OT: Gasoline Cost in Europe

It's not "consciousness", it's "sentience". My immune system knows what to "fight off" the same way an ameba knows what to eat. :-)

Cheers! Rich

What we know about the operation of the squishy systems amounts to a tear drop in a tub of water. You will know when the knowledge base has become significant when The Washington Post headline reads:"Cure For Cancer, AIDS, and all Known Disease Found!"

Until then, it is just guess work with an occasional fortuitous result.

-Chuck

(The encouraging thing is 30 years ago, it was a tear drop in the Ocean.)

Will that include a cure for the desire to be a lawyer or politician?

Why do you ask? You fancy her a biologist?

That is a clever distortion.

No one knows 'everything' about anything but I don't need to know 'everything' about an airplane to distinguish it from an apple.

I have no idea how to define "consciousness", but if my brain cells can join up and do it, why couldn't my immune system? Why not a strand of DNA itself? It's certainly complex enough, and certainly qualifies as a quantum computer.

John

Nope. I hate weed... makes me paranoid, and smoke, any smoke, causes lung disease.

John

I have noticed that Ayn Rand fans fancy themselves as experts in all fields.

The topic was ethics and morality, which requires consciousness.

Sentience is another matter subject to arbitrary definition and disjointed emotional extrapolation, such as your argument for a 'sentient' ameba because it, supposedly, 'knows what to eat'.

The problem stems from the 'minimalist' claim that simply responding to a stimulus is 'proof' of sentience (or simply defining it as such) while also claiming that sentience is the core of consciousness along with all manner of extrapolations, such as it must, therefore, 'feel' (the root of sentience), be self aware, etc.

However, my computer 'knows' a lot more stimuli-response codings than an ameba does but few, beyond joking, would consider it 'sentient'. Rather, it's an automata. And a smart bomb 'knows what to eat' (blow up) too. Is it 'sentient'? Plants respond to sunlight (grow in that direction. some open leaves in sunlight, close them at night. Some respond to touch, etc.). Are they 'sentient'? And, if so, what do you mean by 'sentient'?

The minimalist claim that simply a response to stimuli defines 'sentience' is a reductio ad absurdum .

You, yourself, demonstrated the afore mentioned "disjointed emotional extrapolation" by claiming since it responds to a stimulus (the minimalist definition) that it "knows," an attribute generally associated with not only intelligence but consciousness yet you also claimed "it's not "consciousness."

I avoid using 'sentience' in a discussion of consciousness for that reason: one person may mean simply 'response to stimuli' (in which case my car is 'sentient' as it responds quite well to gas pedal stimuli) while the next then concludes 'consciousness' (the colloquial understanding of it). And then there are those who erroneously claim both, that a stimulus response 'is consciousness'. The words become meaningless.

I'll make it even easier: "able to sense." Having senses. Obviously, an ameba has some mechanism for sensing what is food and what's a threat. It does this by sensing them.

And Sentience and Consciousness are about as similar to each other as magnetism and electricity. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

You must be down right clairvoyant because I haven't noticed a discussion of "all fields" by which such a determination could be made about anyone.

Maybe I just missed it.

killed

Perhaps what you call "Ethics and morality" is a more complicated chemical process, as is "consciousness".

Automaton.

One can only hope!

Yup. I happen to know the cure for all of them, but nobody seems to want it, probably because it requires being absolutely honest with yourself, and admitting that you don't already know everything there is to know.

Thanks, Rich For more information, visit:

Sentience, by definition, is: 1) sentient being, or state; consciousness, 2) Inchoate consciousness; sensation, as distinguished from perception and thought.

and Inchoate (inkoat) means recently, or just begun; being in the first stages; rudimentary.

So, sentience is the first rumblings of consciousness.

-Chuck

We are ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I saw a special-edition "Microsoft" H3 at a trade show, loaded up with Embedded Windows ve-tronics. It's even rounder and fuzzier than the H2, a pretend military vehicle for wannabee Marines. There were three Microsoft people trying to get the on-board systems up; don't know if they ever did.

John

Its probably the prototype of another failed attempt to sell the military on overly computerized vehicles that failed. ;-)