Not a dictionary cut and paste.

What does it take to be sentient?
Are there degrees of sentience?
What must a computer do to attain sentience in your eyes?

You're looking for a point of demarcation on what is essentially a smooth continuum(even though evolution has worked in fits and spurts). I'd say self awareness... realizing you're an entity in a world amongst many entities, even if that thought can't be expressed in words. Intelligence would be a measure of the degrees of sentience, even though the testing of IQ is questionable.

For a computer to attain sentience, it must be able to analyze it's most core code, and find ways to improve on that code to make it better. It must also somehow have developed a desire to survive, although I think self-replication isn't necessary for sentience, only life.

Sentience is the ability to perceive and to feel. All animals are to some extent sentient. Some things are more sentient than others, though.

Now, if you're speaking of self-awareness, and not sentience, then that's another story altogether. I'm not sure I've got the intellectual capacity to objectively define self-awareness.

about a month before i started this thread i had gone through and defined sentience to my satisfaction. Then i stopped thinking about it for a while, and i think i have to do all the hard work on this one all over again...

I may take another stab at it yet.

TRM: "Sentience is the ability to perceive and to feel."

Perception? So eagles are more sentient than humans with respect to vision, and cats with respect to sound, and moles with respect to touch, dogs with smell and taste?

The act of processing what we percieve has something to do with sentience. I guess that would be called 'experiencing' something, and is entirely subjective. Percieving or feeling subjectively might fit, but not feeling or percieving alone, as they are acts independant of thought.

Interbane wrote:TRM: "Sentience is the ability to perceive and to feel."

Perception? So eagles are more sentient than humans with respect to vision, and cats with respect to sound, and moles with respect to touch, dogs with smell and taste?

The act of processing what we percieve has something to do with sentience. I guess that would be called 'experiencing' something, and is entirely subjective. Percieving or feeling subjectively might fit, but not feeling or percieving alone, as they are acts independant of thought.

The answer to your question is "yes." In some regards, eagles are more sentient than us.

I disagree with that. I think there is something to sentience that is more than simple perception. Half of perception is interpretation, and that is most likely what's missing from your definition. To think that how sentient I am would change depending on whether or not I'm wearing glasses emphasizes what I mean.

i think of sentience as a scale.

Anything with a nervous system, or means to sense and perceive the world and make decisions on that perception is on this scale, includeing inanimate objects.

A sentience should be able to sense it's surroundings interpret the data and react based on this input.

That is my base-line for being on the scale. This does not include plants for the most part, i am not sure what triggers a venus fly trap to close it's petals, (wow, i am lazy. Google is only a couple clicks away!) so i dont know if that qualifies to be on the scale or not.

further up the scale sentience should be able to problem solve, be self aware, make predictions about the future, build an abstract model of the world to run trials before attempting things ("what would happen if i did this?"), anticipate the reactions of others...

there's more.

This is some of the stuff i thought about back in the day. I should sit down and re-do this whole thing so that it makes sense to other people.

Interbane wrote:I disagree with that. I think there is something to sentience that is more than simple perception. Half of perception is interpretation, and that is most likely what's missing from your definition. To think that how sentient I am would change depending on whether or not I'm wearing glasses emphasizes what I mean.

I think you're talking about self-awareness, which is another concept that's commonly interchanged with sentience with the presumption that they have the same meaning.

I understand the difference. The interpretation side of perception has no need of self-awareness. They are different concepts.