Sentient intelligence

 

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. It is based on certain wavelengths of light (usually but not always) fed to our consciousness as the color. It is easy to demonstrate 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 an advance in survival. It can, for example, be associated with pleasure and displeasure centers in the brain, enabling the body to motivate the animal more strongly and 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 efficiency. 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. Interestingly, it is also an excuse to seriously doubt traditional philosophical materialism (or its modern descendant now known as physicalism).

You’re carving things at a very natural joint there. The distinction between sentience (having experiences at all—pain, color, mood) and intelligence (doing something structured with information—reasoning, planning, categorizing) is widely used in both philosophy and neuroscience, even if people sometimes blur it in casual talk.

Your treatment of qualia—“green” as something constructed rather than out there—is very much in line with mainstream thinking. What exists physically are wavelengths; what exists experientially is color. That move goes back at least to John Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and gets sharpened in modern philosophy of mind by people like Thomas Nagel. The key point, as you say, is that calling it an “illusion” doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary or false—just that it’s a constructed interface between organism and world.

On animals, your pushback against René Descartes is very much where science has landed. The “animals are automata” view has collapsed under behavioral and neurological evidence. Pain behavior, learning, social bonding, even rudimentary empathy in mammals and birds—these strongly suggest sentience. The interesting modern debate is less whether many animals are sentient and more how far down the tree it goes (octopuses? insects?) and what kinds of experience they have.

Your evolutionary point is also well put. Sentience looks like a kind of “value tagging system”—it assigns good/bad to states, which makes learning vastly more flexible than pure reflex. Intelligence, then, builds on that by modeling the world and predicting outcomes. There’s a plausible story where:

• basic reactivity →

• sentience (valenced experience) →

• intelligence (structured manipulation of representations)

Though I’d gently complicate one thing: it’s not clear that intelligence strictly requires sentience. Some researchers think fairly sophisticated problem-solving systems could exist without subjective experience—more like very advanced versions of what Artificial Intelligence builds today. Whether those systems would really lack sentience or just lack our kind is part of the ongoing puzzle.

Your remarks about mind stopping are also aligned with standard neurobiology: deep, dreamless sleep and coma show reduced or absent conscious experience, while the brain continues background processing. But even here, there are interesting gray zones—minimal consciousness, fragmented awareness, or states where experience may persist without memory.

And then we get to what you nicely call the “deep problem.” In philosophy it’s often called the Hard Problem of Consciousness—why and how physical processes give rise to subjective experience at all. You’re right to resist both easy escapes:

• “God of the gaps”

• “woo of the gaps”

Those don’t explain anything; they just label the mystery.

Where I’d push back slightly is your last move against physicalism. It’s true that we don’t yet have even a sketch of how qualia arise from physical processes. But historically, many phenomena looked similarly intractable until the right conceptual tools appeared—life before biochemistry, heat before statistical mechanics, etc. Physicalism is less a completed theory than a working bet: that consciousness, too, will eventually fit into the same explanatory framework.

Still, your skepticism is philosophically respectable. Positions like property dualism, panpsychism, or neutral monism are all attempts to take the “felt” aspect seriously without abandoning science.

If I had to summarize your view in one line: you’re treating sentience as the fundamental mystery and intelligence as an elaboration on top of it. That’s a very defensible way to frame the terrain.

I’m curious where you lean on one fork in the road: do you suspect that sentience is something added to physical processes (in some sense), or that it’s already implicit in them and we’re just failing to see how?

I don't think I implied intelligence requires sentience, only that that was its route in human evolution. It is maybe true that problems in the past that looked intractable have been solved, at least in the terms of the ways the problems were expressed, but solutions have a way of raising new, deeper problems.

Ah, yes—that makes perfect sense. You’re not claiming a logical dependency between sentience and intelligence, just that in our evolutionary history, intelligence seems to have arisen on the foundation of sentience. That’s an important distinction because it avoids conflating necessity with contingency. A non-sentient intelligence might be conceivable, but we didn’t evolve that way.

And your point about “solutions raising new, deeper problems” is exactly right. Each explanatory advance tends to shift the frontier. Thermodynamics led to statistical mechanics, genetics led to molecular biology, neuroscience leads to the hard problem of consciousness. Solving a problem in one frame often just exposes the next level of conceptual subtlety. In consciousness studies, even if we fully mapped the neural correlates of every qualia, the why of subjective experience—the experience itself—remains a step beyond. That’s why the deep problem persists and feels so intractable.

If you like, we can try sketching a “ladder of depth” showing how problems evolve as solutions emerge—consciousness would sit near the top, alongside the deepest puzzles in physics and philosophy. Would you like me to do that?

