2

Definitions

I'm aware that there are differences in usage for 'sentience', 'consciousness', and 'awareness' as broadly covered (PhilSE)

So:

  1. This question considers 'sentience' as the ability to have sensual perception.
  2. This question considers the mind as the mind part of the mind-body problem.

Assumptions

The first assumption of this question comes from Erwin Schödinger:

"So while the direct sensual perception phenomenon tell us nothing as to its objective physical nature (or what we usually call so) and has to be yet discarded from the outset as a source of information, yet the theorical picture we obtain eventually rests entirely on a complicated array of various informations, all obtained by direct sensual perception." - Schrödinger, 1967, p. 102

I take Schrödinger to mean that sensual perception cannot come from physical phenomena (which seems reasonable it is related to the explanation of emergence, at least this question supposes it). Thus, it seems this question takes Schödinger's thoughts for granted. Also, given the broader discussion over the mind-body relation, this question seems to assume that the mind exists, is not reducible to lesser things, has a causal effect, and is not a physical phenomenon.


Question

What I'd like answered is specifically about what philosophy has to say about the relationship between 'sentience', in the modern philosophical sense, and the received notions of 'mind'. If any individual has a mind does it imply that he has sentience and vice versa?


Schrödinger, E. (1967). What is life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge: University Press

J D
  • 19,541
  • 3
  • 18
  • 83
Erdel von Mises
  • 196
  • 1
  • 19
  • 2
    Does this answer your question? [What are the differences between sentience, consciousness and awareness?](https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/4682/what-are-the-differences-between-sentience-consciousness-and-awareness) – Conifold Oct 21 '21 at 00:59
  • 1
    This is definitely an interesting question but potentially a little broad -- is there any chance you could share a little more here? (Particularly helpful is anything you can share about what you might have been reading or studying that's made this interesting to you from a philosophical point of view..) – Joseph Weissman Oct 21 '21 at 02:13
  • @JosephWeissman Did you think I fixed it? – Erdel von Mises Nov 01 '21 at 12:25
  • 1
    Revised some grammar and syntax. Added some links. – J D Nov 01 '21 at 14:33
  • is this useful [Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism, by Galen Strawson](https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Realistic-Monism---Why-Physicalism-Entails-Panpsychism-Galen-Strawson.pdf) ? – Nikos M. Nov 02 '21 at 08:55

2 Answers2

2

Sentience, capable of sensing.

Consciousness, awareness of things. Often implied is self-consciousness or self awareness.

Studies on coma patients show some of their brains can respond to sounds, and this helps indicate which are more likely to wake up - it suggests at least less damage. So there is a degree of sentience there, sensing, reactivity, but not consciousness.

We aren't conscious when sleeping, but continue to be able to sense - we can be woken by noise or shaking. Anaesthesia can stop sensing and consciousness temporarily, without ceasing the capacity for these.

I would look to Global Workspace Theory to understand how the difference is one of architecture. Most of what our brain does happens autonomously, out of awareness. It is the unexpected, disruptions, surprises, that typically enter awareness, for action, greater awareness, and reconciling through attention of higher functions. To become conscious of them.

I like the Buddhist view, that mind arises at the 'gates', between world and mind. The external senses and the internal experience arise together. And other forms of awareness and mental process arise from there.

We can look to evolution to understand development of higher functions, like the connectome of c. elegans which has a specialised neuron for sensing self-other, builds towards proprioception, and a bicammeral mind with hemispheric specialisation of one half towards self one towards other, visual learning from mirror neurons to neocortex for social landscape as indicated by Dunbar number.

So, sentience can happen without integration - like dinosaurs with multiple brains. But for there to be a subject, a consciousness, that involves integration, and higher processing.

