The deep dark truth is human sentience is, by every marker we have, an illusion.
Is it cowardice to not want to face that?
Is it cowardice to not want to face that?
The sentence itself makes no sense to me. If it's an illusion, then what does "illusion" even mean? Who perceives the illusion?
I'm with you if you want to say that the idea of a metaphysical entity that is separate from the body and not part of physical reality (a "soul"?) might be wrong - i.e. that our conscious experience is fully caused by physical effects, by the interactions of neurons in the brain and all the other machinery there - and that it might not even be an indivisible whole but might be "composed" of different components.
But that doesn't make any practical difference. We're still experiencing the world, have internal thoughts, memories, feelings, etc. Those things exist. In what form they exist is an interesting scientific question, but that's something different from dismissing them completely.
This is the point.
Your existence is meaningless.
I guess there may be an illusion that there is something much deeper to it than a bunch of neurons being in some state.
Cowardice implies free will.
I know I am sentient. If I am not, then the word has no meaning, and it is utterly pointless to try to even talk about sentience in any context.
Therefore, humans are sentient.
Human sentience may be weird, it may be mysterious, it may be emergent, and it may be ephemeral...but it is, without even the slightest shadow of a doubt, real.