pixelero wrote:
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Replying to post 38 by Divine Insight]
Conscious awareness is necessary for sentience (i.e. self-awareness).
But sentience is not necessary for consciousness. And like I say, for all we know plants may even be conscious on a non-sentient level.
(1.)When you say "sentience is not necessary for consciousness", what exactly do you mean by "consciousness"?
(2.)We seem to have a hierarchy here; "Conscious awareness is necessary for sentience," yet "sentience is not necessary for consciousness." Could you explain the details of this hierarchical structure of consciousness?
Ok, I agree there is some need for clarification on how I am using these terms.
To begin with I personally suggest that the term "consciousness" is itself ill-defined.
Here is a definition of consciousness I got from Google:
Consciousness - the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.
I embrace this definition and point out that to be "aware" is absolutely paramount to being conscious then.
Thus it's fair to say that "awareness = consciousness". In other word, since being aware is required by definition for consciousnesses, then being aware is certainly a required attribute of consciousness.
When we say that someone has "lost consciousness" what we mean to convey is that they appear to be unaware of what is happening.
From the outside, objectively they may or may not be unaware. We have no way of telling. Someone may appear to have passed out and become unconscious so we pick their body up and carry it to a save place. But then when they recover they tell us that they were actually aware the whole time. They knew they were being picked up and carried and they remember the experience but for whatever reason they had lost control over their body and had become a limp mass.
In that case we say, "Ok, there was never really a time when they were unconscious" because they were aware of what was going on all the time even though objectively they appeared to have been unconscious.
So do we even new two words for this? Isn't consciousness and awareness really the same thing?
I say that it is, so I say that consciousness = awareness, and vice versa. It's just two different words that basically mean the same thing.
And I have also established that just because someone appears to be unconscious from an external objective point of view doesn't necessarily mean that they are actually unconscious from their own subjective point of view.
In other words, awareness is a subjective experience and cannot be defined objectively. But as soon as we move over to the term "consciousness" we are suddenly tricked into thinking that maybe we can make objective statements about when someone is conscious or not.
So I actually prefer to use the term "awareness" to preserve the subjective reality of it.
Now let's move on to the term sentience.
I personally use this term to mean "self-awareness" as apposed to just being aware in general. In fact others have used this term in this way as well. We often ask are animals "sentient" like humans? Or are humans unique in their sense of self-awareness.
There have been many debated over just how "sentient" chimpanzees might actually be. Are they truly self-aware like humans are? Or are they merely just aware of their surroundings?
Many arguments have been make that Chimpanzees do indeed have a high degree of sentience or sense of self.
In fact, we can ask these same questions of other animals like dogs, cat, or mice, etc. There are currently debates over whether or not mice are "sentient" or have a sense of self-awareness.
This even become more complex when we move into something like the study of bees, for example. Are bees sentient? Does each bee have a sense of self-awareness? Does a swarm of bees have some sort of collective sentience or self-awareness of their entire community? Perhaps there are levels of "sentience" that are alien to our way of thinking.
And finally when we start getting down the biological latter further we can ask, does a worm have sentience (i.e. an awareness of self), how about an amoeba?
What about a plant?
Moreover, if "sentience" has dropped off on the way down this latter of awareness has non-sentient awareness remained?
In other words, a worm may not have a sense of self, but is it having an experience at all? Is there any awareness at all going on in a worm? Is a worm aware of it's surroundings? Not on an intellectual level of labeling things and understanding them conceptually, but simply on a level of awareness. If you pick a worm up out of the cool grass and toss it onto a hot sidewalk is the worm having an awareness that its environment has changed dramatically.
Is so, then the worm has awareness (which is the definition of consciousness) even though it may not have sentience (a conceptual intellectual idea of self).
So in other words, awareness (or consciousness) is required for sentience.
You need to at least be aware of your surroundings before you can even begin to have an intellectual conceptualization of self (which is sentience).
On the other hand, you don't need sentience (an intellectual conceptualization of self) to be aware of your environment (i.e. to be conscious) Because remember consciousness is nothing more than the ability to be aware of your environment.
So you don't need sentience to be conscious. But you do need consciousness before you can become sentient.
And this also then brings the question to the plant kingdom. Are plants "conscious"? It's a pretty fair guess that they aren't sentient. They most likely do not have an intellectual construction of an idea of self. But are they aware of their environment? If they are aware, then they are conscious, even though they may not be the slightest bit sentient.
