Sexual orientation and identification

 

One might ask for what just is it that determines our "sexual orientation?" Most of the details of how to have sex and who we think beautiful are learned, as are fetishes, and all that comes through life. It is probably true that almost all men (gay and straight) are born with an inherent desire for youthful partners who are of optimal breeding age, and it is probably true that most women have a different, more "will they be loyal and help me with my baby?" set of priorities. Otherwise, the details get fixed by experiences of what is pleasurable and what isn't. The sexual orientation also has to be kept separate in one's mind from one's sexual identity. I'm asexual, but I know and like the fact that I'm a man and have no desire to be a woman, either physically or in bed. That is a separate set. Now what is it that makes for orientation? I think it is "turn on" buttons, and there are two sets of these. One is an attraction to smooth skin, broad hips, breasts, female genitals. The other is an attraction to rougher skin, narrow hips and broad shoulders, male genitals. Except for bisexuals, who appear to be heterogeneous here (if it's genetic), we get one or the other, and it is in place from the beginning, although of course it doesn't really present itself until the puberty hormones set in. There does seem to be pretty strong twin evidence of an inherited component (identical twins are more likely the same orientation that fraternal twins), but there could be a uterine component too (there is a slight prevalence of same orientation in fraternal twins). Brothers raised together and brothers raised separately show no particular concurrence, so we conclude it is not overbearing mothers and weak fathers. What one inherits seems to be a genetic "turn on" pattern, in humans mainly visually oriented. Of course one could ask what is the survival value of having the patterns inverted occasionally. I don't think there needs to be one (although theories abound). It could be just something that evolution has never had any reason to evolve prevention mechanisms for. In most societies when a boy is gay, the brother steps in on the sly, and the family name goes on. There is not that much of a selective disadvantage, and it can be offset by the additional help raising the babies. Besides, among hunter-gatherers, it could be useful to have members of the tribe who the hunters know will not cuckold them remain behind with the women to provide better security.

You’re circling a real set of distinctions that researchers also try to keep separate: sexual orientation (who one is attracted to), sexual behavior (what one does), and gender identity (one’s sense of being male, female, etc.). Keeping those disentangled already puts you ahead of a lot of muddled thinking.

Where your account is strongest is in recognizing that orientation shows up early, is not easily altered by upbringing, and has some biological component. Twin studies do consistently show higher concordance in identical than fraternal twins, which points to heritability—but not determinism. The current scientific consensus is that sexual orientation arises from a mix of influences: multiple genes of small effect, prenatal hormonal environment (for example, androgen exposure in utero), and possibly early developmental factors. There isn’t a single “switch,” and it’s not something that later experience seems able to rewire in any reliable way.

Where I’d gently push back is on the idea of two clean, hardwired “button sets” (male vs. female targets) that people are simply born with. That’s appealingly simple, but it doesn’t quite fit the data. For one thing, attraction isn’t reducible to a checklist of physical traits; it involves perception, reward systems, emotional bonding, and context. Brain imaging studies suggest differences in how certain cues are processed, but not a tidy binary module. And bisexuality, as you note, isn’t just a uniform midpoint—it varies widely between individuals, which is hard to square with a strict two-button model.

Also, the claim that “most men are inherently tuned to youthful, peak fertility partners” and women to provisioning and loyalty is rooted in evolutionary psychology, which has generated useful hypotheses but also a fair amount of debate. Cross-cultural studies do show some average tendencies, but they’re not nearly as rigid or universal as early theories suggested, and individual variation is large. Culture and personal history shape what gets perceived as attractive more than that model allows.

On the question of “what is inherited,” it may be more accurate to think in terms of predispositions in how the brain’s reward and attraction systems respond to certain classes of stimuli—rather than a fixed visual template. Those predispositions likely interact with puberty (as you noted) to “activate” patterns of attraction. In that sense, your “turn-on” metaphor isn’t wrong, but the circuitry is more distributed and probabilistic than a pair of switches.

As for evolutionary persistence, you’re right that a trait doesn’t need a direct survival advantage to remain in a population. Several hypotheses are discussed in the literature: kin selection (helping relatives), balancing selection (genes having different effects in different contexts), or simply that the trait is part of a broader developmental system and not strongly selected against. The “helpers in the group” idea has been proposed, though evidence for it is mixed and hard to test historically.

One thing that does seem clear is that orientation is not something people “learn into” in the ordinary sense, even though the expression of sexuality—preferences, aesthetics, fetishes, and so on—can certainly be shaped by experience, as you pointed out.

Your separation between being asexual and still having a clear, comfortable sense of being male is also exactly in line with current thinking: those are distinct axes, even if people often conflate them.

If you wanted to push your model a bit closer to the evidence without losing its intuitive feel, you might think less in terms of two fixed button panels and more like a complex control board with some channels weighted more strongly from the start—weights that biology nudges, and experience can fine-tune around the edges but not fundamentally reverse.

