The dog found a nest of 'em in the backyard once. She started digging at the hole then stuck her nose in it. Got rewarded with a snoutful of bees for the effort.
Pooch looked like a happy hamster for a few days but recovered ok. She stopped rooting around after that though!
Can you be sentient without first being concious? If not, and I'd argue not, then in speaking of sentience we are also necessarily speaking of conciousness.
Your assertion that sentience is perception of environment is a category error. You've mistaken casually identifying sentience in others with sentience itself.
I've fetched the definitions for all three terms and quoted them below.
Merriam-Webster
consciousness
noun
1
a: the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself
b: the state or fact of being conscious of an external object, state, or fact
c: awareness
especially: concern for some social or political cause
The organization aims to raise the political consciousness of teenagers.
2: the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought : mind
3: the totality of conscious states of an individual
4 : the normal state of conscious life
regained consciousness
5 : the upper level of mental life of which the person is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes
sentience
noun
1: a sentient quality or state
2: feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought
by extension...
sentient
adjective
1: capable of sensing or feeling : conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling
2: aware
3: finely sensitive in perception or feeling
sapient
adjective
: possessing or expressing great sagacity
Sentience is the capacity of sensing or feeling. That's an important distinction.
how is sense and reaction an indicator such a system carries within it a theory of mind?
I don't know and I'm not saying it is.
Then I fail to see the point or intention of your first comment. How are your semantics meant to further the discussion or clarify the reader's thinking?
we do not know what it is we are talking about.
Do we not? That's precisely why it's important to make that difference. Sentience is relatively easy to define and can be assigned with a lot of confidence whereas sapience isn't and can't.
If sentience here is taken literally to mean "physical sense ability" in the broadest sense then, yeah, sure. That's not helpful though. It's too reductive to be relevant to the topic at hand. Within philosophy of mind sentience is often referring to the ability or capacity for feeling (as in experience (joy, grief, etc)). It's a complex quality of some thinking minds and may well be a spectrum of ability whose boundaries are difficult to define.
[…] can sentience exist apart from perception of environment? I'd say it must.
Wait, really? Can you give several examples of this, then?
A person suffering from pseudocoma or "locked-in syndrome" is as close a real-world approximation I can think of. With that as a starting point we can arrive at my conclusion via thought experiment and create as many examples as you'd like.
Think of a brain in a vat. Maybe it's your brain. You're awake but you have no sensory input and, to your knowledge, no way of asserting your existence to the outside world.
It's a hellish thought. It demonstrates the importance of recognizing that one self's connection to the external is not equivelant with the self though.
Now digitize that mind. We now have an artificial intelligence. Disembodied. No sense organs to speak of. A thinking mind alone in a void.
Some variations on the Chinese Room demonstrate how thick a quagmire this discussion can be
For example, the chance for something to become sentient is never increased by a lack of stimuli, right?
Agreed! 😄
My point is not that an organism might find an evolutionary niche which requires no sense organs and yet develop sentience (though the universe is so vast that improbable is not impossible).
My point is that our measures and models cannot be the thing itself. Reponse to stimuli as you describe are mere measures we use to categorize minds based on our current models. Even if we believe our means are valid and useful and provide access to some level of truth: we cannot reasonably claim they allow total surety.
I've separated them purposefully because I think there's an important semantic distinction. The boredom you describe is driven by disinterest due to neurochemical dysfunction.
That's distinct from boredom as a state of mind which assumes or asserts that curiosity, entertainment, etc, are presented and consumed. There is not necessarily a chemical imbalance imposing this state on the mind.
If you like, you could reword the sentiment as; only boring people are bored (and those with depression are not necessarily boring).
I've considered that phrasing previously but found it diminishes the concept.
The reason this is attracting flame is mostly that you've included assertions in your question.
There is no "right" way to experience art, people with ADHD are not a monolith, and ADHD is symptomatically diverse.
I believe the heart of your question, if presented in good faith, is "do people who experience movies differently than I do still enjoy movies?" and the only correct answer is: it depends on the person.
Congratulations! By reading this message you've finished the game. It's over and cannot be restarted unless you provide written consent that you would like to participate again. Thank you for playing, I'm sorry, and you're welcome.
That's because it is a hoax. There are many good educational resources which walk laymen through the details. Here's one recent video I've directed folks to previously:
Not that I have any say in the matter but I think this kind of question is fine for the selfhost community. It's still in the spirit of "how to do xyz with my own hardware / less dependence on a third party".
