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?