I think you’re putting your finger on a particularly stubborn distinction: sentience is not the same problem as intelligence.
An animal can be quite unintelligent in any interesting sense and yet there can be something it is like to be that animal. It can feel pain, perceive light, experience fear, seek warmth, enjoy food. We infer this partly from behavior, but there is also something more fundamental in our judgment: we recognize other creatures as fellow experiencers. We don't have a scientific instrument that detects “having an experience.”
And I think your objection to the two traditional escape routes is quite reasonable.
Materialism has an awkward explanatory gap. We can describe the physical machinery with extraordinary precision: neurons fire, networks integrate information, neurotransmitters alter states, particular brain regions become active. We can even correlate particular neural activity with reported experiences. But none of that description seems to contain the experience itself. Knowing everything about the wavelength of red light and everything about the neurons responding to it doesn't obviously tell us why there is a redness to seeing red.
That doesn't necessarily prove that consciousness is non-material. It does establish something weaker but important: we don't presently know how a physical description becomes a first-person description. Saying “consciousness is what the brain does” may ultimately be correct, but it is more a proposed identity than an explanation of why the identity holds.
Then spiritual explanations have almost the opposite problem. They can make the mystery disappear linguistically—“the soul experiences”—without actually explaining anything. And, as you say, once you enter that territory, the possibilities proliferate according to culture and historical accident. An immortal Christian soul, a Buddhist stream of consciousness, an animist spirit, and so forth cannot all simply be the scientific explanation of the same phenomenon.
There is an interesting third position, though, which I suspect may be closer to what you're circling around: perhaps sentience is a fundamental feature of reality rather than something that has to be manufactured out of something fundamentally non-sentient.
That is roughly where various forms of panpsychism and related philosophical positions end up. Not necessarily “rocks have little humanlike thoughts,” which is the caricature, but something more modest: perhaps physical reality has an experiential aspect at its most elementary level, and sufficiently organized systems produce the enormously richer kind of unified experience that we call consciousness.
That doesn't solve the problem; it relocates it. But relocation may be intellectually respectable when the alternative is pretending that the problem has been solved.
And there is another distinction I think is especially useful:
Detection isn't experience.
A thermostat detects temperature. A camera detects light. An AI can detect that someone has said something sad and produce an appropriate response. None of those facts, by themselves, establish that anything feels like anything from the inside.
Which brings us rather naturally to your earlier thought about AI. We may eventually build systems whose intelligence enormously exceeds ours while remaining uncertain whether there is anybody home inside them. And the uncomfortable possibility is that behavioral tests may never completely settle it, because the thing we are trying to establish is precisely a private phenomenon.
That may be one of the few genuinely hard problems where we know the phenomenon with greater certainty than we know what the phenomenon is.
Exactly—and that gets at the strongest intuitive objection to panpsychism.
If by “sentience” we mean there is something it is like to undergo a state, then saying that a rock has some infinitesimal experience seems to buy us very little. The rock doesn't merely have a tiny version of your experience of being kicked; it apparently has no experience of being kicked at all.
There is also a nasty problem of composition. Suppose electrons have microscopic “experiences.” How do billions of them somehow combine into one experience belonging to a brain? Why don't we have billions of tiny consciousnesses sitting alongside our own? Panpsychism can move the mystery downward, but it doesn't obviously explain the remarkable thing we actually want explained: unified subjective experience.
Your position seems more like:
Sentience is a property that emerges under particular conditions, but we don't know what those conditions fundamentally amount to.
And I think that's a much more defensible position than either “everything is conscious” or “consciousness is an immaterial soul.”
The really interesting question then becomes what distinguishes a sentient system from a merely responsive one. A dog recoiling from a kick is suggestive. A dog avoiding the person who kicked it later is considerably more suggestive. A dog apparently anticipating something unpleasant, seeking comfort, becoming playful, and modifying its behavior according to its past experience makes the inference stronger still.
But none of those observations gives us the philosophical certainty we have about our own consciousness. We know our pain directly; we know the dog's only by inference.
And that produces a wonderfully awkward scientific situation: sentience may be the most certain phenomenon we know from the inside and one of the least directly observable phenomena from the outside.
A rock, meanwhile, remains admirably free of existential complications. Kick it and it just sits there.
Indeed. The rock has achieved what Buddhist monks spend decades attempting: complete indifference to insult, pain, and circumstance.
Though unlike the monk, the rock has never been tempted to write a memoir about it.
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