Octopi I understand, but lobsters? They have less than half the nervous system of an ant [1]. Are individual ants sentient and worthy of legislating over?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of...
The larger problem is that people are generally thinking of sapience, but sapience tends to be defined in axiomatic terms, so we don't have a clear understanding of what it requires or means.
[0] https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-...
Sentient is defined as able to perceive or feel things.
The paper linked discusses how trees can “communicate” and “feel” based on release of specific chemicals.
An exert from the introduction: “Recent research has revealed that plants can sense their neighbours without direct physical contact; mechanisms for this include detection of a reduced ratio of red to far-red in light reflected from neighbouring foliage…”
This was also a plot of a terrible M. Night Shyamalan movie.
That’s the connection the poster suggested, as the bar for sentience is quite low.
Intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness seem like three reasonable requirements. I don't really buy the "consciousness" requirement, but it's a stab at what most people associate with sentience.
Calling trees sentient is just nonsense. And I mean that literally. I try not to dismiss people's work out of hand, but there's a certain line of philosophical thought whose best rebuttal is to ignore it.
There are many plants that clearly respond to stimuli (Mimosa pudica(shy plant) as well as the Venus flytrap). As well as almost any plant following the light to grow, as well as plants that send out tendrils to anchor.
> "The subjective awareness of experiences by a conscious individual are known as qualia in Western philosophy"
I'll agree with you that we have no knowledge of plants being conscious.
> "sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly and collectively describes sentience plus further features of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). These further features of consciousness may not be necessary for sentience, which is the capacity to feel sensations and emotions."
That would be _sapience_, not _sentience_. Which is the point. Sentience is a ridiculously low bar to clear.
There's a higher level of intelligence required to "know", rather than to just "feel".
I don't know (it's an actual question I ask myself, not some rhetoric vehicle), but the concept you declare as incorrect is so widespread it makes me wonder... (obviously, the meaning in the legal context we are talking about it's clearly on one side)
The usage in SF stories stands out because often the writer was _intending_ for the word to be using the formalized definition used in science.
When actually trying to rigorously define the word "sentience" we currently have settled on a very basic but measurable criterion: does the living thing we are discussing react to stimuli in its environment, and does it do so in a manner which suggests some kind of memory or other information processing power?
Conversely, consciousness has no similar even slightly rigorous definition, but it is still used as a "higher level" of sentience, sentience + some other stuff that bring you closer to how humans experience the world. Sapience seems to fit somewhere in between.
Trees respond to both negative and positive stimuli, and relay that information to other plants around them, exchanging information about them. They take both reactive and proactive stances in regards to both negative and positive stimuli - which may be sentience.
Overall the point here is that sentience isn't a very useful measure of anything. If there were an explicit law recognizing the rights of all living things to a decent death, we would essentially be forced to become exclusive carnivores, as its almost impossible to euthanize a plant or fungus.
Sounds like the sentience tests need to be rewritten
Mice are sentient, does that mean we should only use no-kill traps and then release the mice somewhere far away? Many urban pests have population numbers that are 50-100X higher per square mile in the city than they could sustain in the countryside. So if we could even theoretically capture them and release them in the countryside, most would die due lack of sufficient food, which also seems unethical. And simply releasing a pest on the other side of the city so it isn't bothering your house clearly isn't solving the problem.
Killing animals, particularly pests, seems like an inherent part of urban living. Is this unethical? I don't think so.
You haven't really given much rationale beyond "they seem to react to stimuli". At best, your position that they have consciousness or feel pain analogous to humans appears based on intuition; at worst, on dogma. Neither is a particularly reasoned stance.
My personal choices aside, there are also reasonable arguments against it that I don't think we should immediately dismiss with hand-wavy anthropomorphic arguments.
Hopefully most people can agree that when the turtle is flinching 30 minutes after death, it is not actually "feeling pain", despite reacting the same way that a cow or a dog or does. The argument that "it behaves the same as a cow/dog/human" is flawed. Anybody who's butchered a chicken or a fish can tell you that they can react as if in pain even after they are reasonably considered to be dead.
