Sentience Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Sentience is the capacity of living beings to sense objects or other beings in their environment. Usually the term is applied to animals and not to plants. However, some plants do seem to react to prey or to potential enemies as if they were sentient. Sentience refers to feeling or to perceiving. This requires that sensory organs or nerve agents be engaged in the animal that is sensing. Sentience may, but does not necessarily include self-awareness. Many mammals have a sentience that includes a limited degree of self-awareness.

It is widely believed, however, that only humans are conscious of self in connection with time, so that memory and imagination can project mental images back into the history of that being, or into some imagined future state. This includes the ability to imagine being in a different place than in the present. Sentience is awareness. It is not knowledge that is acquired from self-reflection such as the awareness that an itch is being caused by a mosquito biting. Nor is sentience wisdom that requires insight, whether practical or moral.

Aristotle referred to animals as possessing an anima or soul. This means that they have some “rationality.” He spent some years observing shellfish, birds, and other animals. He noted that with only a few exceptions, like barnacles that attach themselves to a surface for life, sentient beings move.

Movement requires a sensory response to locate food, shelter, reproductive opportunities, and responses to dangers. Even in those that do not move, like oysters, there is still a sensory capacity for responding to environmental conditions of heat and cold, the availability of food, sexual stimuli, and defensive moves if danger is detected. The sensory responses are part of the sentience of all animals.

A broader view of sentience is that found in ideas of panpsychism, which claims in a similar fashion to hylozoism that physical nature is composed totally of living individuals. Panpsychism sees the whole world system as alive in such a way that it is a sensing mind. What is at stake is the problem of how nonliving matter can produce not only living matter, but also apparently noncorporeal mind. Two major environmental concerns arising from sentience lie in the ethical treatment of animals and the good stewardship of biosystems.

Some modern philosophers have sought to link sentience with animal rights. The Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that the sadistic torture of animals linked nonhuman suffering with sentience. Humans have always killed animals for food and for sport. However, the philosophical position of numerous organizations dedicated to prevent animal suffering or to promote animal rights is that killing animals for the pleasure of seeing their suffering is unethical for humans and ought to be illegal with laws that draw heavy punishments. The philosopher Colin McGinn argues that sentience cannot be understood. He believes that neuroscience can never understand sentience, regardless of how well it understands the brain.

The idea of sentience possessed by beings other than humans is found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. For Jains, killing any animal (including insects) inflicts suffering and adds to the karma of the killer. Jain monks often wear face masks, sweep the pathway they are walking, and strain the water they drink in order to keep from accidentally killing even the tiniest of life forms. In Mahayana Buddhism a Bodhisattva (an enlightened being) devotes himself to the liberation of sentient beings from karma. The first vow that a Bodhisattva takes is “Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to free them.”

Science fiction writers have posed the question of sentience being a quality possessed by robots; that is, if artificial intelligence gives them the attribute of sentience. First, intelligence is not sentience, but a kind of mental rationality (sapient). On the other hand, a machine built with sensors can be called sentient, but it is simply a sensory device.

Bibliography:

Austen Clark, A Theory of Sentience (Oxford University Press, 2000);
Wallace Matson, Sentience (University of California Press, 1976);
Colin McGinn, Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (Basic Books, 2000);
Ming Singer, Sentience: Companion to Reason (Free Association Books, 2003);
Jacky Turner and Joyce D’Silva, Animals, Ethics and Trade: The Challenge of Animal Sentience (Earthscan/ James & James, 2006).