sentinence

[Thalas]

in my opinion "ignorance is bliss" and that the less we ponder this the more good we are doing. Just thinking about this hurts, and as thus we shouldn't think about it. The answer is different for every person.

Indeed, because striving to understand how everything works (to the best of their abilities) is the major goal of MOST people. "thinking about this hurts... thus, we shouldn't think about it." Terrible logic.

I'm sorry that is not what i meant to say. What i mean is that if we don't think about it then we won't have as many problems concerning thinking about it. Think about what would happen if someone figured out if we have sentience or not. If not, and that everything is a chemical reaction than that said person could exploit that and cause major havoc. And if they discovered that we are sentient than they could figure out something horribly evil the could do with that knowledge (can't think of any off-hand) . If we don't think about it than it lowers the chance of someone figuring it out and using it against any other person. In that way thinking about it hurts.

That's the funny thing about humans. We'll take any info we get, and twist it to fit our desires. So, yes, we could destroy ourselves, but it's a double-sided coin. We could easily turn it into benefits. Just have faith that humans MIGHT choose something beneficial for ourselves in general.

i have no faith whatsoever in humans and think about how many people in the world that are greedy and/or sex-crazed

Off-topic : Even though I disagree with your sentence "Just thinking about this hurts, and as thus we shouldn't think about it" I really agree with you on this.
I literaly lost faith in people last week. We were on school trip with class, I am 14, there were 2 things I could endure 1) Girls were laughing every 10 seconds, I won't even post why
2) general insolence, lot of things (For example one student refused to sit down in bus even though teacher shouted at him.) I could understand that they are just kids.
But there were things I was furious about
1) The most popular guy in our class stole some shiny stones for about 5 dollars (If I transfer currency) and he's acting like sinless in school, preaching everyone how they should behave (No, I don't envy him). He's mad when someone borrows his eraser without his permission total hypocrat.
2) One of my class mates wanted to borrow about 4 dollars and for some reason he proposed that he borrows 4 dollars and gives back 8 dollars and as liability he gave his mobile worth 150 dollars.
well it's hard to describe this, it might trail off different when I'm describing it, but..................
I don't believe that there's hope

On topic: As for the sentience, we are just atoms that's all, no sentience. However I'm curious why these atoms arranged like this, but this belongs to another thread

[Bloodshadow]

i have no faith whatsoever in humans

Been there, done that, and still partially doing that though nowhere near as much. (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,12949.0.html) But that's off-topic.

We cannot debate about the existence of sentience without debating about the definition of sentience. If we define sentience in such a way that it technically "exists" for complex biochemical machines, then what's there to debate about?

[agentflare]

i have no faith whatsoever in humans and think about how many people in the world that are greedy and/or sex-crazed

Think about how many people in this world that are trying to accomplish what they believe in. You don't hear about them, because they're not out of the ordinary like those scandalous figures you talk about.
On topic,

"Sentience is the ability to perceive, or be conscious, or have subjective experiences." - Incomplete Wikipedia Quote.

This is broken into 3 parts:
1) Observation of surrounding environment
You're in a room
/look
You see the walls are painted green. There is a table approximately 2 metres in front of you. There is a key on that table.
/pickup key
You pick up the key

(yay for lame Text based adventure)

Basically, do you understand what's going on around you?

2) Ability to think

Ex. Can you understand logic? How many steps ahead do you think?

3) Ability to understand subjective relationships

Who's the leader? Am I stronger or weaker than him? Am I holding the key, or is the key holding me?

[nerd1]

i think that i would define sentinance as the level of intelligence a creature would have to make killing it immoral.

[Korugar]

That's...not a definition. You first have to define what sentience is, then decide if the above statement were true for all such beings.

[memimemi]

Lol...you made that statement? Hope you have taken some philosophy courses and taken a few biology courses because Philosophers do not agree buddy. (I am still laughing)

Really?  Cite your sources, please.  'Cause determinism has B.F. Skinner, James Watson, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, etc, etc....  Without showing my own thoughts on the matter, I propose that you consider the debate far from closed, even among philosophers of biology.

Plus, it's not chemicals that make us living. Life is something yet to be discovered. If we knew what makes us living, then we would have created humans by now (btw, procreating gametes is not the same as you are not the person giving the 'life' to it)

Lol... you made that statement?  Hope you have taken some philosophy courses and taken a few biology courses because Biologists still don't agree on what 'life' is.  Unless, perhaps, your assertion can be backed by some sort of actual data, or at least a chain of reasoning?  Y'know, the things you'd have been taught in those biology and philosophy courses to which you allude?

[Vis-spei]

In my very literal sense, my answer is: When it's aware that other beings think it's aware.

Well actualy children under 3 years old are unable to conceive that other people can think and have emotions and one year old babies don't even perceive the world and thus other people existing outside of their conciousness, however I wouldn't say that children and babies aren't sentinent (meaning that they posses cognitive material and mechanisms to promote the material). It would be good to note though that babies younger than one year don't possess self-consiousness and so cannot recognise themselves as absolute beings. It is sure difficult to procced any further without only one definition of ''sentinent''.