MoonGlow
Padawan Learner
"Precisely because we cannot resolve issues of consciousness entirely through objective measurement and analysis (science), a critical role exists for philosophy. Consciousness is the most important ontological question. After all, if we truly imagine a world in which there is no subjective experience (a world in which there is swirling stuff but no conscious entity to experience it), that world may as well not exist. In some philosophical traditions, both eastern (certain schools of Buddhist thought, for example), and western (specifically, observer-based interpretations of quantum mechanics), that is exactly how such a world is regarded."
-Kurtzweil
I ran across this quote in a discussion of machine intelligence, so "conscious entity" a bit of a broad term. I'd say the difference between consciousness and sentience is that sentience involves self-awareness and awareness of others. Consciousness entails perception of and response to one's environment. Both concepts exist on gradients, and could go in directions that seem alien to us (tree-consciousness, or internet-sentience).
There's a German word, umwelt, that means that different animals, with different sensory specialization, are effectively living in alternate universes. A dog, living in a world of smells, can only have a dim grasp of what the world can be like for a bat, who lives in a world of sound. It is logical to follow that different people live in different umwelten, as their experiences prejudice their perceptions.
It has been proposed that human beings are just a stepping stone toward the Earth reaching its own sentience via the internet. If so, that would explain LOL cats and a lot of other silly things that glut our great body of knowledge: That great sentience is only in its infancy.
-Kurtzweil
I ran across this quote in a discussion of machine intelligence, so "conscious entity" a bit of a broad term. I'd say the difference between consciousness and sentience is that sentience involves self-awareness and awareness of others. Consciousness entails perception of and response to one's environment. Both concepts exist on gradients, and could go in directions that seem alien to us (tree-consciousness, or internet-sentience).
There's a German word, umwelt, that means that different animals, with different sensory specialization, are effectively living in alternate universes. A dog, living in a world of smells, can only have a dim grasp of what the world can be like for a bat, who lives in a world of sound. It is logical to follow that different people live in different umwelten, as their experiences prejudice their perceptions.
It has been proposed that human beings are just a stepping stone toward the Earth reaching its own sentience via the internet. If so, that would explain LOL cats and a lot of other silly things that glut our great body of knowledge: That great sentience is only in its infancy.