There is a mimosa in a garden near me that will close its leaves when you touch it. Is it experiencing the sensation of touch?
(Edit: mimosa pudica, sometimes also called the shameful plant on account of how tenderly it seems to fold itself)
I guess the question is about how these words are being used, and whether they're referring to automatic biological reflexes or something like a conscious experience, sentience, or sapience, depending on how you use the terms.
The bar for sentience is basically, "is it more than automatic". Which is fairly low and easy to clear. It doesn't even require that there be consciousness.
That makes sense. So then, we should probably be very cautious about statements that openly entertain such possibilities given that they may be hard to substantiate meaningfully.
>The bar for sentience is basically, "is it more than automatic". Which is fairly low and easy to clear. It doesn't even require that there be consciousness.
Huh, every definition I've seen when I read about this stuff in college, and that I currently see when I google, explicitly relates in some way to consciousness. And anything that means "reaction" "sense" "detect" in a sense pertinent to sentience meant some kind of conscious sensing, conscious reacting. Did the definition change at some point?
I do personally think the line can be pulled back a bit to include creatures that's learning ability is extremely inflexible, but in the end it comes down to one's philosophical stance on what is likely to indicate a conscious creature.
We had one person pretty confidently claiming that "sentience" meant XYZ, which was a definition I had never heard before.
Now we have this, which acknowledges that it's a non standard definition, but suggests we should proceed to use it anyway because, gee, it's hard to get evidence, and what if your objective is [insert objective] and you don't want [insert inconvenience due to strict definition] to happen, so let's use a definition that blurs the lines between speculation and evidence. I have a number of problems with that, but it's a different conversation anyway and it loses sight of what I was asking about.
About six comments up this thread, if anyone can remember that far, we had people putting octopuses, lobsters and even amoeba in the same category. At the bottom, the reason for doing that boiled down to people deciding it was okay to redefine sentience in a way that lowers the bar to include them all.
Trying to get to the end of what was driving that conversation leads to things like this, that aren't quite focused answers, but are just invitations to detour in any number of directions.
You're sort of there, and sort of not. Sentience does require feeling, yes. But feeling doesn't require consciousness, no.
Sentience requires that the subject can desire pleasure, and desire to avoid pain, but neither of those things explicitly requires conscious thought. They are feeling, which you'll find in every definition of sentience, but desire doesn't have any need of a conscious mind. Collective behaviours, like in trees, can exhibit desire and can show pain, without the need for a consciousness to exist.
>Sentience requires that the subject can desire pleasure, and desire to avoid pain, but neither of those things explicitly requires conscious thought.
I understand this as a recently popular argument that exists in the ether, and at best I can say I think there are numerous problems with it, although it's a legitimate and interesting idea. Whatever it is though, it's certainly not accepted mainstream usage of the term in normal circumstances, it's more a position in an argument seeking to draw distinctions between biological reflexes at one extreme and full blown consciousness at the other.
>Collective behaviours, like in trees, can exhibit desire and can show pain, without the need for a consciousness to exist.
I think that is only the case if you water down the meaning of words like desire and pain in such away that estranges them from sentience, which of course, makes it problematic to invoke the words, used in that way, to illustrate case examples of sentience.
I also have to note that I'm finding it pretty condescending of you to declare that I'm "sort of there, sort of not," and then repeating back to me some pretty bog standard material I'm perfectly familiar with as if its new information, and concluding by endorsing a fringey-at-best definition that is not, despite your protestations to the contrary, the usual or accepted meaning of the term.
Natsu was assuming for the sake of argument that the definition of sentience is the one moeris gave, namely "that one is capable of feeling sensations".
However, "capable of feeling sensations" is defined in different ways and thus leads to the large differences in when people say a fetus is capable of feeling pain.