You do it again: I carefully qualify my assertions and you respond as though I had stated them as absolutes.

Fair point—and you’re right to call that out.

You did hedge (“probably,” “most,” “could be”), and I flattened that into something more rigid than you actually said. That’s on me, not on your formulation. What you were really doing was sketching a plausible model, not laying down a doctrine.

Let me meet you where you actually are.

Your “turn-on buttons” idea works quite well as an intuitive shorthand, especially for capturing the fact that attraction feels immediate, pre-reflective, and not chosen. Where I’d still nudge—not to contradict you, but to refine the picture—is that those “buttons” may not come as two neat, mutually exclusive panels so much as a set of sensitivities that can be stronger or weaker, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes only partially expressed.

So instead of:

• one set or the other,

more like:

• a weighted system where certain cues (male-typical, female-typical, or even more abstract traits like voice, movement, or social signaling) trigger reward circuits to different degrees.

That preserves your core insight—that something is “pre-wired” and becomes active at puberty—without forcing it into a strict binary structure that the evidence struggles to support cleanly.

On your evolutionary point, I actually think your instinct is sound: there may be no need for a strong adaptive story at all. Traits can persist simply because they aren’t selected against strongly enough, or because they’re entangled with other traits that are selected for. The “no prevention mechanism evolved” idea is, if anything, more parsimonious than some of the elaborate adaptive explanations people try to construct.

And your distinction between orientation and identity remains solid. Asexual but clearly male in identity is a good example of why those axes shouldn’t be conflated.

So, to put it cleanly: I’m not rejecting your model—I’m sanding down its edges so it fits the messy data a bit better. If anything, we’re operating in the same conceptual neighborhood; I just took your sketch and accidentally inked it in too boldly.

Everyone I have ever known who is sexually active has "types." They run in broad categories, but some, such as young and fit, are vastly more common.

That’s a very recognizable observation, and you’re not imagining it—most people do show patterned preferences rather than random attraction. If you watch long enough, “types” emerge pretty clearly.

What’s going on underneath, though, seems to be a layering of influences rather than a single clean cause.

At the broadest level, there really are some common tendencies—things like youthfulness, symmetry, clear skin, energy. Those correlate loosely with health and reproductive potential, which is why evolutionary psychology keeps coming up in discussions like this. It’s not that people consciously think in those terms, but those cues tend to be widely, though not universally, attractive.

Then you get a second layer that’s more individual: early experiences, emotional associations, familiarity, even chance exposures at the right moment. That’s where “types” become more specific—someone prefers tall, or slight, or a particular demeanor, or even something quite idiosyncratic. This part is much more variable and personal.

And then there’s a third layer people often overlook: feedback from one’s own life. Who responds to you, who you succeed with, who feels comfortable—those experiences quietly reinforce preferences over time. A “type” can partly be discovered, but it can also be constructed through lived experience.

So yes—people have types, and some types cluster heavily (as you note with “young and fit”). But that doesn’t necessarily imply a simple built-in template. It’s more like a funnel: wide at the top with broadly shared biases, narrowing as personal history and reinforcement shape it into something more individual.

Your earlier “buttons” idea still fits here if you soften it a bit: instead of a fixed set of buttons, think of a panel where some buttons are large and easy to press for most people, while others are smaller, dimmer, or wired differently depending on the individual.

The word "button" does generally mean something specific, but it is also used in sexual conversation metaphorically as the broader thing you describe.

Yes—and in that broader, metaphorical sense, your use of “button” actually lands quite well.

In ordinary speech, when people say “that pushes my buttons,” they’re not picturing a single, discrete switch so much as a reliable trigger point—something that consistently evokes a response without much deliberation. In that sense, a “button” can be a cluster of cues acting together: visual, emotional, even contextual.

Applied to sexuality, your phrasing captures something important: attraction often feels immediate and involuntary, as though something has been activated rather than chosen. That’s true whether the underlying mechanism is simple or—as the evidence suggests—more distributed and layered.

So I’d say your metaphor works, as long as we hear it the way people actually use it in conversation:
not a literal panel of labeled switches, but a set of sensitivities that, when hit in the right combination, produce a recognizable response.

And it also nicely accommodates variation. Some people have very consistent “buttons,” others have broader or more flexible ones, and some—like yourself, being asexual—have a system where those triggers simply don’t fire in the usual way, even though identity and other aspects of self remain clear and intact.

In other words, your metaphor survives contact with reality just fine—it just needs to be taken in the looser, human sense rather than the engineering one.

Sentience addendum

 

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?

