a bonobo humanity?

So I don’t feel that I’ve covered sentience that well in my previous post on the topic. My description of the blowfly, or housefly, its perhaps life-threatening circumstance, and its escape, was – well, just a description. In terms of sentience, or whatever it might be called, it was inadequate. The fly had a problem, and it made the problem go away. But what exactly was the problem?

Well, there were perhaps two. It was upside-down, and it couldn’t fly. Was it aware that it was upside down? Quite likely, in some sense. I’ve just found that flies can fly upside-down, and orient themselves that way to land on ceilings – which raises the question, how do they land, and stay, on a ceiling without falling down? I can’t offhand remember seeing a fly just hanging around on a ceiling. I’ll have to watch out for it. 

Anyway, flies don’t tend to fly upside-down just for fun methinks. I think they have an awareness of what we call right-side up – though they may be able to rotate those compound eyes of theirs to always maintain that perspective. 

The other problem it had was that it couldn’t use its wings – for flight at least. The buzzing I heard as it spun around on the bench was, I thought, the wings hitting the bench in a futile attempt to push itself off. A housefly (and maybe this was a housefly not a blowfly) makes its buzzing sound with its wings, which flap at about 200 times per second, according to AI. Not entirely futile, though, because the wing-buzzing caused its circular movements, which might have taken it to the edge of the bench, then into ’empty space’, at which the ‘flip’ circuitry for flying right-way up would’ve kicked in. Then again it might have had some awareness of the bench edge and avoided it as a ‘known unknown’. 

All of this is food for thought. Sentience still strikes me as a frustratingly vague term, much like awareness, which is arguably even vaguer. A fly’s brain has been calculated at just under 140,000 neurons, compared to around 86 billion for humans – so can ‘sentience’ level just be associated with ‘number of neurons’? Can we ‘evaluate’ other species according to such numbers? A sperm whale has about 40 billion ‘cortical neurons’, just saying, and we can no doubt make a list of value according to such numbers, but can sentience or intelligence or whatever be calculated in this basic numerical way? Probably just a rough guide. For example when we think of, say, awareness, we have to think of the ‘whatness’ we need to be aware of – a water world being very different from a land world, not to mention forests versus deserts, and a different planetary world being different in a different way, and the devil’s in the detail. And though it’s connections rather than numbers that matter, it’s likely that more numbers means more connections and more connective complexity, all within the confines of different environments with their particular complexities and problems regarding adaptation. 

So, sentience is a broad, vague term, about ‘aliveness’ to an environment. As to whether every living thing, or those in-betweeny life-forms, such as viruses, or the immune cells that fight them, have this ‘quality’ is probably not important. What’s really important, that’s to say most interesting, is how they interact with their environment. And flies, those pesky critters, have proved a boon to researchers in this department, being commonplace, and not particularly controversial as a laboratory species. There’s no RSPCF, as far as I’m aware.

So that’s more than enough about sentience. But flies – blow, house, fruit, horse etc, are another complex form of matter. If I could turn back the clock 50 years, that would be a subject for a lifetime’s study…..