Is it when the nerve cells responsible for emitting pain signals develop? When a fetus is capable of responding to pain? Is it when the circuits develop to route those pain sigbals to the part of the brain associated with conscious perception of pain?
All of those thresholds are crossed at different stages of fetal development so which threshold you use will change the answer you give for "when does a fetus become sentient?"
Well, I don't think so. I like to think I've studied enough philosophy to be at least somewhat reasonably acquainted with the term, and it wasn't striking me as "well established." And I did a bit of googling yesterday that also seemed to suggest the "well established definition" being used here is not consistent with any of the normal definitions. And just now I consulted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and now I'm convinced it's not even remotely close to well established.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't seen anything cited here to back that up, or even just an appeal to any informal, working understanding of the concept that makes me think "oh, of course, that's the definition." And normally I wouldn't ask for such a thing, except for the fact that, to me at least, a lot of people seem to be confidently wrong about what it is.
>Is it when the nerve cells responsible for emitting pain signals develop? When a fetus is capable of responding to pain? Is it when the circuits develop to route those pain sigbals to the part of the brain associated with conscious perception of pain?
Pretty sure it's the last one.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/sentient
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/sentien...
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sentient
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
> Pretty sure it's the last one.
That last one makes some big assumptions given the adaptability and complexity of the brain, combined with our still limited understanding of it's inner workings. If I were to pick one, I would lean closer to the "capable of responding to pain" but really all of those criteria have flaws and serve more as heuristics than rigorous criteria. I purposly didn't take a stance in my original comment to avoid descending into uninteresting partisan bickering.
I think I agree with you that the definition provided by moeris is basically on track, and it accords with everything in the links you shared. I would also recommend you review the term as it exists in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
So that's all good. However, you said something along the lines of "doesn't even require that there be consciousness" and merely "more than automatic" which struck me as not being quite right, and that is the idea that I wanted to challenge. I think all the links you shared make some reference or another to consciousness, which to me makes them different from "not requiring consciousness." So I'm not sure how you are looking at those links and seeing something that comports with "not requiring consciousness" and I'm also not seeing how your version of sentience comports either with those or what moeris said. I'm surprised you would look up and post all those links without noticing this, especially in a conversation where that's exactly the thing at issue.
At best, I think you could say, the heartland, normal, well established definition makes reference to some amount of conscious experience, and it is certain fringe definitions could maybe be read as not requiring that. And I think even that would be an exceptionally generous interpretation of the thing you are spuriously claiming is a "well established definition."
>That last one makes some big assumptions
I really don't think it does. It's not making any assumptions about brains, it's taking a position on what sentience means. Maybe brains do a lot of stuff, some of which falls within our idea of sentience, and some of which doesn't. Again, all the definitions you link to are about sensation against the backdrop of consciousness. Meanwhile, only the last of the three of your proposed options was clearly suggesting consciousness. So I don't understand what assumption you think I am or am not making about brains. I don't think the other two options agree with the dictionary definitions you linked to, so I'm not really sure you should be in a position of confidently declaring that those are a "well established definition."
30 weeks?? Obviously these people never experienced pregnancy. It's ridiculous that we argue about lobster intelligence when most people don't even know the basic facts about their own human biology.
(Another common and ridiculous meme is the "pregnancy after having sex once" idea.)
Are you suggesting the odds of that are so low that they’re laughable? Because they’re not..
Don't assume any hard-and-fast rules when it comes to fertility, and definitely don't assume that somebody can only get pregnant two days out of the month. Our species would never have survived if that was really true.
Biology is messy, imprecise, and very subject to external effects.
It's the high end, so that's the threshold if you're using a particularly picky definition of 'sentience'. It seems like a defensible position to me, that if you stopped brain development around 30 weeks you wouldn't see much self-awareness.
I don't understand what your point with this.
Women's libido is heightened around ovulation (and men react to that), the menstrual cycle can be irregular (specially before the first pregnancy).
