I would suggest making a distinction between sentience and intelligence or "thinking."
Sentience has to do with senses, and by extension also with emotions. The "sound" of one hand clapping is what we sometimes call frustration -- an unfulfilled expectation -- there should be a sound but there is not. This hoary old koan teaches how emotions and sensations are essentially the same sort of thing -- things we "feel" or experience, but are entirely in our mind.
Yes what we see and hear and so on is entirely in our mind. It is an illusion (not a delusion -- there is something outside our mind generating it). The brain or something of that sort processes incoming information and feeds it to us as sensations ("qualia"). "Green" has no physical reality -- what we see as green is invented in the brain or mind -- what it is based on are certain wavelengths of light (usually but not always) fed to our consciousness as the color.
It is easy to demonstrate (showing Descartes had it all wrong) that a lot of animals are sentient. Descartes said that what they do looks like sentience, but is really just reflex. Of course there are things we do that are reflex, but we recognize them as such because they happen before we are consciously aware. That animals suffer too, though, shows me when they are in pain there is more than reflex going on, and one has to wonder what Descartes could have been thinking.
Sentience is a huge advance in survival. It can, for example, be associated with pleasure and displeasure centers in the brain, enabling the body to motivate the animal much more strongly and much more flexibly. So we perceive pain not just as a sensation but as something very unpleasant and bad -- and the animal does not have to wait for mutations that tell it not to do certain things.
Intelligence comes later, and probably needs the presence of sentience to evolve, and is associated with logic processing and association and categorization of things and stuff like that. A lot of animals can do those things too, but apparently it takes a lot more brainpower to do it well, hence our brains use four times as many calories ongoing as does a chimpanzee brain. Languages obviously fit into this as allowing these activities even more efficiently, and that is where I would also put mathematics.
Does the mind ever stop experiencing and thinking? I guess that depends on what "mind" is. If it is just an illusion generated by brain, then of course it stops thinking when we sleep without dream, when we are comatose, and when we die. Maybe that is the case even if mind is something more.
What sentience is and what it is when we experience qualia (including self awareness) is the "deep problem" of neurology, and, I would say, also of philosophy and psychology and maybe even physics. Because neither I nor anyone else has an answer (no one can pretend to even have an idea how to approach it scientifically) is not an excuse to jump to the god of the gaps, nor to jump to the woo of the gaps, but it is an excuse to seriously doubt traditional philosophical materialism (or its modern descendant now known as physicalism).
Sentience has to do with senses, and by extension also with emotions. The "sound" of one hand clapping is what we sometimes call frustration -- an unfulfilled expectation -- there should be a sound but there is not. This hoary old koan teaches how emotions and sensations are essentially the same sort of thing -- things we "feel" or experience, but are entirely in our mind.
Yes what we see and hear and so on is entirely in our mind. It is an illusion (not a delusion -- there is something outside our mind generating it). The brain or something of that sort processes incoming information and feeds it to us as sensations ("qualia"). "Green" has no physical reality -- what we see as green is invented in the brain or mind -- what it is based on are certain wavelengths of light (usually but not always) fed to our consciousness as the color.
It is easy to demonstrate (showing Descartes had it all wrong) that a lot of animals are sentient. Descartes said that what they do looks like sentience, but is really just reflex. Of course there are things we do that are reflex, but we recognize them as such because they happen before we are consciously aware. That animals suffer too, though, shows me when they are in pain there is more than reflex going on, and one has to wonder what Descartes could have been thinking.
Sentience is a huge advance in survival. It can, for example, be associated with pleasure and displeasure centers in the brain, enabling the body to motivate the animal much more strongly and much more flexibly. So we perceive pain not just as a sensation but as something very unpleasant and bad -- and the animal does not have to wait for mutations that tell it not to do certain things.
Intelligence comes later, and probably needs the presence of sentience to evolve, and is associated with logic processing and association and categorization of things and stuff like that. A lot of animals can do those things too, but apparently it takes a lot more brainpower to do it well, hence our brains use four times as many calories ongoing as does a chimpanzee brain. Languages obviously fit into this as allowing these activities even more efficiently, and that is where I would also put mathematics.
Does the mind ever stop experiencing and thinking? I guess that depends on what "mind" is. If it is just an illusion generated by brain, then of course it stops thinking when we sleep without dream, when we are comatose, and when we die. Maybe that is the case even if mind is something more.
What sentience is and what it is when we experience qualia (including self awareness) is the "deep problem" of neurology, and, I would say, also of philosophy and psychology and maybe even physics. Because neither I nor anyone else has an answer (no one can pretend to even have an idea how to approach it scientifically) is not an excuse to jump to the god of the gaps, nor to jump to the woo of the gaps, but it is an excuse to seriously doubt traditional philosophical materialism (or its modern descendant now known as physicalism).
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