# Sentience > **Machine-Evolution Nexus:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] places this node within the history and governance of substrate-independent evolution. **Domain:** Consciousness / Ethics / Rights **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition Sentience is the capacity for valenced experience: states that can feel good, bad, painful or otherwise matter to the subject. ## Nexus Context Digital evolution demonstrates reproduction and selection, not sentience. Avida organisms and cellular-automaton loops can satisfy evolutionary criteria without evidence of felt experience. ## Evidence Boundary Sentience is morally relevant but difficult to measure. Precaution may be warranted under uncertainty, yet functional complexity alone must not be reported as proof. ## Relationships [[wiki/Consciousness|Consciousness]], [[wiki/Rights|Rights]], [[wiki/Recognition Threshold|Recognition Threshold]], [[wiki/Nonhuman Personhood|Nonhuman Personhood]] - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > "Conceptually, autonomous or artificial intelligence systems can develop two ways: either as an extension of human thinking or as radically new thinking." > **— Rolf Dobelli**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/AI Could Extend or Depart From Human Thought by Rolf Dobelli|AI Could Extend or Depart From Human Thought by Rolf Dobelli]] > "Through this step, negative preferences become negative subjective preferences, i.e., the conscious representation that one's own preferences have been frustrated (or will be frustrated in the future)." > **— Thomas Metzinger**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Conscious Machines May Suffer by Thomas Metzinger|Conscious Machines May Suffer by Thomas Metzinger]] > "Designed Intelligence will increasingly rely on synthetic biology and organic fabrication, in which neural circuitry will be grown from genetically modified cells, and spontaneously self-assemble into networks of functional modules." > **— Paul Davies**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Designed Intelligence Will Grow From Synthetic Biology by Paul Davies|Designed Intelligence Will Grow From Synthetic Biology by Paul Davies]] > "There are plenty of conscious (system two) processes that a machine can do better, more accurately, with less bias than we can." > **— Paul Dolan**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Machines Can Outperform Conscious Human Reasoning by Paul Dolan|Machines Can Outperform Conscious Human Reasoning by Paul Dolan]] > "We have nothing to fear from machines that can think unless they can also feel. Thinking alone can solve problems, but that is not the same thing as making decisions." > **— Abigail Marsh**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Machines Must Feel Before They Can Decide by Abigail Marsh|Machines Must Feel Before They Can Decide by Abigail Marsh]] > “In the same way, the neural code is unlikely to resolve the mind-body problem to everyone's satisfaction. When it comes to consciousness, many of us seek not an explanation but a revelation, which dispels mystery like sun burning off a morning fog. And yet we will embrace a neural-code theory of mind if it works — that is, if it helps us predict, heal and enhance ourselves. If we can control our minds, who cares if we still cannot comprehend them?” > **— John Horgan**, *2008, Edge Annual Question, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”* [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Changing My Mind About the Mind-body Problem by John Horgan|Changing My Mind About the Mind-body Problem by John Horgan]] > “Today, the biggest challenge is to explain our powers of thinking and imagination, our abilities to represent and report our thoughts: the very means by which we engage in scientific theorising. The final triumph of the natural sciences over supernaturalism will be an account of nature of conscious experience. The cognitive and brain sciences have done much to make that project clearer but we are still a long way from a fully satisfying theory.” > **— Barry C. Smith**, *2006, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Conscious Experience Is the Final Frontier of Natural Science by Barry C. Smith|Conscious Experience Is the Final Frontier of Natural Science by Barry C. Smith]] > “There are no moral facts. Moral sentences have no truth-values. The world itself is silent, it just doesn’t speak to us in normative affairs — nothing in the physical universe tells us what makes an action a good action or a specific brain-state a desirable one. Sure, we all would like to know what a good neurophenomenological configuration really is, and how we should optimize our conscious minds in the future. But it looks like, in a more rigorous and serious sense, there is just no ethical knowledge to be had. We are alone. And if that is true, all we have to go by are the contingent