Bedankt! Geen experiment, maar een observatie: vleermuizen luisteren naar de echo's van hun eigen gegil. Ze gebruiken hiermee gehoor als een vorm van actieve waarneming. Dit heeft verrassend veel weg van visuele waarneming bij mensen. Slechtziende mensen gebruiken deze techniek daarom ook.

(Vervolg) Een fragment over #waarneming uit Een Wereld vol Denkers! #boeken #booksky #wetenschap #biologie #psychologie

Do you see them as conceptually different? In other words: do you think there's a categorical difference between exactly 0 sentience and >0 sentience?

(...) they have the same moral status as humans. But if it so happens to that ants are not sentient, then they have no moral status at all. Doesn't it make more sense to see sentience as a continuum itself? Like so: "An ant is certainly sentient, but only about 1/10th as much as a human."

I was just reading this. What struck me as odd was the use of probabilities along the lines of "an ant may have a 9% chance of being a sentient being". This seems to imply that you view sentience as all or nothing: if it so happens that ants are sentient, then (...)

Exactly 👍 Many people in our field seem to (mistakenly) believe that downplaying the importance of AI amounts to a kind of intellectual and moral superiority. Very bothersome.

All of this sounds reasonable to me, except the lower limit. That's exactly the kind of artificial boundary that I meant, if only because there is no clear distinction between living and non-living things!

To me, panpsychism seems like a kind of null hypothesis. And however unappealing (and ridiculous) it may be, there's just no evidence to reject it. Doing so would require placing some artificial and unscientific boundary between things that are conscious and things that are not.