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I think you're mixing up sentience/consciousness/intelligence. Many animals are sentient for example but as far as we know, they don't really have language. But I think I get what you're getting at, which I believe is "human level intelligence requires langauge". I think that's a reasonable take. But you said "sentience", and you said "is", which makes your position difficult to agree with.

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Hold up, you can't just throw out a claim like "many animals are sentient" as if it's a statement of fact. You might be right, but there's a reason that "the hard problem of consciousness" is hard. We don't really have any way to distinguish sentience/non-sentience based on behavior. The whole concept is extremely mushy.

You're right but as I've stated before, sentience and consciousness are different terms, and sentience has a definition in which the idea that animals are sentient isn't all that controversial. Not a mathematical axiom sure, but it all depends on what you mean by sentience, and I'm going by the classic definition.

Yes. You're right. I was sloppy with language. To be specific, I think that "human level intelligence" is basically synonymous with "able to think about thinking", and I think to do that, you need symbolic manipulation, and language is the only way we can do symbolic manipulation.

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