CriglCragl
  • 19,444
  • 4
  • 23
  • 65
  • "So, sentience can happen without integration - like dinosaurs with multiple brains.", What about octopi? – Erdel von Mises Oct 22 '21 at 12:02
  • Also, even you answer is interesting, I was thinking more about a individual that is sentient/concience in a atemporal sense. – Erdel von Mises Oct 22 '21 at 12:05
  • @ErdelvonMises: Yes I nearly mentioned octopuses (it's Greek root not latin) who's tentacles do act autonomously - but clearly they integrate, & are highly coordinated. Humans have additional nerve-centres too, like the solar plexus, & the gut-brain axis is proving significant in medicine of mood-disorders. Snails would be a better example, with separate clusters of ganglia https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20925-brainy-molluscs-evolved-nervous-systems-four-times Atemporal..? What, souls or something? How can a dynamic activity, sensing & reacting, happen without time – CriglCragl Oct 22 '21 at 13:15
  • I am refering in a no physicalist/materialist sense of Consciousness. – Erdel von Mises Oct 23 '21 at 03:17
  • @ErdelvonMises: If consciousness is metaphysical, how does it affect matter? Do you think minds can violate entropy, like Maxwell's demon? – CriglCragl Oct 23 '21 at 13:14
  • @ErdelvonMises It's somewhat contradictory to refer to a physical mind. At best, such a phrase might denote the brain. A mind by definition is abstract intuitively. Materialists have propositions for explaining how materialism accounts for the abstract, but they do not consider the mind physical. – J D Nov 02 '21 at 13:51
  • Global Workspace Theory does not match well with observed instances of consciousness and unconsciousness. Driving is a highly integrated activity, yet one can daydream or listen to music or a book on tape while driving -- which should not be possible per GWT. Higher Order Processing theory has even more clear disconfirmations -- pain from a pinprick is VERY immediate and conscious yet has no higher order processing at all. – Dcleve Nov 10 '21 at 14:50
  • @JD -- the ontic status of abstract objects in physicalism is -- one of its major failings. So yes, the concept "mind" is problematic. Most physicalists gloss over this issue -- their focus is on CONSCIOUSNESS, which physicalists are generally very clear, that they consider to be a physical phenomenon. Behaviorism, functionalism, neurologic or algorithmic identity theory -- these are claims that consciousness IS physical. What this physical consciousness then DOES -- mind -- yes that is an abstraction, and part of Popper's world 3. Physicalism is basically a denial of world 2. – Dcleve Nov 10 '21 at 14:56
  • @Dcleve This is a meaty claim. To be clear, are you claiming that the majority of physicalists consider the mind to be physical by essence, or that they, in some form of reductionism, believe the mind reduces to the physical. It seems to me that many physicalists, materialists, what have you, rely on emergence as an explanatory principle to reconcile how the mind reduces to the brain. That's not the same thing as saying the mind is the brain. – J D Nov 10 '21 at 15:15
  • I do agree that physicalists have historically wrestled with notions regarding the objectivity of certain aspects of the mental, however, I think I'd be wary of capturing the wide spectrum of physicalist, materialist positions as being identical to the claim that all is physical by nature. Eliminative materialism is not the only materialism. Your claim that THOSE claims are 'consciousness IS physical' relies on the ambiguity of the copula in the proposition. It's simply too easy to retort, 'that depends on what your definition of is is. :D – J D Nov 10 '21 at 15:25
  • @JD -- Every one of the 20 or so definitions that Stoljar evaluated in https://www.amazon.com/Physicalism-Problems-Philosophy-Daniel-Stoljar/dp/0415452635 rejected the non-physicality of consciousness. Same with Melnyk https://www.amazon.com/Physicalist-Manifesto-Thoroughly-Materialism-Philosophy/dp/0521827116/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=melnyk+physicalist&qid=1636559493&s=books&sr=1-1. Papineau as well https://www.academia.edu/819823/The_Rise_of_Physicalism. Both property dualism, and emergent psycho-physical dualism -- are dualism. There are dualist alternatives to spiritual dualism. – Dcleve Nov 10 '21 at 15:56
  • @Dcleve Thanks for the recommendations. – J D Nov 10 '21 at 16:07
  • @JD Popper's https://www.amazon.com/Self-Its-Brain-Argument-Interactionism/dp/0415058988/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+self+and+its+brain&qid=1636561104&s=books&sr=1-1 advocates for emergent psycho-physical dualism, which seems to be increasingly the most widely held form of dualism among "naturalist" leaning philosophers. – Dcleve Nov 10 '21 at 16:21
  • @Dcleve: That's a ludicrous objection. Driving is exactly an example of something that can be highly 'automated', run with specialised subroutines. It is *novelty* which enters the global workspace for attention & integration. A pinprick, very unexpectedly, is different from say, in a study where it's expected. If you randomly get pain, you try to figure it out as a priority - don't you think? Substrate-independence shows how mind can require physical instantiation, but BE organisational. – CriglCragl Nov 10 '21 at 20:35
  • Taking GWT as a theory, and then evaluating whether integrating activities that need to be shared across the GW are actually conscious, is the basic process of testing the hypothesis. Calling such a test "ludicrous" is to be anti-science. Popper's alternative view, which presaged system1/system2 thinking from Kahneman, that consciousness is what is needed to deal with uniqueness and crises, INDEPENDENTLY of whether they cross the GWS -- yes that is a better fit to driving and pinpricks. It is also a different theory. – Dcleve Nov 10 '21 at 21:51
2

This answer has several parts.

First, you are misinterpreting Schrodinger. He is not denying that perception can come from matter, he explicitly leaves that open (nothing can be "discarded" yet, and no inference as to its ultimate source is yet valid either). Instead, he is just outlining the starting point for all our worldview IS our first-person and immediately experienced perceptions. The buildup of a "theory of the world" and "theory of other minds" is a complex inferential process, resting on this perceptual foundation. Whether identity theory, delusionism, or some other materialist view of mind can explain this process, or not, is still open.