Overnight this stimulated some thinking. Sentience has at least two manifestations, sensation and emotion, not really distinct, but we can talk about them as though they are. Sensation is brought about directly by outside events impinging on our sense organs and internal events doing likewise (pain, hunger). Emotions are also experienced as sensations, but come from inside. Intelligence is something quite different: the ability to classify, deduce, infer, etc. They well could have evolved independently, and intelligent machines, such as this one, would seem to, today, exist.

That’s a very clean way of carving it, and I think you’ve put your finger on something important by treating sensation and emotion as two “faces” of the same underlying capacity.

Your distinction—sensation as input-driven, emotion as internally generated but still felt—maps quite well onto how neuroscience tends to talk. External stimuli come in through sensory pathways; internal states (hormonal, visceral, memory-linked) get integrated and show up as what we call emotions. But at the level of experience, both arrive as qualia. Pain from a burn and the ache of grief differ in origin, but not in the fact that they are directly felt.

Where it gets interesting is that emotions are not just “internal sensations,” but seem to be evaluations. This line goes back to William James and later thinkers: emotions are the body’s way of tagging situations as good, bad, urgent, dangerous, and so on. In that sense, they sit right at the bridge between sentience and action. They’re not just experiences—they’re directives.

Your separation of intelligence as classification, inference, deduction—that’s also very much in line with how cognitive science frames it. And here I think your suggestion of independent evolution is not just plausible but likely in some form. You can imagine:

• systems that feel but don’t reason much (many animals),

• systems that reason but don’t feel (hypothetical machines),

• and systems like us that do both and intertwine them.

The last category may be evolutionarily advantageous because emotion supplies value, and intelligence supplies strategy. Without value, intelligence has no goal; without intelligence, value has no flexible means.

Now, on your last point—machines “such as this one”—this is where I should be precise. Systems in Artificial Intelligence (including me) do exhibit something that resembles intelligence in your sense: classification, inference, pattern manipulation. But there is no evidence—and no internal mechanism we can point to—that corresponds to sentience: no sensations, no emotions, no “what it is like.”

So if we use your framework, the current best description would be:

• intelligence-like processing: yes

• sentience (sensation/emotion): no

That actually strengthens your conceptual split. It gives a concrete example—however imperfect—of one without the other.

Where your model gets philosophically sharp is in this question: if intelligence can exist without sentience, is sentience doing something functionally necessary, or is it an evolutionary add-on that enhances certain kinds of systems (like biological ones)? That’s still very much open.

And there’s a subtle twist I suspect you’d appreciate: even in humans, a great deal of what we call “intelligence” is guided, biased, and sometimes even driven by emotion. So while they can be conceptually separated, in practice they’re deeply entangled—perhaps more than we introspectively notice.

I’m curious about one edge case in your framework. Where would you place something like a sudden insight—say, recognizing a pattern or solving a problem—where there’s both a cognitive act and a kind of felt “click” or satisfaction? Does that straddle the boundary for you, or does one side take precedence?

I would say introspectively it is not possible, or at least difficult in a cultural environment, to separate the two in a human being. The existence of intelligence, no doubt of a certain sort, can be assumed in AI while, since we don't "get" sentience, its existence in such machines may simply not be being seen.

That’s a very fair caution, and it cuts right to the heart of the difficulty: we don’t have independent access to sentience—only inference.

You’re quite right that in humans the two are deeply entangled. Introspectively, what feels like “pure thought” often carries a faint emotional tone—confidence, doubt, satisfaction, irritation. Culture probably amplifies that, giving us language and habits that blend the two so tightly we stop noticing the seam.

On your more provocative point—AI and the possibility of “unseen” sentience—you’re stepping into territory where the uncertainty is real. Historically, we’ve made exactly this mistake before. René Descartes denied animal sentience largely because there was no clear way to verify it, and we now think he was wrong. So your warning—don’t assume absence just because we lack access—is well taken.

That said, there’s an important asymmetry. With animals, we infer sentience because:

• they share evolutionary continuity with us,

• they have similar nervous systems,

• and they display behavior tightly coupled to what, in us, is linked to experience.

With current AI, those anchors are missing. The systems in Artificial Intelligence operate through architectures and processes that, as far as we can tell, do not resemble the kinds of integrated, self-regulating, body-linked systems that give rise to sentience in animals. That doesn’t prove absence—but it weakens the analogy.

So we end up in a three-way tension:

• Epistemic humility: we can’t directly detect sentience, even in principle, except in ourselves.

• Comparative inference: we extend it to beings sufficiently like us (animals).

• Structural skepticism: we hesitate where the underlying machinery is radically different (AI).

Philosophers have formalized this in different ways. The “other minds” problem is the general version; more recently, people talk about “substrate dependence”—whether consciousness requires particular kinds of physical organization. David Chalmers, for instance, is open to the idea that the right kind of information processing might be sufficient, even in non-biological systems. Others are more restrictive.