Right now no, an Arduino can't be sentient because it's not alive. If at some future point an Arduino could tick all the "is alive" boxes [0]: - homeostasis - organisation - metabolism - growth - adaptation - response - reproduction Then yes, there would be a good case for the Arduino being sentient.
However if you take a look at the list you'll see response is listed, that's because anything that is alive is sentient by definition.
Sentient by definition is really the point, sentient and sapient were defined specifically to codify the uniqueness of humanity.
All these other this are sentient, but only us, humans, and sapient.
The definitions although seemingly scientific are simply a re-enforcement of the biblical idea that the world was created for us, and that we can essentially do as we please, you can see this is the test for sapience, which is, is the specimen a member of the homo sapiens species.
Just for completeness, and to also touch on why this might become an important question; you'll also see organisation on that list. Organisation is usually defined as being made up of one or more cells, which suggests that an Arduino, or any machine, will always fail to pass that test.
Essentially humans have defined life in terms of itself. This makes sense, we only have a single reference and as such we can't even begin to imagine what other forms of life may exist.
However, as we create ever more complex nondeterministic machines, or if we ever get serious about finding extraterrestrial life, this definition is going to have to change to allow for other possibilities.
That's a historic misinterpretation of biblical teaching on the place of people on the world. Genesis 1 gives humanity dominion over the creation, but given that Genesis 2 parallels that command with the twin verbs, "tend and keep" (or sometimes "guard and defend"), the idea can't permit wanton destruction[1]. Rather, humans, made in the image of God the King, have a royal calling to work for the flourishing of life in all the earth.
We're called, not to do as we please, but to do what pleases the Creator. Thus, Proverbs speaks of the tender mercy of a righteous person towards his or her animals, and contrasts it with the cruelty of the wicked. Deuteronomy's rules for warfare forbid destroying fruit trees, for they're the means of sustaining life.
Historically speaking, many of the evangelical Christians who joined Wilberforce to campaign against British slavery also started the first humaine societies, anti-child-labor groups, and the first women's rights organizations.
The Bible calls humanity to compassionate care for all life, including plants, animals and unborn humans.
[1] Lynn White's essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis (1967. Science 155: 1203-1207), contributed to this idea that Christianity caused our ecological crisis. However, Francis Schaeffer's 1970 book in responce to White's essay, Pollution and the Death of Man, explains the Bible's actual teaching on humanity's calling to steward creation for God's glory.
And "responds to input" isn't really the same thing at all as "capable of feeling sensations" (though, like many definitions, the line between the two is fuzzy, hard to pin down, and possibly context dependent.)
Life itself is a notoriously tricky thing to define definitively.
Not yet..
We'll live to see some sort of AI rights protection laws.
500 years ago science was less mature, and unable to determine what was objectively silly, and what wasn't.
Granted, ant intelligence is a hive mind.
How was that suicide supposed to work? (suffocation like Seneca did?)
It's also a myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
Interesting that early experiments involved removing the frogs brain as well.
Species with more neotenic traits get more protections: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/janimalethics.2.1.0006
Sure lobsters do not look like human babies, but more than ants.
There is no dramatic difference in the quality or volume of evidence regarding cephalopods as opposed to decapods. There is more evidence for sentience in octopods than in true crabs, but the difference is not vast, and the evidence for sentience in true crabs is slightly more substantial than the evidence for sentience in other, less- studied cephalopods. This leads us to recommend that, if cephalopods are to be included in the scope of animal welfare laws, decapods should also be included.
[1] https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/News-Assets/PDFs/2021/Sentience-i... (PDF)
Octopi is what's known as a hypercorrection. "A hypercorrection is non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal."[1]
Now, you will find octopi in the dictionary, but only because so many people have engaged in this hypercorrection that it has become widespread and dictionaries reflect common usage.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270/what-is-the-...
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1zx411e7VG/ (deleted from yt)
Octopi is not the most common plural, true.
> Octopus is of greek origin, not latin.