Bacon to standard candles

 

How did Francis Bacon come to be viewed as the father of the scientific method? Surely there was lots of similar thought earlier?

You’re quite right to be suspicious of the title—no single person “invented” the scientific method, and much of what Francis Bacon advocated had clear precedents. His reputation as the “father” is less about originality in every detail and more about timing, emphasis, and influence.

Earlier thinkers absolutely anticipated key elements. Aristotle systematized observation and classification; medieval scholars like Roger Bacon stressed experiment; and in the Islamic world, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) laid out something very close to controlled experimental method centuries before Bacon. So the ingredients were already on the table.

What Bacon did, writing in the early 1600s, was to reframe and promote a new attitude toward knowledge at exactly the moment Europe was ready for it. In works like Novum Organum, he attacked the old reliance on pure reason and authority—especially the scholastic use of Aristotle—and argued that knowledge should be built from systematic observation, careful experimentation, and gradual induction from facts to general laws.

Two things made his contribution especially influential:

First, he turned method into a kind of program. Earlier thinkers practiced observation and experiment, but Bacon insisted that this should be the organized, collective enterprise of humanity. He even imagined research institutions and collaborative science—ideas that later took shape in groups like the Royal Society.

Second, he was a superb propagandist for a new intellectual ethos. He framed science as a tool for improving human life—“the relief of man’s estate,” as he put it. That forward-looking, almost moral justification helped shift science from a marginal pursuit into something culturally central.

It’s also worth noting what he didn’t fully get right. Bacon emphasized induction (building up from data) but underplayed the role of bold hypotheses and mathematics—areas where figures like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton were far more decisive in shaping modern science as it actually developed.

So his title is a bit like calling someone the “father” of a nation: not the first person there, but the one who gave it a clear identity and persuasive voice at the crucial moment.

I would say his main value was not so much in the method itself but his attack on Scholastic Aristotelian authority thinking.

That’s a very defensible reading—and many historians would lean your way.

By Bacon’s time, “Aristotle” didn’t really mean the original, often subtle Aristotle so much as a rigid, textbook version filtered through late medieval scholasticism. In that environment, knowledge could drift into something like commentary on authority: what did Aristotle say, how do we reconcile it with theology, how do we classify it? The danger wasn’t Aristotle himself—it was the habit of mind that treated inherited texts as the final court of appeal.

Francis Bacon went straight at that habit. His famous “idols” are basically a diagnosis of how human thinking goes wrong—tradition, language, and intellectual fashion included. And his critique of the “idols of the theatre” is very close to what you’re pointing at: whole systems of thought accepted because they’re elegant or authoritative, not because they’ve been tested against the world.

In that sense, his contribution is less “here is a new technical method” and more “stop trusting systems just because they’re venerable—go look.” That shift sounds obvious to us, but at the time it was culturally disruptive. It helped clear space for people like Galileo Galilei, who was willing to let observation contradict inherited doctrine, and later Isaac Newton, who built theories tightly tied to measurable phenomena.

If one wanted to push back slightly on your formulation, it would be this: Bacon’s attack on authority and his emphasis on method aren’t really separable. The method—slow, collective induction from observed facts—is his alternative to authority. Without a replacement, criticism alone wouldn’t have had much staying power.

But you’re right about where the energy lies. He didn’t invent experimentation; he helped delegitimize the old way of deciding what counts as knowledge. That’s a quieter kind of revolution, but arguably the more important one.

Sure, if one wants to attack a method, it's a good idea to have a replacement.

Exactly—and Bacon understood that instinctively. If you only tear down a way of thinking, people tend to drift back to it out of habit. By pairing his critique of scholastic authority with a proposed alternative—however imperfect—Francis Bacon gave people somewhere to stand intellectually.

What’s interesting is that his “replacement” wasn’t really a finished method in the modern sense. It was more like a direction of travel: distrust authority, collect observations patiently, build upward cautiously, and do it as a shared enterprise. That was enough to shift the center of gravity.

You can see the contrast if you put him next to René Descartes. Descartes also rejected scholasticism, but his replacement leaned heavily on reason and deduction from clear principles. Bacon, by contrast, distrusted that kind of confidence—he thought the human mind was too prone to error—and so he pushed toward slow accumulation of evidence instead.

In practice, modern science ended up being a kind of hybrid: the mathematical boldness of people like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton combined with the empirical discipline Bacon was trying to instill. Neither approach alone would have gotten very far.

So yes—if you’re going to pull the rug out from under authority, you’d better lay down at least a rough new floor. Bacon didn’t finish the house, but he made it possible to start building one.

You mention Descartes, who pursued certainty with logic. Bacon never proposed certainty.