Second -- YES, Schrodinger assumes that mind exists in this quote. For there to be "perception" there has to be a "perceiver". However, before running with this insight, hold for a bit. Thinking on the philosophy of mind has advanced a bit since Schrodinger's book, and so has the process of neurology, and its insights into our unconscious minds. It is better now to distinguish between experiencing, and perceiving. Perceiving is of SELECTED information, ORGANIZED and HIGHLIGHTED for our consciousness, by our unconscious minds. Our vision, for example, is not of the pixels that our eyes receive, but those pixels are grouped, using edge detection algorithms, and clumped into recognizable objects, and those objects are prioritized if they are moving, and particularly if they twig the "face" category, etc. For hearing -- continual background sounds are zeroed out for us, so that we can hear subtle changes, and baby/infant crying immediately catches our attention, etc. Here are two philosophic references that discusses the details of how our neural networked brains do information digestion for us. (See The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul and Astonishing Hypothesis The Scientific Search for the Soul.) These are both eliminative materialists, who try to dismiss the reality of consciousness, but their info on the nature of the UNconscious processing our brains do, prior to perceptions entering our conscious awareness, is highly relevant. As perceptions are highly post-processed, they have a higher theoretical, interpretive, and inferential content, and perceptions are not what you should be focusing on, as they are neither simple nor direct. Quales, in contrast, are what we experience. They are basically how our unconsciousness presents these digested perceptions to our consciousness. Some quales are experiential, others are organizational.

What this discussion shows is that perception, mind, and consciousness are not simple or non-equivocable terms. And doing reasoning with these sorts of unclarified terms, will likely lead to invalid reasoning. One should instead focus on quales and experience, as they explicitly require an experiencer. And also look at the creation of a theater by our unconscious mind, for our consciousness. These are the two clarified terms which can do some of the work you are hoping for to make an anti-physicalist argument.

Neither quales, nor this theater-producer/viewer relation between unconsciousness and consciousness, are comfortable concepts for materialist views of consciousness. And they are easily accommodated with an interactive dualist view. BUT -- this quote DOES NOT preclude that a physicalist model could be found that could work. As Quine noted, theory is ALWAYS underdetermined by evidence! So no it does not presume anti-physicalism. Nor does it presume causation for mind, nor irreducibility for quales.

However, according to Jaegwon Kim, the 50 years of philosophic investigation of reductionism and quales subsequent to Schrodinger's book have shown them to be irreducibly non-physical. (See Physicalism, or Something Near Enough) And evolutionarily thinking about consciousness readily shows that it must be causal. (See "William James and the Evolution of Consciousness".) But these are arguments which must be constructed, they are not obvious upon inspection from the quote. Combine then with the theater construction, and the experiencer, and you can make some progress in your project.

J D
  • 19,541
  • 3
  • 18
  • 83
Dcleve
  • 9,612
  • 1
  • 11
  • 44
  • But how I know that I have qualia? – Erdel von Mises Nov 09 '21 at 14:14
  • That we have qualia, is an exception to the indirect realism that Schrodinger assumes for most of the world. We have direct realism access to the reality of qualia. We also have direct realism access to basic reasoning. We use qualia, and basic reasoning, to infer everything else, the "theoretical picture we obtain eventually". I distinguish between qualia and perception, because some of that inference is being done unconsciously, and is embedded in what we "perceive". – Dcleve Nov 09 '21 at 17:28
  • So, If any individual has a mind does it imply that he has qualia and vice versa? – Erdel von Mises Nov 09 '21 at 18:07
  • Awareness of qualia seems to be central to consciousness. Mind -- is a broader term, and we can do lots and lots of our "mind" activities unconsciously, which seems to mean "without qualia". Thinking Fast and Slow has a good discussion of the massive amount of "mind" activity we do unconsciously, with system 1. – Dcleve Nov 09 '21 at 18:50
  • I've upvoted, edited a few typos, and added the URLs. – J D Nov 10 '21 at 15:31
  • "The buildup of a "theory of the world" and "theory of other minds" is a complex inferential process, resting on this perceptual foundation. Whether identity theory, delusionism, or some other materialist view of mind can explain this process, or not, is still open." This is an excellent claim. – J D Nov 10 '21 at 15:35
  • 1
    @JD That should be the default presumption for almost any empirical questions in areas which are not settled consensus. To clarify, I was speaking of what Schrodinger said, not my own beliefs. I consider functionalism, delusionism, and identity theory all to be refuted by test -- and the less widely held materialist models of consciousness to be increasingly implausible -- as they are symptoms of the desperation of an increasingly regressive Physicalist Research Programme (to use Lakatos's terms). If physicalism is to be credible, it must somehow incorporate pluralism and emergence. – Dcleve Nov 13 '21 at 07:25