Looking at your post for anything worthy of a reply...I would say I think we've gotten off topic. Thrice removed from it, in fact. This has ceased to be about the Flat Earth Society, has ceased to be about the gravity of ideas promoted by such backward groups, and has even ceased to be about your merits as co-director of Crimson Echoes. At this point you're arguing about something that belongs in the appropriate threads of the Analysis Section. So let's cut it off here and move on.
In that spirit, there is one thing you said to which I really would like to reply, and that has to do with the definition of
sentience. In my life outside the Chrono Compendium, the exact nature of sentience is a subject near and dear to my heart, and one that I have worked on extensively over many years, conversed over with many people, and even studied academically! If you ask me, the hardest part of understanding sentience is simply coming up with a good definition for it. And maybe that isn't surprising, since a good definition implies a good understand of the entire concept. But how interesting, then, that the ultimate final exam of one's understanding may be as simple as defining a single word!
And truly, for all its usual authority as a source of expertise, the dictionary definition in this case does sentience no justice. We cannot make sentience synonymous with words like
awareness,
consciousness,
cognition, and so forth, because these refer to different concepts. And, notwithstanding the etymology of the word itself, we cannot rely upon the older definition of sentience, which refers as you mentioned to feeling as opposed to thought. Sentience is neither feeling nor thought, but again a different concept.
In the past couple of years, my work has focused on the
will. What is the will? Commonly it is understood to be our power of choice. But what does that mean, really? The will is more than just the power of choice; it is the seat of identity, and, crucially, it is thus an abstract projection. If I asked you to point to yourself, what would you point to? Your arm? Your head? Your chest? It'd all be wrong. The will is what you would want to point to, but the will does not exist as a simple physical structure. It is an interpretation, an abstraction, a product of something else. And I've come to the fascinating conclusion that the "something else" is sentience, that sentience and the will are related in the most intimate way. And here's how: The will is that which is produced by being sentient. In other words, sentience manifests itself in the form of the will. That is why I almost always refer to the will as the "sentient will." (You may find this in other Compendium topics.) In more rigorous terms, my hypothesis is that sentience is responsible for the will. That is a testable proposal.
But not before we get our definitions in order. If the will is the product of sentience, then what is sentience? We still need that one essential definition. And, after learning about the will, I have begun to come around to attacking this question frontally. Starting from the neurons and synapses of the human brain, and working our way up, we graduate from the physical stuff of the brain and get into something called cognition, and this time the dictionary acquits itself quite well by offering a truly helpful definition:
cognition
1. The mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.
2. That which comes to be known, as through perception, reasoning, or intuition; knowledge.
But if the brain itself is the
object, and cognition is the
process, then what is the
condition? I think you can see where this is headed!
Sentience is the condition that results from having a brain such as ours, and cognition is the brain's process of knowing, and of course the brain itself is the physical apparatus. If you like analogies, this is much in the same way as water is an object, rain is a process, and wet is the condition of the object that results from the process.
In that regard, sentience is a gradient, not an absolute "yes" or "no" condition, and I don't think I ever made that clear in the Lavos discussions. I was using the human level of sentience as a cutoff, but perhaps I would have done better to point all of this out a long time ago.
We now also have a model for understanding the will, which as the product of the condition of sentience is itself the seat of identity--now you can see why that makes sense--and also an abstract projection--which now also makes sense--and that the will, therefore, is not an object, nor a condition, but an action.
It's fascinating stuff. At least I think so. And once you get these simple (hah) definitions out of the way, then you'll have a powerful new perspective through which to dabble in everything from cybernetics to epistemology.
