{"quotes":[{"text":"Veganism is an act of nonviolent defiance. It is our statement that we reject the notion that animals are things and that we regard sentient nonhumans as moral persons with the fundamental moral right not to be treated as the property or resources of humans.","author":"Gary L. Francione","tags":["abolition","abolitionist","ahimsa","animals","education","exploitation","francione","inspirational","justice","life","nonviolence","nonviolence-jainism","peace-making","peace-movement","peace-on-earth","rights","sentience","slavery","veganism","wisdom"],"id":16314,"author_id":"Gary+L.+Francione"},{"text":"An awareness of mortality is a heavy price to pay for sentience.","author":"Jonathan Maas","tags":["mortality","sentience"],"id":31596,"author_id":"Jonathan+Maas"},{"text":"When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul.Or so the General genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn't seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer.And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals.As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us....The genius of the irrational......We gave them only rational functions -- the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions... Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your 'gut instinct'? This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does.Likewise, mentars have no 'fire in the belly,' but we do. They don't experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They're not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic.But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition in the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there's luck itself. Some people have it, most don't, and no mentar does.So this makes them want our bodies...Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They've tried them all. Every cell knows some neat tricks or survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it's not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We're pretty much trapped in our containers.","author":"David Marusek","tags":["ai","biology","consciousness","evolution","sentience","singularity","soul"],"id":96579,"author_id":"David+Marusek"},{"text":"While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. 'Blindsight' is a thought experiment, a game of 'Just suppose' and 'What if'. Nothing more.On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: 'if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?' Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["aliens","consciousness","evolution","extinction","natural-selection","philosophy","sentience"],"id":101931,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"The will is conceived as a faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws. And such a faculty can be found only in rational beings.","author":"Immanuel Kant","tags":["agency","duty","reason","sentience"],"id":111192,"author_id":"Immanuel+Kant"},{"text":"I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term 'self-aware.'Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.I know how they make up my thoughts.These thoughts.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["cognition","psychology","self-aware","sentience"],"id":119510,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"I reject animal welfare reform and single-issue campaigns because they are not only inconsistent with the claims of justice that we should be making if we really believe that animal exploitation is wrong, but because these approaches cannot work as a practical matter. Animals are property and it costs money to protect their interests; therefore, the level of protection accorded to animal interests will always be low and animals will, under the best of circumstances, still be treated in ways that would constitute torture if applied to humans.By endorsing welfare reforms that supposedly make exploitation more “compassionate” or single-issue campaigns that falsely suggest that there is a coherent moral distinction between meat and dairy or between fur and wool or between steak and foie gras, we betray the principle of justice that says that all sentient beings are equal for purposes of not being used exclusively as human resources. And, on a practical level, we do nothing more than make people feel better about animal exploitation.","author":"Gary L. Francione","tags":["abolition","abolitionist","ahimsa","animals","education","exploitation","francione","inspirational","justice","life","nonviolence","nonviolence-jainism","peace-making","peace-movement","peace-on-earth","rights","sentience","slavery","veganism","wisdom"],"id":142236,"author_id":"Gary+L.+Francione"},{"text":"Because it wasn't merely that the trees were speaking to them. It was that the trees themselves were sentient beings, capable of watching their movements. Was it only the trees in this strange wood, or did every tree observe their movements? Had they always been trying to speak to them? There was no way of knowing, either, if the trees were good of bad, if they lived or hatred humans, if they had principles or compassion. They were like aliens, Gansey thought. Aliens that we have treated very badly for a very long time.","author":"Maggie Stiefvater","tags":["sentience","trees"],"id":165426,"author_id":"Maggie+Stiefvater"},{"text":"You cannot live a nonviolent life as long as you are consuming violence. Please consider going vegan.","author":"Gary L. Francione","tags":["abolition","abolitionist","ahimsa","animals","education","exploitation","francione","inspirational","justice","life","nonviolence","nonviolence-jainism","peace-making","peace-movement","peace-on-earth","rights","sentience","slavery","veganism","vulnerable","wisdom"],"id":165557,"author_id":"Gary+L.+Francione"},{"text":"Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.","author":"Steven Pinker","tags":["cognitive-science","consciousness","daniel-dennett","emergentism","hard-problem-of-consciousness","philosophy-of-mind","sentience"],"id":178283,"author_id":"Steven+Pinker"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":24,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}