Free Will: Excellent discussion (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 21:38 (3567 days ago) @ David Turell

SHERMER: 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. -Dhw: I am beginning to wonder whether my autonomous sentient organisms- as opposed to your automatons - may not in fact represent the current majority opinion after all.-DAVID: It still depends on how you define the limits of sentience in single-celled animals.-What depends? Shermer attributes sentience to every organism on this planet, and all the scientists I have referred to say that single cells are sentient. Evolution depends on single cells combining to form multicellular organisms. Are you now arguing that single cells are automatons but you accept that the moment they combine they become sentient, i.e. emotive, perceptive, conscious etc.? On the squid thread, you wrote that you look at the IM hypothesis and then “revert to the idea that much of the progress of evolution is preprogrammed. It is easiest to stop at ‘God did it'.” It's equally easy for an atheist to stop at “Chance did it” - but then of course you'd jump on him and ask how. Perhaps easiest of all is to stop even thinking about these matters, but wouldn't that go against the grain?