Consciousness; proposed new research (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, June 18, 2015, 08:54 (3446 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: DHW PLEASE NOTE:-QUOTE: "Finally, it is quite a different question whether single cell-organisms, worms or other simple metazoans—vastly simpler than mammals with their large brains—have sentience. I do share with the letter writers a hunch that it may well be that “it feels like something to be a worm”. However, that is a question that right now can't be answered in any meaningful empirically accessible manner."-Sentience is a word that has been over-used and over-hyped, as this quote indicates. There are many levels of meaning of the word 'sentience', which simply means the ability to recognize stimuli.
-If there are “many levels of meaning”, sentience doesn't “simply” mean the ability to recognize stimuli; it can also mean “awareness”, and the quotation goes even further, in the direction of self-awareness (“it feels like something to be a worm”). Not even experts like McClintock, Margulis, Albrecht-Bühler, Shapiro etc. claim human-type self-awareness for bacteria or worms. Without the ability to recognize stimuli (a definition I am quite happy to accept), no organism can survive, but these experts do not confine themselves to that ability: they also talk of cognition, intelligence, decision-making, cooperation, communication. Sentience can therefore be regarded as the attribute that provides the material on which intelligence works, whether in single-celled or multicellular organisms. You are clutching at lexical straws.