on sentience
I’m reading Dennett’s 1996 book Kinds of minds, which, from my dilapidated copy, I must’ve read before, but… anyway, I’m a bit disappointed so far, as I was hoping it would be about the minds of other creatures – cetaceans, elephants, bonobos and such – but so far, nearly halfway through, it’s been dealing with much more basic species, as well as the more complex systems created by humans as of 30 years ago. He does have some interesting things to say about that slippery concept known as sentience, though, so I thought I might think on those thoughts. A brief escape from the political scene.
So here’s Dennett’s first take on the concept:
Since there is no established meaning to the word ‘sentience’, we are free to adopt one of our own choosing, if we can motivate it. We could refer to the slow but reliable responsiveness of plants to their environment as ‘sentience’ if we wanted, but we would need some reason to distinguish this quality from the mere sensitivity exhibited by bacteria and other single-celled life forms…
Kinds of minds, p66
It’s groping at the idea of some kind of awareness which certainly isn’t consciousness but above ‘mere sensitivity’. But these are just words. It suggests something on a certain level of complexity which isn’t quite mammalian – or rather it embraces a complexity which starts at a pre-mammalian stage. Something which provides focus. Descartes, in his attempt to capture human consciousness, imagined that there was a central focussing medium in the human pineal gland. Of course he was wrong, but the idea of such a central processing medium or system, from which sentience emerges, hasn’t died.
If we replace ‘sentience’ with, say, ‘self-awareness’, something that we’d likely deny to plants, and grant to mammals, cephalopods, fish (whose status in self-awareness, and general intelligence, as bestowed by humans, has risen in recent years, I’ve noticed), and maybe crustaceans, but not to oysters and other such mollusks….and then what about insects?
So the more I think on the term, the more uncertain I am about its usefulness. Perhaps that’s because the more we look into particular species or genera, the more we feel we should grant sentience to them. That’s to say, our system of valuing broadens. Lately I’ve been reading about whales, and watching recent videos about them. The history of human relations with cetaceans has been marked by a complete transformation in the past 150 years, more complete, arguably, than that for any other mammal, but the fact is, the more we investigate any living beings, the more we’re made to think along ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ terms, which becomes a kind of ‘transference of sentience’ to other life forms.
So here’s a story. A few days ago, I was at the state library here in Adelaide with my laptop, writing. I was at a long white bench stretching across the back wall, with other people working in a seemingly similar way at a fair distance from me on either side – a kind of Edward Hopper scenario. My researches were interrupted though by a mildly insistent buzzing to my left. I looked over to the young woman some metres away staring intently at her computer. Perhaps she was watching a video. I tried to ignore it – it wasn’t too loud, but monotonous, stopping sometimes, then starting again. I looked over again, puzzling at it, and then I noticed a black speck moving in circles on the bench between us. It was a blowfly, and the sound was its wings beating on the bench. It was upside down and desperately trying to right itself. Issue resolved, I focussed again on my writing, and meanwhile the fly’s struggles brought it closer to my workspace. I had a bag on the bench beside my computer, and the fly managed to get itself, still upside-down, on the bag’s strap, which meant that it was no longer horizontal but tilted slightly towards normality. It remained there, immobile for a while – no more wing-beating. It seemed to be resting, gathering strength, summing up its new scenario. Then it flipped back onto the bench, right-way up. It remained still for quite a while, almost lifeless it seemed. I went back to work, and when I looked again, it was gone.
The lifespan of a blowfly is three to four weeks on average, and I suspect this event would’ve been momentous for this blowfly. Would it be remembered? Perhaps yes, but of course not in any human sense. Sentience, though is generally seen as more basic – Wikipedia starts out with a simple sentence: ‘Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations.’ Sentience is an ability? Is there a difference between a feeling and a sensation? Language so often confuses with distinctions without differences. Was this piece of sentience or experience life-changing for this fly, rendering it in some way different from other flies? Changing its future pattern of behaviour? But that would go beyond sentience to a kind of learning. But what would sentience be for, other than that? A sensation that tells or teaches us to move towards or away from. So sentience is about more than just sentience. There is a purpose to it, a survival purpose, and possibly more. An evolutionary purpose – those who have more effectively learned from their sensations – or simply have had more or a greater variety of sensations to learn from, to survive, will live to copulate and multiply, producing more of their kind of effective learners. Something along those lines was how Darwin thought, surely, and then genes were uncovered, adding more complexity, for how ever could experience be encoded?
Evolution has no purpose, I’ve heard. It’s just that sentience of a certain kind has survival value. The more sentience, the more value? A battle of the sentiences? A battle of the codes for sentience? How could all this be related to nucleic acid sequences? It’s all too mind-boggling, just shut up and connect….
How much sentience is too much? It’s all so exhausting, and then we die, like flies…
References
Daniel Dennett, Kinds of minds, 1996
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