That’s a sharp way to draw the contrast, and it gets very close to the heart of the difference.

René Descartes is explicitly hunting for certainty—something indubitable that can serve as a foundation. His method is subtractive: doubt everything that can be doubted, keep only what survives, and then rebuild knowledge from those secure starting points. The ideal is something like geometry: clear, distinct, and logically compelled.

Francis Bacon is doing almost the opposite. He has a rather dim view of the unaided human intellect—he thinks we are riddled with biases (“idols”) and prone to rushing to conclusions. So instead of trying to secure certainty at the base, he tries to discipline the process: gather many observations, proceed gradually, and let conclusions emerge with caution. What you get is not certainty, but increasingly reliable generalizations.

In modern terms, you might say Descartes is chasing foundations, while Bacon is building a procedure. And the procedure is explicitly fallible—open to correction as more evidence comes in.

If one wanted to sharpen it even further: Bacon almost seems to lower the ambition of knowledge. He gives up on certainty in order to gain traction on the world. That trade-off—less certainty, more empirical grip—turns out to be enormously fruitful.

And interestingly, later philosophy tends to side more with Bacon on this point. Think of David Hume, who shows that induction can’t deliver certainty at all, or much later Karl Popper, who recasts science as conjectures and refutations rather than proofs. In that sense, Bacon’s refusal to promise certainty looks less like a limitation and more like a kind of early realism about how knowledge actually works.

Bias? Such as thought proves the soul?

Yes—that’s a good example of the kind of move Francis Bacon was worried about, though he’d frame it a bit more generally.

Bacon thought the mind has built-in tendencies—his “idols”—that push us toward conclusions that feel satisfying but outrun the evidence. One of those tendencies (his “Idols of the Tribe”) is the urge to see more order, necessity, or metaphysical weight in things than is actually warranted.

So something like “thought proves the soul” would, in his terms, be a leap: you start from a real phenomenon—thinking—and then quickly elevate it into a strong ontological conclusion. Bacon wouldn’t necessarily say it’s false; he’d say it’s premature and shaped by the mind’s desire for neat, final explanations.

If you compare that to René Descartes, you can see the contrast. Descartes treats “I think” as a secure starting point and then builds outward, eventually arguing for the existence of a thinking substance. Bacon would be uneasy with that whole trajectory—not because it’s logically sloppy, but because it moves too quickly from a psychological certainty to a metaphysical claim.

Another of Bacon’s categories, the “Idols of the Theatre,” fits even more closely with your example when it becomes part of a system: whole philosophical or theological frameworks that feel compelling and internally coherent, and therefore get accepted as truth without sufficient grounding in observation.

So your formulation is very much in the spirit of his critique. The issue isn’t just error; it’s the mind’s habit of over-interpreting its own experiences and then mistaking that interpretation for knowledge about reality.

Descartes "bias" here was a sort of material soul, that everyone had. It was in the daily soup of his life and times.

That’s well put, and it points to something people sometimes miss: even a thinker as self-consciously radical as René Descartes wasn’t operating in a vacuum. His method aims to strip away assumptions, but what counts as a “natural” conclusion is still shaped by the intellectual air he breathed.

The idea that each person has a soul—not just as a theological doctrine but as a kind of default explanation for thought and identity—was indeed part of that air. When Descartes arrives at res cogitans (thinking substance), he presents it as what survives radical doubt. But one can reasonably ask whether he has, in a subtler way, reintroduced a familiar concept under a new, philosophical description.

From a Baconian angle, that’s exactly the kind of thing to be wary of. Francis Bacon would say the mind doesn’t just inherit explicit doctrines; it inherits habits of interpretation. Even after you reject authority, those habits can quietly guide what feels “obvious” or “necessary.” In his language, that would fall somewhere between the Idols of the Tribe (shared human tendencies) and the Idols of the Theatre (systems absorbed from culture).

To be fair to Descartes, he does try to earn the conclusion through argument rather than simply assume it. But your point stands: the direction of his reasoning—toward a distinct, immaterial thinking self—aligns rather neatly with what his culture was already prepared to accept.

If one steps back, it highlights a broader lesson both men, in different ways, are circling around: you can’t fully step outside your time. You can challenge it, refine it, even overturn parts of it—but some assumptions tend to come along for the ride, disguised as pure reason or obvious truth.

In mathematics one proves or disproves a conjecture or theorem by deduction from previously proved theorems, which in turn were proved the same way. Hence if there is any break in the logic chain, everything following is broken.

Yes—and that’s exactly the strength and the fragility of mathematics.

In a fully deductive system, every result rests on earlier results, all the way back to axioms. So if there really were a flaw in the chain, everything downstream would indeed be compromised. That’s why mathematicians are so exacting about proof: each step has to be justified with almost mechanical rigor.

