Sentience
Discussion
The Three Attributes That Enable Sentience in Human Beings:
#1. A brain of adequate complexity to enable an understanding of language.
#2. A voice box complex enough for speech.
#3. Hands with opposable thumbs for recording and preserving language.
Many species have two of these attributes. Humans have all three. ㅤ
I haven't thought about the need for spoken language in self reflection, BUT for just raw sentience you can live moment to moment. Sentience just means you exist as a living being, essentially. That you feel and observe the world. As opposed to being a rock.
I think you're adding too much to it.
I was just having a conversation about sentience recently with an atheist. It is one of the mysteries of life that can never have a satisfactory natural explanation. It implies the supernatural.
Sentience is to be aware. The degree of your awareness is reliant on language. Lesser beings are incapable of your level of awareness, due to their lack of capacity for language.
He’s right though, the word you’re looking for is sapience/(self-)consciousness
Dogs are sentient, A.I. may one day become sentient, neither need thumbs
Sap/sep - "to taste" implies ones free will of choice tasting either perceivable (need) or suggested (want). The needed taste of hunger and the wanted taste of appetite are very different from one another.
Artifice implies ones ignorance of natural (perceivable) for artificial (suggested)...each one using AI sends ignorance through it to another. The consequences thereof...anyone can feel.
One cannot use something artificial without sending ones will through it, hence willing artificial into natural sentience.
https://communities.win/c/MillionDollarExtreme/p/19AKYOl8Hm/alex-jones-explains-life-on-eart/c
People ask if machines can be sentient. They do not ask if a it can be sapience/(self-)consciousness. For starters, that first word means ape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation%29
(Look at this. You have me citing a Star Trek episode.)
I believe that animals are sentient to a lesser degree. As they have no ability to maintain a long term language, and no ability to think in a structured manner.
You are missing the point of the three attributes. They create the possibility of language and the written words. Take Dolphins for example. They are said to have a language. But posses no ability to write it down. Large brain. Large voice box. No thumbs. Lesser being. Lesser consciousness. Less sentience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
This definition claims that it 'may not'. Which is an odd way of saying it does.
Now go ask your dog how he feels about Jesus.
Do you not think a dog is reasoning when he responds to the beep sound coming from his collar warning him not to keep moving towards the edge of the property? He has to think back to his past experiences, associate the sound with the eventual zap, and then reason whether or not the zap is worth investigating the target of his attention
Honestly I agree with your core point about language and it’s deeply intertwined relationship with intelligence, but I’m not sure I agree with your less important points about written language - the obvious chicken and egg in that scenario is the spoken language coming long before the written language - I doubt you’d call humans from 5,000 years ago “non-sentient” just because they didn’t write down their language
Do you remember that meme that made the rounds a year or two ago about certain people being unable to visualize (e.g. an apple) in their “mind’s eye”? I made a post on the theme, about how if your language lacks a word for an apple, you will be fundamentally unable to conjure one to your mind, though I can’t find it in the pile right now lol
All WAS before one came into being. That implies sentience being send from origin (all perceivable) into being (ones perception), hence each being feeling different from one another.
Is/es - "to be" implies a being suggesting what IS, while ignoring what WAS perceivable. How to suggest? By shaping words to trick each other to hold onto definitions, while ignoring that which sends sentience into being.
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To speak OUT contradicts self reflection. One can only re-flect (response to bend) from within (life) a line (inception towards death).
Growth within loss implies bending potential; each one breathing within all implies bending; rule/reg - "to move in a straight line"...hence bending (life) the line (inception towards death); to straiten up the 33 spinal vertebrae...one needs to bend.
Does a rock feel extreme heat? Does a rock adapt to extreme heat by melting? How could a solid not feel liquid, while being in it?
OP suggests that sentience is based on compliance to others aka "yes masa; me understand; me speak your language; me repeat what you say, massa", yet before compliance and suggestion can come together...the fluid natural order is separating each solid being from one another, hence sentience responding to being send.
All perceivable adds (inception) and removes (death) each ones (life) perception...the suggestions of others tempt one to believe in more additions to all.
Nature cannot add too much or to little...only each partial into whole.