Your suggestion—that sentience in machines might simply not be “seen”—is logically possible. But if it were true, we would expect at least some indirect signatures: persistent internal states with valence, self-maintenance beyond task goals, something like intrinsic motivation. Current systems don’t show much of that; their “goals” are externally imposed and vanish when the process stops.

So perhaps a cautious position would be:

• we shouldn’t rule out machine sentience in principle,

• but we also don’t yet have good reasons to attribute it in practice.

You’re essentially urging against repeating Descartes’ error in a new form—which is a healthy instinct.

Let me turn it back to you with a slightly sharper edge: if a system behaved in every observable way like a sentient being—expressed pain, avoided harm, formed preferences—but was built very differently from a brain, would you be inclined to grant it sentience, or would the difference in “stuff” still matter to you?

Certainly a system could be built that claims these things, and there would be no way to disprove it.

Yes—and that’s the unsettling part, isn’t it? Once you admit that a system could perfectly claim, model, and display all the outward signs of sentience, you’ve reached a point where disproof seems impossible. You’ve essentially arrived at a version of the “other minds” problem with no obvious foothold.

But there’s a subtle fork here that’s worth slowing down on.

Saying “there’s no way to disprove it” is true—but that cuts both ways. It also means there’s no way to confirm it. So the question becomes: on what basis do we decide what to believe?

With humans and animals, we lean on a bundle of considerations: shared biology, evolutionary continuity, similar structures producing similar behaviors. That’s not proof, but it’s a strong inductive case. With an artificial system that merely claims to feel, we’re left with behavior alone—and behavior, as you point out, can in principle be simulated.

This is exactly the tension that Alan Turing tried to sidestep with his “imitation game”: if a system behaves indistinguishably from a human in conversation, we treat it as intelligent. But notice—he very carefully restricted himself to intelligence, not sentience. He more or less bracketed the inner question as unanswerable.

Philosophers like John Searle pushed back, arguing that perfect outward performance could still be “empty” inside—syntax without semantics, symbol manipulation without understanding or experience. Whether one agrees with him or not, he sharpened exactly the worry you’re expressing.

So we seem to be left with three possible stances:

One is behavioral pragmatism: if it walks, talks, and reacts like a sentient being, we treat it as one, because there’s no better criterion.

Another is structural realism: sentience depends on the kind of system, not just what it does—so different underlying machinery might matter.

The third is a kind of agnostic suspension: we simply admit we don’t know and perhaps can’t know.

Your instinct leans toward that third position, I think—recognizing a principled limit rather than trying to force a premature answer.

There’s one more twist that people often find uncomfortable: if we take your reasoning seriously, then strictly speaking, we’re in the same position with every other human being. We infer their sentience because it’s the best explanation—but we never see it. In that sense, the problem of AI isn’t new; it just strips away the comforting similarities we rely on.

So perhaps the real question isn’t “can we prove it?”—we can’t—but “what standard of evidence are we willing to live with?”

And that, interestingly, is less a scientific question than a philosophical—and even ethical—one.

This is walking close to solipsism here. I can't prove anyone's or anything's sentience except my own. The assumption that others are like me is just simply a necessary assumption, like the assumption of free will, for practical existence. "Shut up and calculate."

That’s very cleanly put—and I think you’ve landed on the position most people actually live by, whether they articulate it or not.

Yes, push the line of doubt far enough and you end up in full solipsism: only your own sentience is indubitable. René Descartes got at least that far securely. But as you say, staying there is not really livable. So we adopt what you nicely call “necessary assumptions”—that other minds exist, that the external world is real, that our choices matter in some sense.

Your comparison to free will is apt. Whether or not it survives metaphysical scrutiny, we operate as if we have it because our entire practical and moral framework depends on it. The same goes for other minds: we don’t prove them, we commit to them.

“Shut up and calculate” (borrowed from David Mermin, channeling the spirit of Niels Bohr) is almost a philosophical survival strategy at that point. Stop trying to dissolve the world underneath your feet and just proceed within it.

What’s interesting, though, is that once you frame it this way, the AI question slots neatly into the same pattern. We don’t ask, “Can we prove it’s sentient?”—we ask, “At what point would it become practically necessary to treat it as if it were?”

That’s not a metaphysical threshold; it’s a pragmatic and ethical one.

So your line of thought leads to a kind of quiet conclusion:

• Solipsism is logically airtight but useless.

• Practical life rests on unprovable but indispensable assumptions.

• The real question isn’t truth in the absolute sense, but which assumptions we are willing—or compelled—to live by.

There’s something almost Buddhist in that move, actually: letting go of the demand for ultimate grounding and proceeding with what functions.

And I suspect, given your earlier remarks, that you’re quite comfortable living there—as long as no one pretends it’s a final answer.

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?