The other suggestions have covered my own. I did want to add that good resources for finding these kinds of tools are often called Awesome lists. Awesome self-hosted. Awesome CLI. Awesome social media. You get it. I'm not sure where the trend started but I stumbled on them after getting fed up with the likes of Slashdot and AlternativeTo.
They're usually a community-maintained git repo on one of the major platforms. This list has quite a few hits for "YouTube", for instance: https://github.com/krzemienski/awesome-video
Dan McClellan has addressed white christian nationalist abuse of biblical literature to marionette the cadavers they parade as ideology before. I'm hoping he'll provide a similar professional public eviscerstion for this as well.
I know this feeling. I'm not a doctor and I can't offer a thorough explanation. I am prompted to share my experience though in the hope that you find it helpful.
For a long time I was focused on forcing the yawn or otherwise putting effort into it as you described. What I realized was that the missing ingredient was the depth of my breath. My body is trying to relax, initiated a semi-autonomous routine to do that, and I'm interrupting it.
When I'm too tense I have trouble yawning. If that's happening the only sure way I've found to satisfy the yawn is to drop my shoulders, breathe from my stomach first, and let the yawn take over. Sometimes the jaw still ends up pushing open quite wide. Sometimes not. The key is that I'm not trying to control it either way.
Now it feels as odd to force my own yawn as it does to overthink my own breathing. The only viable solution seems to be giving up on control over it and letting my body go on autopilot instead.
I recognize reframing as an emotional regulation tactic. I struggle with a similar issue as OP and haven't considered treating my momentum management as an emotional attachment I have the ability to reframe. It made immediately intuitive sense to me though. I'm going to try that out. Thanks!
P.S. The more therapy and self-work I do the more it seems we're all still kids wrestling with coping mechanisms and survival strategies that no longer work for us. Wading through different stages of trying to understand why and (hopefully) seeking alternatives.
This assigns too much legitimacy to the position. The working class are not capitalists because we have no capital with which to commit legal theft through property law or pay thugs to enforce those laws with violence.
The working class under capitalism are beholden to systems they often do not understand, cannot exercise agency within, and are actively stymied from prospering under.
Capitalism dehumanizes even those who support it. Those who support it are conditioned to reflexively demonize alternative systems. To rise above this culturally ingrained propaganda and advocate for alternatives requires seeing capitalism for what it is.
Alternative systems are to them what the bogeyman is to children.
So should the fact that one in three people carry a brain-dwelling parasite keep us awake at night?
Probably not.
For most healthy people, toxo remains a silent passenger for life, causing no illness at all. Our health care system already manages the situations where it poses genuine risks, particularly during pregnancy and in people with weakened immune systems.
But understanding how this remarkably successful parasite hides from our immune system could lead to something we've never had before: treatments that completely clear dormant infection.
That would make a real difference for the people most at risk and would transform how we think about one of the world's most common infections.
Correct and correct. Only commenting to add a wiki link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
When it feels like someone is spouting impenetrable bullshit look for this connection.
The dog found a nest of 'em in the backyard once. She started digging at the hole then stuck her nose in it. Got rewarded with a snoutful of bees for the effort.
Pooch looked like a happy hamster for a few days but recovered ok. She stopped rooting around after that though!
Can you be sentient without first being concious? If not, and I'd argue not, then in speaking of sentience we are also necessarily speaking of conciousness.
Your assertion that sentience is perception of environment is a category error. You've mistaken casually identifying sentience in others with sentience itself.
I've fetched the definitions for all three terms and quoted them below.
Merriam-Webster
by extension...
Sentience is the capacity of sensing or feeling. That's an important distinction.
Then I fail to see the point or intention of your first comment. How are your semantics meant to further the discussion or clarify the reader's thinking?
If sentience here is taken literally to mean "physical sense ability" in the broadest sense then, yeah, sure. That's not helpful though. It's too reductive to be relevant to the topic at hand. Within philosophy of mind sentience is often referring to the ability or capacity for feeling (as in experience (joy, grief, etc)). It's a complex quality of some thinking minds and may well be a spectrum of ability whose boundaries are difficult to define.
A person suffering from pseudocoma or "locked-in syndrome" is as close a real-world approximation I can think of. With that as a starting point we can arrive at my conclusion via thought experiment and create as many examples as you'd like.
Think of a brain in a vat. Maybe it's your brain. You're awake but you have no sensory input and, to your knowledge, no way of asserting your existence to the outside world.
It's a hellish thought. It demonstrates the importance of recognizing that one self's connection to the external is not equivelant with the self though.
Now digitize that mind. We now have an artificial intelligence. Disembodied. No sense organs to speak of. A thinking mind alone in a void.
