Talk:Sentience

Bias and subjectivity of definition of sentience

I looked up the definition of sentience and "the ability to feel" is not what came up.

Merriam Webster: Sentience: feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and THOUGHT. Thought: the action or process of THINKING Thinking: the action of using your mind to produce ideas, decisions, memories, etc.

Dictionary.com: Sentience: having the power of perception by the senses; CONSCIOUSNESS. Consciousness: awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.

The scientifically respected turing test compared to this article about sentience conflict greatly.

There is not only a bias in the article leaning toward an animal rights agenda, but there are far too many lines fixated on that agenda instead of substantial scientific fact and theory.

I recommend a complete re-write of this article that is fixated on the science of sentience, not the opinions of it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.0.107.211 (talk) 16:37, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

You found these definitions:

feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought

having the power of perception by the senses; CONSCIOUSNESS

We have almost precisely the same definition in the article:

Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or to experience subjectivity. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as "qualia"). The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights, because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, which is held to entail certain rights.

So I'm not really sure what you are talking about. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 07:21, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

The very first sentence of this article ("Sentience is the capacity to interpret feelings and sensations into self-awareness.") is unsupported by its own citation, which references the dictionary definition of the word. That definition contains no mention at all about self-awareness, much less the capacity to interpret feelings and sensations into it. It puzzles me that Wikipedia would feel free to redefine a word in a significant way like this, and then use a footnote to a source that doesn't at all support that statement. This misleads the casual reader into accepting a definition that goes significantly beyond the actual definition of the word. 184.99.176.147 (talk) 18:13, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

The science fiction section should be replaced with the general misuse of the term in modern culture

I've noticed that the term has been rampantly misused by the general public and in writing settings outside of science fiction-based literature. Some examples: 1 (I'm pointing out how it's misused here, Lauren Faust(fyre-flye) didn't understand and failed to reply to my clarification) 2 (the use in literally all of these posts refer to the ability to reason) 3 and here's some examples I just dug up of people with similar frustrations as my own: 1 2 3 (you'll have to control+f for this one but I think it's worth pointing out that whoever is curating this article (it's a wiki full of nerds, an article like that one is going to have at least one person curating it) seems to think that referring to it in the context of human levels of intelligence a commonly accepted definition and considers correcting people on the issue to be "very pedantic" which is not my own opinion but still a clear sign that people often get it wrong).

While it's still primarily used in science, Sci-Fi and general fantasy contexts, the social osmosis of the misuse is pretty clearly reaching a level where the people who read a lot of SciFi but never touched a dictionary are misusing the term to the point where they are even misleading others to use the term wrong and I think that this is worth mentioning on the article. Mattwo7 (talk) 08:54, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Agree, but we need a source. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 04:51, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

let's not talk about AI sentience

"The term "sentience" is not used by major artificial intelligence textbooks and researchers."

the claim that AI research, for reasons unknown, would stubbornly refuse to discuss sentience (in any way) strikes me as preposterous. even the citation only provides evidence that four by now dated textbooks (supposedly) do not use the term. k kisses 17:14, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

The current editions of these textbooks do not use the term either. It is simply not a part of mainstream AI research or industry, because it is unclear if it has any relevance to intelligent problem solving. --- CharlesGillingham (talk) 04:48, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree. The fact that discussions of sentience are omitted from more technical discussions of AI doesn't seem to justify the original statement, especially when there are highly cited works on the ethics of artificial intelligence which do indeed discuss sentience. 2001:14BA:A080:B00:59F8:B977:50:39FE (talk) 10:36, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

The "Consciousness" section

The "Consciousness" section seems to be unnecessary. A section of this header in this article should compare consciousness to sentience, shouldn't it? This one seems to just be an extremely abbreviated version of the article Animal consciousness. Justin Kunimune (talk) 14:35, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

You’re right in that there must be a detailed description about the relationship between consciousness and sentience. However, I don’t think that a section on “consciousness” is unnecessary for it is only a superset of the subject under discussion. I agree the present one might appear to be a shortened version of the animal consciousness article, but sentience being an aspect of consciousness, a brief mention on consciousness only expands on the discussion. What do you say? Bhagya sri113 (talk) 10:57, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps we could add something to the effect of "'Sentience' is sometimes used interchangeably with 'consciousness', but some writers such as [insert some names here] distinguish them. They take consciousness to be any form of awareness, and contrast it with sentience, defined more narrowly as feelings or qualia." I think there are references already in the article that can support this. Then, I would still recommend paring down the rest of the section. In particular, I think the second paragraph could be replaced with a single sentence that links to the Animal consciousness article. Justin Kunimune (talk) 13:20, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Are insects sentient beings?

Doing a "find on page" search using Microsoft Edge, the word "insect" didn't come up. Maybe somebody can think this issue through and write a brief section on it. Me, I'm too busy with other things. Personally, I believe that insects are aware of their existence. Although many people would disagree. They have eyes and are able to see things. And they react like humans when threatened, planning strategies of escape and so on. They seem to react with pain if injured. 2600:8801:B011:300:10B7:8F72:424E:883 (talk) 13:50, 13 May 2021 (UTC) James.