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)

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)

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.

sapience
this article is very handwavy about sapience. strange, given there is a section on it. there is a link near the top, in the 'science fiction' section, and then i don't know what. i think a sentence or paragraph describing the differences would help me understand 24.132.57.190 (talk) 19:51, 5 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Yes, there should be an explanation of what sapience is, even though it seems like a pretty vague term. The paragraph may also need to be reworked to be more easily understandable. Alenoach (talk) 13:14, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Actually, I ended up removing the paragraph. It was going into a complicated technical digression about brain modularity and whether consciousness is located in a module. And after reading this, you don't really have a clearer idea of what sentient is and which animals are sentient. Not that it was uninteresting, but rather too disconnected from the topic and too technical. And also the fact that it doesn't present an established consensus but rather a debate, with sources that are getting a bit old and are not easily accessible. Alenoach (talk) 23:38, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Is this paragraph relevant?
The paragraph "Empirical data on conditioned reflex precision" seems only remotely connected to the topic of sentience. In particular the first sentence: the fact that dogs begin salivating at a larger frequency range in the context of Pavlovian reflexes seems very far-fetched evidence for dogs being less sentient. I don't have access to the provided source, but most writings on on Pavlov reflexes don't even mention sentience. I suggest removing the paragraph. Or a at least removing the first sentence and merging the rest with the previous subsection. Alenoach (talk) 13:04, 6 June 2024 (UTC)