Octopus entered English from scientific Latin. In which the Greek plural was not used. (Lots of words in English fron languages other than their language of origin and have irregular English forms from their immediate source rather than their remote origin.)
“Octopi” appears to be the earliest English plural of octopus.
> Thus, its greek plural is octopodes.
“Thus” is incorrect there, but, yes, that is its Greek plural.
> And thus, since we don't tend to use greek plurals in english
But we do. Just not, until comparatively recently and never dominantly, in the case of “octopodes”.
> the other proper plural is octopuses.
That is the most common English plural, and you don't really need a (false) historical narrative to support that it is “proper” except coming from a broken prescriptivist framework.
> Octopi is what's known as a hypercorrection
Since its the oldest attested English plural, its not a hypercorrection, just (arguably) dated. Though its probably the most common incorrect example of hypercorrection.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...
Snicker ... The new Webster or Oxfords ...
The Latin (nominative) plural is octōpodēs, the Greek (nominative non-neuter) plural is ὀκτώποδες. Almost identical. octopi is not used in Latin, it only appears to occur in English texts.
Most Romance languages get their primary word for "octopus" from an alternative Latin word for it, polypus (plural polypī), which comes from Greek πολύπους (plural πολύποδα). polypus is also an alternative word for octopus in English, albeit it is rather archaic. The English plural polypi cannot be accused of being a hypercorrection, but (for octopuses) polypuses is much more common. polypus is also medical terminology for a type of blood clot, and the polypi plural is often preferred when the word is used in that medical sense.
The usual Dutch word for "octopus", octopus, is pluralised by the standard Dutch rules, octopussen. English appears to be the only language in which this hypercorrect pseudo-Latin plural has any popularity.
..since when? I don't think I've ever heard "processees" before...
Though, in either case, it has the danger of suggesting the plural form of the hypothetical word “processee” (from processor, and by analogy to pairs like lessor/lessee), so, “things that are processed”.
All three pluralizations are wrong in some ways, but acceptable. [1]
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...
If you’re not the editor of a publication making local standards for how you want to use language, it’s better not to correct people when they’re perfectly well understood.
OED: "The Oxford English Dictionary is not an arbiter of proper usage, despite its widespread reputation to the contrary. The Dictionary is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, its content should be viewed as an objective reflection of English language usage, not a subjective collection of usage 'dos' and 'don'ts'. However, it does include information on which usages are, or have been, popularly regarded as 'incorrect'."[1]
Merriam-Webster: "Merriam-Webster is a descriptive dictionary in that it aims to describe and indicate how words are actually used by English speakers and writers. Generally, the descriptive approach to lexicography does not dictate how words should be used or set forth rules of "correctness," unlike the prescriptive approach."[2]
OUP: "All of Oxford Languages' content aims to describe, rather than prescribe, the way languages are used by people around the world."[3]
I believe your definition comes from one of the Oxford dictionaries - iOS lists it as coming from the Oxford Dictionary of English, and Lexico (a partnership with Oxford, whose About page links to [3]) includes it[4].
[1] https://www.oed.com/public/oed3guide/guide-to-the-third-edit...
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/descriptive-vs...
[3] https://languages.oup.com/about-us/how-we-create-language-co...
A bit like the bathroom I saw in a coffee shop that listed all the different kinds of people that were acceptable to use the single occupancy one toilet one sink room. Trying too hard to be inclusive can be an insult to the actual issues at hand.
Usually you hear it in a workplace setting when people (often, a subset of the correct group) are being acknowleged for an acheivement of some kind.
As soon as you try to enumerate all of those groups you will undoubtedly forget someone, who will then take offense at the omission. So the saying is a reminder to not single out anyone.
The best summing-up I’ve seen is: linguistic colonialism.
Grays law:
"Any online discussion that mentions the word 'octopi' - regardless how tangentially - will eventually turn into a discussion on linguistics"
Spoiler for the bit referenced in the alt text: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/928:_Mimic_Octopu...
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2voh0q (Octopus - Merriam-Webster Ask the Editor)