Leemaster777 said:
Jabberwock xeno said:
In my scientfifc amercian issue that arrived today, it had an artcile about how scitenists could directly input electrical signals into a beetles neuromuscluar system, so to bypass the brain and the beetle's own free will.
Based on what I understood, they could selectibly control certain aspects of the beetle's muscular systenm, such as wings or legs, but let the animal keep automatious tasks.
While the scitenists have good intentions: using them to scout dister areas, I can't help but wonder:
Why ins't this animal abuse? I understand that beetles are insects, but they are nontheless sientient and ARE animals.
Thoughts?
I don't think you quite understand what "Sentient" means. Sentience is having human-level or higher intellegence.
OT: This is interesting, but at the moment, I seriously doubt that we have to worry about mind-controlled people. A human brain is VASTLY more complex than an insects. It'll be quite some time before technology advances to the point where mind-control could even be attempted on humans.
EDIT: Damn, ninja'd on the sentience.
Sorry to pull the 'ad hominum' 'I'm an academic researcher' on you, but no, sentience does NOT mean human-level intelligence. Nothing of the sort.
Sentience is even a step below consciousness. It means the capacity to feel and suffer to some extent, no matter how minor. In that sense, it is a matter of degree. It does not imply self-consciousness, nor even true consciousness. It does not even imply the capacity to think. All it implies is the capacity to feel sensation (hence sentient - sensation/sentient). That's why it is the starting point for moral significance - if something isn't sentience, and can't have sensations, nor consciousness, it is very hard to see how it can have moral significance.
But there is a huge gap between sentience and human-like sentience. The term gets twisted because of b-grade sci-fi novels overusing the term 'sentient life'. Avinll 'sentient life' distinguishes anything from is stuff like amoebas and other single-celled organisms. Amoebas are almost certainly non-sentient.
Having said that, it's a tad silly to get arguing about the semantics of what means what. All that matters is we have a common terminology so we know what we're arguing about when discussing things. But if reading an academic or semi-academic article/book on bioethics, then sentience just means the ability to have sensation - that's all. Human-level consciousness is usually referred to as 'personhood' - to separate the notion of human 'life' (cancer cells count as 'human life' in that they have human DNA and their alive, but no-one gives them moral status) from the moral status that goes with humanity. Then there's a whole lot of argument about whether foetuses, people in comas etc qualify as 'persons'. But we use the term 'personhood' because while theoretically we could run into something else with human-like consciousness that isn't human, we never have, and so we haven't had to seriously think about it.
Typically sentience is within that framework. In academic/scientific/bioethics writing personhood is for human-level consciousness. Sentience is just the ability to have sensation. For a backup link, search the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's Wikipedia for professional philosophers and it is awesome. Unlike wikipedia you can cite it in your uni assignments because it lists the authors, and they are almost always leading authors in the relevant field. Seriously, if looking up anything to do with philosophy use the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy online, not wikipedia. You won't regret it.