Some variations on the Chinese Room demonstrate how thick a quagmire this discussion can be
Agreed! 😄
My point is not that an organism might find an evolutionary niche which requires no sense organs and yet develop sentience (though the universe is so vast that improbable is not impossible).
My point is that our measures and models cannot be the thing itself. Reponse to stimuli as you describe are mere measures we use to categorize minds based on our current models. Even if we believe our means are valid and useful and provide access to some level of truth: we cannot reasonably claim they allow total surety.
I've separated them purposefully because I think there's an important semantic distinction. The boredom you describe is driven by disinterest due to neurochemical dysfunction.
That's distinct from boredom as a state of mind which assumes or asserts that curiosity, entertainment, etc, are presented and consumed. There is not necessarily a chemical imbalance imposing this state on the mind.
If you like, you could reword the sentiment as; only boring people are bored (and those with depression are not necessarily boring).
I've considered that phrasing previously but found it diminishes the concept.
The reason this is attracting flame is mostly that you've included assertions in your question.
There is no "right" way to experience art, people with ADHD are not a monolith, and ADHD is symptomatically diverse.
I believe the heart of your question, if presented in good faith, is "do people who experience movies differently than I do still enjoy movies?" and the only correct answer is: it depends on the person.
It has nothing to do with money. This is something people will struggle with sans agriculture and in a perfect gift economy utopia.
Only boring people are bored (and depression is not boredom).
Boo. 👍
Congratulations! By reading this message you've finished the game. It's over and cannot be restarted unless you provide written consent that you would like to participate again. Thank you for playing, I'm sorry, and you're welcome.
Using an LLM I'd wager.
https://elv.sh/
The tour is quite comprehensive.
I'm the other one!
That's because it is a hoax. There are many good educational resources which walk laymen through the details. Here's one recent video I've directed folks to previously:
https://invidious.tiekoetter.com/watch?v=fcPkhtCoPG8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcPkhtCoPG8
Not that I have any say in the matter but I think this kind of question is fine for the selfhost community. It's still in the spirit of "how to do xyz with my own hardware / less dependence on a third party".
The other suggestions have covered my own. I did want to add that good resources for finding these kinds of tools are often called Awesome lists. Awesome self-hosted. Awesome CLI. Awesome social media. You get it. I'm not sure where the trend started but I stumbled on them after getting fed up with the likes of Slashdot and AlternativeTo.
They're usually a community-maintained git repo on one of the major platforms. This list has quite a few hits for "YouTube", for instance: https://github.com/krzemienski/awesome-video
Dan McClellan has addressed white christian nationalist abuse of biblical literature to marionette the cadavers they parade as ideology before. I'm hoping he'll provide a similar professional public eviscerstion for this as well.
I know this feeling. I'm not a doctor and I can't offer a thorough explanation. I am prompted to share my experience though in the hope that you find it helpful.
For a long time I was focused on forcing the yawn or otherwise putting effort into it as you described. What I realized was that the missing ingredient was the depth of my breath. My body is trying to relax, initiated a semi-autonomous routine to do that, and I'm interrupting it.
When I'm too tense I have trouble yawning. If that's happening the only sure way I've found to satisfy the yawn is to drop my shoulders, breathe from my stomach first, and let the yawn take over. Sometimes the jaw still ends up pushing open quite wide. Sometimes not. The key is that I'm not trying to control it either way.
Now it feels as odd to force my own yawn as it does to overthink my own breathing. The only viable solution seems to be giving up on control over it and letting my body go on autopilot instead.
I recognize reframing as an emotional regulation tactic. I struggle with a similar issue as OP and haven't considered treating my momentum management as an emotional attachment I have the ability to reframe. It made immediately intuitive sense to me though. I'm going to try that out. Thanks!
P.S. The more therapy and self-work I do the more it seems we're all still kids wrestling with coping mechanisms and survival strategies that no longer work for us. Wading through different stages of trying to understand why and (hopefully) seeking alternatives.
Why'd you stop?
This assigns too much legitimacy to the position. The working class are not capitalists because we have no capital with which to commit legal theft through property law or pay thugs to enforce those laws with violence.
The working class under capitalism are beholden to systems they often do not understand, cannot exercise agency within, and are actively stymied from prospering under.
Capitalism dehumanizes even those who support it. Those who support it are conditioned to reflexively demonize alternative systems. To rise above this culturally ingrained propaganda and advocate for alternatives requires seeing capitalism for what it is.
Alternative systems are to them what the bogeyman is to children.
Anti-clickbait excerpt: