Sentience
Sentience is an important concept in ethics, as the ability to experience happiness or suffering often forms a basis for determining which entities deserve moral consideration, particularly in utilitarianism.
[4] Some writers define sentience exclusively as the capacity for valenced (positive or negative) mental experiences, such as pain or pleasure.
[9] Some philosophers, notably Colin McGinn, believe that the physical process causing consciousness to happen will never be understood, a position known as "new mysterianism".
[a] The declaration notes that all vertebrates (including fish and reptiles) have this neurological substrate for consciousness, and that there is strong evidence that many invertebrates also have it.
[2] David Chalmers argues that sentience is sometimes used as shorthand for phenomenal consciousness, the capacity to have any subjective experience at all, but sometimes refers to the narrower concept of affective consciousness, the capacity to experience subjective states that have affective valence (i.e., a positive or negative character), such as pain and pleasure.
Sentience has been a central concept in the animal rights movement, tracing back to the well-known writing of Jeremy Bentham in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: "The question is not, Can they reason?
Gary Francione also bases his abolitionist theory of animal rights, which differs significantly from Singer's, on sentience.
"[28] Andrew Linzey, a British theologian, considers that Christianity should regard sentient animals according to their intrinsic worth, rather than their utility to humans.
[30] Nociception is the process by which the nervous system detects and responds to potentially harmful stimuli, leading to the sensation of pain.
It involves specialized receptors called nociceptors that sense damage or threat and send signals to the brain.
[32] Historically, fish were not considered sentient, and their behaviors were often viewed as "reflexes or complex, unconscious species-typical responses" to their environment.
[33] Jennifer Jacquet suggests that the belief that fish do not feel pain originated in response to a 1980s policy aimed at banning catch and release.
Functionalist philosophers consider that sentience is about "causal roles" played by mental states, which involve information processing.
In this view, the physical substrate of this information processing does not need to be biological, so there is no theoretical barrier to the possibility of sentient machines.
[41] LaMDA is an artificial intelligence system that creates chatbots—AI robots designed to communicate with humans—by gathering vast amounts of text from the internet and using algorithms to respond to queries in the most fluid and natural way possible.
The transcripts of conversations between scientists and LaMDA reveal that the AI system excels at this, providing answers to challenging topics about the nature of emotions, generating Aesop-style fables on cue, and even describing its alleged fears.
[43] He also said about LLMs that "it's not doing them justice to say they're simply regurgitating text", noting that they "exhibit glimpses of creativity, insight and understanding that are quite impressive and may show the rudiments of reasoning".
[36] In 2022, philosopher David Chalmers made a speech on whether large language models (LLMs) can be conscious, encouraging more research on the subject.
Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.
