Tag: q

dear robot stories

glumshoe:

isnt-it-tragic:

glumshoe:

stop saying “sentient” when you mean “sapient”

Can you explain the difference

Sure, but only specifically in a sci-fi context. Once you really start getting into philosophy of mind and biology, it gets confusing.

“Sentient” means to be able to perceive, feel, and/or be aware of the surrounding world – to have senses that allow one to experience things. Animals are sentient – they are able to hear, see, smell, taste, and/or touch. Plants are also arguably sentient, albeit in a much slower and more cryptic way than animals – but we don’t generally count them as such for practical purposes (I could… get into this). If you built a robot no more intelligent than, say, a goldfish, but it was able to see or smell or feel pain, it would be sentient, but not sapient. 

“Sapient” means human-like wisdom or self-aware intelligence – the ability to engage in complex reasoning and judgement. In sci-fi, it usually denotes personhood and identity. A computer could therefore theoretically be sapient, but not sentient. 

Robot stories are almost always about exploring the formation and value of consciousness and personhood. Star Trek is probably in large part to blame for “sentience” to mean “sapience” in loads of media – it’s certainly the reason I used to get it wrong! I lost count of how many times Data refers to himself as “sentient” when he’s describing self-awareness aspects of his personal identity – he even contrasts himself with his cat, claiming she is not sentient (he’s uh… wrong…). 

Data is, of course, both sentient and sapient. An android that can walk around and respond to the world around it, using artificial senses that allow it to gather information from its surroundings, is sentient. (Being able to analyze flavor, scent, and temperature counts as sensing – not just seeing and hearing). An android that can reason and form self-awareness is sapient, whether or not it has traditionally human-like emotions. HAL 9000 is obviously sapient, but his sentience is limited. 

1lovemotel:

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?
(via vacantkind)