Free Will: Excellent discussion (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 19:26 (3566 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: Shermer, like all the scientists I have been referring to, incorporates all organisms on this planet. 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.? [...]-DAVID: No, I view single cells as having automatic responses to stimuli. This is all done though a series of modulated molecular reactions. Note there is no thinking involved, so the use of the word sentient is a major stretch of the meaning of sentient. Are these cells sentient? Only if one views automatic molecular reactions to stimuli as sentience. And that is what your favorite authors imply. [...]
From the Oxford Dictionary:"Definition of sentient in English: adjective
Able to perceive or feel things:"
And perhaps in error, I've included 'responsiveness' in my view of the word 'sentient'. The single cells show their sentience by the automatic responses they exhibit. True. The responses are automatic, without question. So how far to stretch the word which at the advanced animal level implies thoughtful responsiveness? 
[...] Is every organism sentient? Yes, if one sticks to the strict limits of the dictionary definition. So what can you philosophize from that. Very little. Everything living can sense its outside world. It has to for survival as Shermer notes. Does this support panpsychism? Not in my view. The full meaning of the word sentient leads nowhere. ...-You are seizing on the word “sentient”, but Shermer and the scientists I keep referring to apparently don't agree with you. Shermer has given us a list of adjectives to explain what he means: “By sentient I mean emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious, and therefore able to feel and to suffer.” Margulis, McClintock. Albrecht-Buehler and others also use terms like intelligent, cognitive, cooperative, communicative, decision-making to describe single-celled organisms. These do not “imply” automatism. They imply thought. Your insistence that “the responses are automatic without question” seems to me misleading. Many of our own responses are automatic, but this does not preclude the existence of a mechanism that is NOT automatic - i.e. that deliberately processes the information automatically collected by the senses or their equivalent.-Of course you are free to reject the findings of “my favourite authors” and those of all the specialists who put their names to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, but please don't make out that they don't regard consciousness as an attribute of sentience. In terms of an inventive mechanism, the above list does not lead nowhere. It paves the way for potential inventiveness, from single cells through to every living organism. I agree that evolution proper begins with multicellularity (otherwise life would have been confined to bacteria), and as you point out later, multicellularity by definition entails greater complexity. But my “favourite scientists” did not argue that bacteria had the complex intelligence of humans or of the so-called higher animals. There are different forms and degrees of intelligence and consciousness.
 
 As for panpsychism, I remain hesitant to attribute any form of consciousness to inorganic materials, but it seems to me that the case for living organisms gets stronger by the day.