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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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Can you prove that you are sentient/sapient?
That's one of those questions that's all too often used for some cheap attempt at a trap. The question is what sort of proof is acceptable in which line of science. You can't prove sentience in the absolute way physics can prove things. That's just natural for scientific disciplines like psychology. Furthermore y you'd first have to define what constitutes sentience/sapience
I think that's kind of the point though, we could meet space traveling aliens and deem them non sapient beings without emotions using the same logic we apply to animals because there's no empirical way to prove that any creature isn't just the sapience equivelent of a chinese room.
A p-zombie I think.
There is, though. The easiest one being that a sentient creature will react differently to it's outside world, most importantly in an unpredictable manner. Think about a fish reacting to it's surroundings and then picture a cat. One will very likely do the same thing given the same circumstances. The other won't.
So would a fish that's eaten a device that administers a small electric shock at random intervals and with random intensities. I don't think that eating such a device made the fish suddenly sentient, but it would suddenly change the outcome of your test.
The only trap here is that my point was that it's not ignored by science. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Just because we have no way of proving a theory, doesn't mean we don't try and find ways to do so. We still make hypotheses and theories even if we have no proven way, or understanding of how we might prove them. That's still science.
That's a tautological statement. We define words like sentient and sapient in terms of what we are.
Saying "this lifeform that we can't communicate with in any meaningful way (for these purposes) has emotional or cognitive experiences that we would recognize as meeting those definitions" isn't falsifiable and therefore isn't science.
If at some point sometime invents a human to mollusk translator so we can discuss our experiences, this topic can be revisited.
Until then words like "may" and "possible" should be used.