| The first "So" at the beginning of that sentence is a typo. It indeed doesn't follow. You can quickly spot what makes sentience subjective when you follow the explanations. They're all either utter gibberish once unpacked, lead to the conclusion that my computer is sentient (fine by me, but I don't think that's what we wanted?), are rooted in other terms with subjective meaning, or they are circular. Let's look at that third kind, which Wikipedia illustrates well: > Sentience: Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations [...] > Experience: Experience refers to conscious events in general [...] > Conscious: Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience [...] Back at where we started. To break this circle one needs to substitute one of the terms with how they intrinsically and subjectively understand it. Therefore the meaning of sentience is subjective. I realize you can expand this to mean that then everything is subjective, but to me that is a sliding scale. The challenge I posed could be rephrased to come up with a definition that is concise and not circular. It would have to be rooted only in objectively definable terms. |