12/11/04
I am going through kind of a funk again. It’s not nearly as bad, just a result of two rough counseling sessions. So I’ve not gotten much writing done this week bur really, do I care? Nope.
I did, however, get some work done on ‘Scholarly Ways/Centrics’ this week. It is up to just over 12K already. I put up a snippet of the original version. It’s not all that great but it’s just a hint of what it is like now.
Lorna and I had an interesting discussion on ‘sentience’ today. What makes an organism sentient? Where is that line between being self aware and doing what we are programmed to do? A dog risks its life to push a child out of the way of a speeding car. Is that sentience? Or is it just what the dog was bred to do? One resource on Wikipedia says that ‘sentience is the ability to experience suffering.’ I am not sure I understand that, however. In order to determine sentience we would have to see the world through the eyes of that being. We cannot assume that the showing of teeth in what looks like a big smile is in fact, a big smile.
In an ant colony, the ants are born into their roles. There job was determined while they were still in the egg. They do not stray from that path. In the movie, ‘Bugs Life’, one of the ants realizes there has to be a better way to do things. He sees himself as capable of much more than he was born to do. He wants to make a difference. THAT is sentience. But how to show that? How do we know that the dog wants to make a difference by risking its life? How do we know that Timmy really is in the well?
Then there is ‘sapience’, which is putting humanoid characteristics onto/into something. Artificial Intelligence is a good example of sapience.
In Real Life, I ordered some most of Lorna’s Christmas presents already. I hate to try and go shopping this time of year so I do it online. The price for shipping is well worth it to me. I ordered them from several different sites. Now I have to try and remember if I got everything. Oh, and her birthday is in January so some of the stuff I found I won’t order until then.