I’m trying to better understand the differences between sentience, sapience, and sophonce, to help me better develop my speculative biology projects. I thought it might be helpful to also look at what a lack of sentience looks like.
I repeatedly run into people saying starfish aren’t sentient, which as far as I understand means it just immediately reacts to stimuli without any forethought.
However, I also see that they feel pain, which Wikipedia says is an indicator of sentience. I think understanding how a starfish reacts to something like pain would help me a lot with this thing, in differentiating sentience from non-sentience.
If a starfish lacks memory, pain is just a sensation that makes them move away from the threat, or makes them attack, and makes sense in a non-sentient animal. In this case, the starfish only knows to flee or defend itself from a pain-causing thing when it actually causes pain, but doesn’t learn to avoid that thing by associating it with the pain.
If a starfish DOES have memory, and can remember to associate pain with something and avoid it, though, that makes things weirder. Either it means starfish are sentient, or the divide between sentience and non-sentience is blurrier than I thought.
In: Biology
>Either it means starfish are sentient, or the divide between sentience and non-sentience is blurrier than I thought.
This is a huge unsolved question in biology, neurology, psychology and philosophy. Many very smart people have tried to find the line where sentience starts, but all fail for several reasons:
First there is not even a definition what sentience even is. In general people say it’s a “feeling of **me**-ness”, but how would you even differentiate that from another feeling?
Then you cannot measure it. It could be that Tim your neighbour is a “philosophical zombie” that acts like everyone else, but actually lacks this feeling of “me-ness” and sentience and only works like a computer reacting to stimuli and stored memories. You couldn’t tell the difference from the outside though. Tim’s own words are the only source for figuring out wether he is sentient or not.
Memory itself is propably not enough for sentience. Because otherwise a simple pocket calculator could be sentient.
This question is very old though. Even in ancient times people wondered wether animals have “souls”
Starfish apparently can have memory. I found a recent paper that tried classical conditioning (think Pavlov’s dogs) and got starfish to associate turning their tank’s lights off with feeding.
This was only last year and so researchers don’t yet know how they do this as they don’t have a brain, only a distributed nervous system.
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