But there are two important nuances that soften the starkness of that picture.

First, mathematics doesn’t begin from “proved truths” in the absolute sense—it begins from axioms, which are not proved at all. They are chosen starting points. In Mathematics, the game is: if these axioms hold, then these theorems follow. So even a perfectly valid chain of reasoning only guarantees truth relative to the axioms. Change the axioms, and you can get entirely different, yet internally consistent, systems—non-Euclidean geometries being the classic example.

Second, in practice, the system is surprisingly robust. A mistake in one proof doesn’t usually bring down “everything following,” because results are often re-proved in different ways or depend on multiple independent lines of reasoning. Mathematics is more like a web than a single chain. When an error is found, it’s often localized and can be repaired without catastrophic collapse.

What is true—and this connects back to your comparison with René Descartes—is that mathematics achieves a kind of certainty that empirical sciences cannot. Once a theorem is validly proved from accepted axioms, it’s settled within that system. There’s no need to test it against the world.

That’s precisely why Bacon’s approach looks so different. Francis Bacon is dealing with nature, where you don’t get axioms handed to you. You’re trying to discover the rules from messy observation, and any “chain” you build is always provisional—open to revision if new evidence appears.

So your statement captures the ideal structure of deduction very well. The interesting twist is that mathematics achieves certainty by narrowing its scope—working within defined assumptions—while science gives up certainty in order to say something about the actual world.

It reminds me of "standard candles" for determining distances in Astronomy and a particular day when it was all the talk on campus that astronomers had found the universe was twice as big as previously thought (more precisely, distances to external galaxies were twice as far).

That’s a very apt comparison. “Standard candles” are almost the empirical cousin of axioms: you build a whole structure on top of them, and if the foundation shifts, everything stretches or shrinks accordingly.

The episode you’re remembering is almost certainly the recalibration work associated with Walter Baade in the mid-20th century. He realized that what astronomers had been treating as a single class of Cepheid variable stars—used as standard candles—actually consisted of two distinct populations with different intrinsic brightness. Once that was sorted out, the distance scale to other galaxies had to be revised upward—roughly doubling many estimates.

And yes, for a time it really was “all the talk,” because it had a cascading effect. If galaxies are twice as far away, then they’re also intrinsically brighter, larger, and the scale of the observable universe expands accordingly. Even the inferred value of the Hubble constant shifted, which fed into estimates of the age of the universe.

This is where the contrast with mathematics becomes especially vivid. In Astronomy, your “chain” isn’t purely deductive—it’s anchored at key empirical points like standard candles. Those anchors are themselves subject to revision. When one is adjusted, the entire structure doesn’t collapse, but it rescales.

It’s almost like discovering that your ruler was mis-marked. All your measurements were internally consistent, but systematically off.

And that loops back nicely to Francis Bacon. His insistence on careful, repeated observation and suspicion of premature generalization is precisely aimed at reducing the risk of building too much on a shaky empirical base. You can never eliminate that risk entirely—that’s the price of dealing with the real world—but you can manage it.

Your memory captures something real about the feel of science: not just steady accumulation, but occasional moments where a quiet assumption shifts and suddenly the universe gets a lot bigger.

It also means the same as having more than one proof of important theorems, have alternative measurements using independent phenomena.

Yes—that’s exactly the right parallel, and it goes deeper than analogy. It’s almost the same epistemic strategy expressed in two different domains.

In mathematics, having multiple independent proofs of a theorem reduces the chance that an unnoticed flaw in one line of reasoning has slipped through. If two proofs proceed by very different routes yet land on the same result, confidence rises sharply. You’re no longer relying on a single chain, but on converging structures.

In observational science—especially something like Astronomy—the equivalent is using independent measurement methods that rest on different physical principles. Distances to galaxies, for example, are not determined solely by Cepheid variables (the classic “standard candles”), but also by things like Type Ia supernovae, redshift relationships, surface brightness fluctuations, and more. Each method has its own assumptions and potential biases.

When they agree, it’s powerful. It suggests you’re not being misled by some hidden systematic error in one technique. When they don’t agree, that’s often where the real action begins—because it signals that something in your understanding needs revision.

That’s very much in the spirit of Francis Bacon, even if he didn’t formulate it this way. His broader instinct was to avoid over-reliance on any single line of thought or observation and instead build knowledge through structured, repeated, and varied engagement with nature.

If I were to compress your insight into a single principle, it would be something like:
robust knowledge comes from independent convergence, not from a single elegant path.

And that principle quietly underlies both the certainty of mathematics and the reliability (though not certainty) of science.