What is sentience?

[Ol' Dirty]

What do you think?

Personally, I think that sentience is the abillity to not only react to ones enviroment, but the ability to change it.

What do you think?

[robob8706]

Self awareness when feeling pain and the ability to react to it. I'm a vegan so I believe all animals are sentient. Intelligence is another thing altogether, but you don't have to be a genius to know when you don't like to be poked. A baby has no more intelligence, in fact it has less up to two years old, than a gorilla, and yet we praise the baby as sentient but the gorilla is "just an animal". So again I reiterate, self awareness when feeling pain and the ability to react to it.

[Ol' Dirty]

Originally posted by [email protected] 7 2006, 03:35 AM
Self awareness when feeling pain and the ability to react to it. I'm a vegan so I believe all animals are sentient. Intelligence is another thing altogether, but you don't have to be a genius to know when you don't like to be poked. A baby has no more intelligence, in fact it has less up to two years old, than a gorilla, and yet we praise the baby as sentient but the gorilla is "just an animal". So again I reiterate, self awareness when feeling pain and the ability to react to it.
That's instinct.

[encephalon]

recursive thought patterns applied to the world and oneself and awareness of that very thought process. I don't believe in randomness.

[Chrysalis]

In epistemology, the condition of being sentient is exclusively attributed to human beings because it is tied to the discussion of belief-formation. So, in spite of what we call our instinctive reactions to the environment, we have the ability or the capacity to form concepts, opinions, beliefs, thoughts, or whatever you want to call it, about our surroundings: rather than just being affected by the environment physiologically.