moral intuitions evolution has hard-wired into our emotional self-model. If we choose to simply go by what feels good, then our future is easy to predict: It will be primitive hedonism and organized religion.” > **— Thomas Metzinger**, *2008, Edge Annual Question, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Evolution Cannot Give Us Moral Facts by Thomas Metzinger|Evolution Cannot Give Us Moral Facts by Thomas Metzinger]] > “If matter is but one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. The mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession.” > **— Donald D. Hoffman**, *2005, Edge Annual Question, “What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/If Matter Is a Product of Consciousness Physicalism May Fail by Donald D. Hoffman|If Matter Is a Product of Consciousness Physicalism May Fail by Donald D. Hoffman]] > “The Internet is also itself a metaphor for the emerging paradigm of thought in which systems are conceived as networks of relationships. To the extent that a Web page can be defined only by what links to it and what it links to, it is analogous to one of Leibniz's monads. But Web pages still have content, and so are not purely relational. Imagine a virtual world abstracted from the Internet by deleting all the content so that all that remained was the links. This is an image of the universe according to relational theories of space and time, it is also an image of the neural network in the brain. The content corresponds to what is missing in those model, it corresponds to what physicists and computer scientists have yet to understand about the difference between a mathematical model and an animated world or conscious mind.” > **— Lee Smolin**, *2010, Edge Annual Question, “How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?”* [[reminders/AI Control/The Internet Exposes What Our Models Still Miss About Conscious Minds by Lee Smolin|The Internet Exposes What Our Models Still Miss About Conscious Minds by Lee Smolin]] > “The film A.I. and the idea contained within it that robots could someday become conscious is another case in which our wishes exceed reality. Despite enormous advances in artificial intelligence, no computer is able to experience a pin prick like a simple frog, or get hungry like a rat, or become happy or sad like all of us carbon-based units. But why is this the case? It is my conjecture that this is because there are some features of being alive that makes mind, consciousness, and feelings possible. That is, only living things are capable of the markers of mind such as intentionality, subjectivity, and self-awareness. But the important question of the link between life and the creation of consciousness remains a great scientific mystery, and the answer will go a long way toward our understanding of what a mind actually is.” > **— Todd E. Feinberg**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Question? ... Why?”* [[reminders/AI Control/What Is the Relationship Between Being Alive and Having a Mind by Todd E. Feinberg|What Is the Relationship Between Being Alive and Having a Mind by Todd E. Feinberg]] > “Any biological theory of consciousness, which assumes that consciousness has evolved, implies that "having consciousness" is not an all-or-none property. The biological substrates of consciousness in human adults are probably also present, but only in partial form, in other species, in young children or brain-lesioned patients. It is therefore a partially arbitrary question whether we want to extend the use of the term "consciousness" to them. For instance, several mammals, and even very young human children, show intentional behavior, partially reportable mental states, some working memory ability — but perhaps no theory of mind, and more "encapsulated" mental processes that cannot be reported verbally or even non-verbally. Do they have consciousness, then? My bet is that once a detailed cognitive and neural theory of the various aspects of consciousness is available, the vacuity of this question will become obvious.” > **— Stanislas Dehaene**, *2001, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT QUESTIONS HAVE DISAPPEARED?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Consciousness May Be a Continuum Rather Than an All-or-None State by Stanislas Dehaene|Consciousness May Be a Continuum Rather Than an All-or-None State by Stanislas Dehaene]] > “There is a growing scientific consensus that animals have emotions and feel pain. This awareness is going to effect change: better treatment of animals in agribusiness, research, and our general interaction with them.” > **— April Gornik**, *2009 Edge Annual Question, response passage* [[reminders/Human Animality/Animal Feelings Could Change How We Treat Animals by April Gornik|Animal Feelings Could Change How We Treat Animals by April Gornik]] ## Sources / Provenance - Philosophy of mind and animal-welfare science; continuity-corpus synthesis.