Categoría: Understanding Sentience
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Synesthesia as unusual sense, by Craig Weinberg
«The fact of synesthesia (the experience of multiple and unusual sense modalities associated with events that are commonly experienced with one sense modality) shows that there need not be any connection between physical conditions and consciousness. Someone might play a piano and see musical notes at the same time, and that would be a form…
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If we are sentient robots, without will, sentience is not useful. And if it’s useful, how can it be?
When it is stated that sentience has a purpose, this idea is usually explained by indicating that sentience is useful because it motivates doing certain things and avoiding others. In addition, in this explanation, it is usually indicated that sentience motivates but does not force. That is, under this explanation, sentience is not simply the…
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The systematic approach to suffering by Robert Daoust
“The study of pleasure and pain belongs to the province of the political philosopher; for he is the architect of the end, with a view to which we call one thing bad and another good without qualification. ” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics The systematic approach to suffering will present a collection of lists, a series…
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Where Should Humanity Steer Sentience? Examining 8 Potential Directions
The list of eight options below is not intended to be a complete list. Rather, it is intended to be a reasonably likely list of options that people might discuss in the near term. For the sake of this article, the word pleasure is being used as a broad term to indicate all preferable conscious experiences, from…
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How a nervous system operates without giving rise to an experience
In our bodies, if our knee is lightly tapped, our leg moves automatically (with no intention on our part) and independently of the experience of the tap that we sense. The information that originates in our knee, with the tap, splits up and moves through two separate pathways: one path goes to our brain through…
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An overview of wagers for reducing future suffering
«Pascal’s wager is a famous argument for why one should believe in God. If God exists, then eternal life in heaven or hell is at stake, but if God doesn’t exist, one’s belief does not matter much – so one should wager on the former. (The validity of this argument has been discussed at length.)…
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Richard Dawkins about suffering in nature
«The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all…
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What is the problem of consciousness?
The problem of consciousness can be formulated as follows: how is it that, from a purely material basis (a brain or a centralized nervous system), consciousness emerges? This is what the problem of consciousness really boils down to. Answering this requires answering the question, what structures must be present in an organism and how would they…
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Discussion on the concept of sentience
drugmonkey said: You may have noticed a rash of posts around the ScienceBlogs decrying the ARA terrorist extremists who have vowed, again, to target the children of a UCLA neuroscientist. Dario Ringach famously gave up his nonhuman primate research in 2006 because of threats against his family. His participation in last week’s dialog held at…
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Consciousness and self-consciousness
Consciousness is being aware. Self-consciousness is being aware of oneself. Being conscious, rather than self-conscious, is the key concept in ethics. Consciousness can be defined as the state of having experiences. Conscious states, or mental states, are situations in which one is having any kind of experience, be it a sensorial experience, a thought, an…