OT - Sentience

[PvK]

Interesting original thought extension, Ed. I would say that "sentience" is an (imperfect) term from (imperfect) Cognitive Science, but if you boil it down to logical calculations and/or behavior, then I would say it's true machines have sentience, as do animals. Basically, my matrix looks like this:

Code:

---

         Logic     Language      Identity      Experience/Consciousness

Human    yes/much  yes/advanced  yes - noisy   yes

Animal   yes/some  yes/basic     yes - simple  yes

Robot    yes/lots  yes/logical   maybe         no/artificial

---

The lower-right cell is the clincher for my moral decisions. Go ahead and power down your computer. But please be kind to animals.