What is sentience?

[rhyddid_rose]

Hail and Greetings

I've been wondering about this because someone said that only people are sentient. Could someone explain just what is sentience and are animals sentient.

Thanks in Advance,


Babochka

 

[RedAndy]

My handy computer dictionary defines sentient as "able to perceive or feel things." In the dictionary sense, clearly people are sentient, but so are many other organisms. It's probably safe to conclude that bacteria aren't sentient, but dolphins most probably are.

The Christian outlook on this, as far as I am aware, is that only humans are imbued with a soul. For a bacterium or even a dolphin, the matter of salvation is immaterial since they do not have souls.

I will speculate that the person who told you that "only humans were sentient" was a Christian who wanted to demonstrate a clear line separating humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. As I say, as far as I know Christianity teaches that humans are distinct from other animals because we have souls and other animals do not, but "sentience" isn't the best word to use to describe this difference, since many other animals are also sentient.

 

[JohnLocke]

To provide that sentience is a trait that is not shared by animals, it must be more than the mere ability to think, plan, reason, and observe.

Many animals are observed to think, plan, solve complex problems, make tools etc.

The old standard used to be "self-awareness" it didn't last long because it required a non-sentient being to be unable to recognize that the image in a mirror or a still pool of water was in fact itself.

Last I checked on the Sentience debate, it had basically died, precisely because there was no workable definition that provided a clear distinction between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Some folks like to think of sentience as the soul, or a moral conscience, but that opens up a whole can of worms.

 

[Bernie02]

To provide that sentience is a trait that is not shared by animals, it must be more than the mere ability to think, plan, reason, and observe.

Many animals are observed to think, plan, solve complex problems, make tools etc.

The old standard used to be "self-awareness" it didn't last long because it required a non-sentient being to be unable to recognize that the image in a mirror or a still pool of water was in fact itself.

Last I checked on the Sentience debate, it had basically died, precisely because there was no workable definition that provided a clear distinction between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Some folks like to think of sentience as the soul, or a moral conscience, but that opens up a whole can of worms.

I don't think this issue is quite as black and white as you seem to suggest, Mr. Locke. My understanding isthat the same defining features of sentience in the way the OP presented it--the ability to abstract--stands as strongly today as it ever has, and this is more a reason the debate has died down than that the issue is ambiguous.

You seem to suggest that the thinking, planing, solving complex problems, making tools etc. that animals perform somehow softens the distinction of sentience, but a common sense approach to reality quickly dismisses this; dogs and cats still lick their arses clean, hack up hairballs and howl at the moon, while people still wrestle with ethical problems and build civilizations.

 

[Robbie_James_Francis]

To be sentient means to have sense perceptions, or to experience some sort of sensation. This, in turn, is one of the seven criteria for being alive along with movement, respiration, consuming nutrients, excreting, reproducing and growing. So it would seem to me that anything that is living is, by a lot of definitions, sentient.

Having said that, being conscious in some way of the sense perceptions is also a criterion for sentience in many definitions. I'm not really sure how consciousness is scientifically defined, but it is certain that many animals do have consciousness of some sort.

So, yes, most animals are definitely sentient.

And I read somewhere a Catholic source that said Christianity does see all animals and plants as having 'souls' inasmuch as they are sentient, because 'soul' is the English for the Latin 'anima', which, as we can guess from words like 'animate', can simply mean 'alive'. It is just that humans alone have immortal souls.

peace

 

[Bernie02]

To be sentient means to have sense perceptions, or to experience some sort of sensation. This, in turn, is one of the seven criteria for being alive along with movement, respiration, consuming nutrients, excreting, reproducing and growing. So it would seem to me that anything that is living is, by a lot of definitions, sentient.

Having said that, being conscious in some way of the sense perceptions is also a criterion for sentience in many definitions. I'm not really sure how consciousness is scientifically defined, but it is certain that many animals do have consciousness of some sort.

So, yes, most animals are definitely sentient.

And I read somewhere a Catholic source that said Christianity does see all animals and plants as having 'souls' inasmuch as they are sentient, because 'soul' is the English for the Latin 'anima', which, as we can guess from words like 'animate', can simply mean 'alive'. It is just that humans alone have immortal souls.

And here you show us why definitions are so important, RJF...sentience is properly be defined in terms which include humans and animals. Consciousness is often equated with sentience, and by this definition animals and humans alike are 'sentient'.

Babochka's statement that she'd heard that only humans are sentient may have been a mistake in semantics on the part of the teller of it.

The distinction noted long ago, that 'brutes abstract not' (may have been Hume or Locke, can't remember) is typically upheld as the primary difference between man and the other higher animals. We Christians usually assign this power to an "animating principle", or spirit, being possessed by humans either (or both) quantitatively/qualitatively greater than that of animals. There're a number of ways soul, spirit, consciousness, sentience, etc. can be understood, but the ability of humans to reason and abstract seem to be what babochka implies in the OP.

 

[MedicMan]

Man in sentient where other life-forms are not because man possesses what Sartre and Descartes call the cogito (from the Latin cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am [Descartes]).
I am going to borrow a little from Existentialism & Humanism here (a bit perverse for a Christian I know, but hey). Sartre tells us that all beings capable of thought have intentionality - that is, our thoughts are always of an object (we cannot think about pure concepts, for example one cannot contemplate love excep tin the context of 'loving x' where x is the object). M Sartre says that man (a subject, by virtue of the fact that he is the one doing the thinking) is unique, because he has the capacity to objectify himself - his intentionality can be directed, not at something in the outside world, but at himself - man may objectify himself. This is proved by possession of the cogito, since introspection is key to understanding it - how could we make such a statement about our own psyche without being able to introspect and self-assess? This is what Sartre calls self-consciousness.
Animals are not self conscious (and therefore not sentient), because they cannot think about their own actions - they act on impulse and learnt responses to stimuli, they do not reason their actions before hand. If a dog is about to eat a plant it does not know, does it think to itself "this plant may be unfit for me. I will eat a little now and see how it affects me, and if I am fine in an hour I will eat the rest of the plant?" No! It eats the whole plant, whatever poisons are in the plant will affect the dog, and thereafter the dog will not eat the plant because of its previous encounter with it.