that I am thinking allows me to make the conclusion that I exist.

It's not clear why you bring up "a rock doesn't think, therefore it doesn't exist" as an objection to this. That does not follow _at all_ from the initial statement. IE, P implies Q does not mean that not-P implies not-Q. Saying "I think, therefore I am" says _nothing_ about things that don't think.

If I say "if there are no clouds in the sky, then it is not raining", I'm not at all claiming that "if there are clouds in the sky, then it is raining" by saying this.

[jonathantybirk]

I feel like every other video you do makes me rethink some fundamental notion I have about life itself, it's great

[MatthewCampbell]

10:11 To be fair, I probably would argue a frog has considerably more value than a tree in the moral sense. For example, if someone owns a tree and chooses to destroy it for just about any reason, I wouldn't call their actions immoral. By contrast, if someone owns a frog, and decides to amuse themselves by burning the frog to death or cutting all its limbs off while it's alive, I'd call their actions evil.
Now, to be clear, I'm not a vegan or anything, but I think most people would agree that out-and-out torturing even fairly simply animals for the sake of sadism is evil. And I'd argue it's actually in society's interest to punish people who do, because tormenting animals is often a sign that a person is an unhinged sociopath who will hurt humans.

[justinlacek]

I studied philosophy as an undergrad and one of the most interesting subjects was on philosophy of science. This video brought me back to that a little bit.

[CharliMorganMusic]

"I'm not scared of a machine that passes the Türing Test; I'm terrified of one that intentionally fails it, " (u/Grandure, 2017).

[charlotteblossom]

A rough, messy method of determing whether something should have rights that i think works fairly well is that a thing should, at minimum, be considered for possessing those rights if it can somehow express that that right would be good or desirable to it, whether intentionally or not.

As a very, very basic example; a cat can express distress, pain, and mourning, so even though a cat does not understand what rights are, probably, they should have the right not to be tortured, or arbitrarily separated from creatures they're bonded to.

[sai]

Sentience: realizing you have it regretting evolving and returning to monke

[Kromface]

Favorite scifi philosopher tackles the topic of sentience? Sign me up.

[heizensperg]

I prefer longer episodes. I don’t understand how most people seem to prefer shorter episodes. Anyway, very interesting, as always

[willdbeast]

What is Sentence: a set of words that is complete in itself, typically containing a subject and predicate, conveying a statement, question, exclamation, or command, and consisting of a main clause and sometimes one or more subordinate clauses.

[gabrielwolffe]

Personally, I'm of the opinion that an entity (machines in particular) deserves to be treated like one of us, when it is capable of asking us to, without being told to do so.

[jamesrumsey]

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

[chrisgaming]

A while ago you had a poll for options for a new episode, and one of the options was "big aliens". Is that episode still a possibility in the future?

[chrispy_]

Sentience is admitting you're wrong when you screw something up. Very few animals have this ability, even fewer people.

[Thecloakedpersuader]

At 2:10 "won't waste any more time challenging if there's such a thing as you or I",
This would a perfect point to introduce the Eastern philosophical idea of sunyata, which does just that, with fascinating and very important consequences. This is especially important in areas as quantum mechanics.

[gablaw]

It's crazy that Isaac discusses such a hard topic. I wouldn't even know where to start.

[sheldoniusRex]

Sapience is the ability to feel existential dread while lounging in perfect comfort with a full belly and five hundred bucks in your pocket.

And with that it looks like my drink for this episode is going to be mixed with gin. Perhaps my snack too.

[AmblesJambles]

The intelligence of slime moulds is something that really dinged my understanding of sentience. Like this is a single celled organism that arranges itself into a mega-organism, that can now remember things! As one cell, it can't do anything but as a community it can start doing things like anticipating environmental conditions. Doesn't that display that it experiences a concept of time? What does it feel like to be a slime mould? What does it feel like to be that same slime mould after it has determined the best path to a food source? It melts my mind just thinking about it!