Free Will: Excellent discussion (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, February 16, 2015, 21:23 (3568 days ago) @ dhw

Shermer, dhw: By sentient I mean emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious, and therefore able to feel and to suffer. Here I'm following the argument made by Jeremy Bentham with regard to animals: It isn't their intelligence, language, tool use, or reasoning power that should elicit our moral concerns, but their capacity to feel and suffer. To this I add the recent Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness—issued by an international group of prominent cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists—that there is continuity between humans and non-human animals, and that sentience is the common characteristic across species. [/i][MY BOLD]
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> dhw: I am beginning to wonder whether my autonomous sentient conscious organisms- as opposed to David's automatons - may not in fact represent the current majority opinion after all.-It still depends on how you define the limits of sentience in single-celled animals.