OT: Some of mankind's toughest questions

[Baron Munchausen]

Kamog said:
Sometimes I hear people say that humans are sentient but other animals are not. I don't understand how we could possibly know this. How can you tell the difference, for example, whether a dog is sentient or not?

If we agree that humans are sentient, I would argue that other animals are sentient also. But then we have the problem of where to draw the line. Are fish sentient? Are insects sentient? Are plants sentient? I would have to say that viruses and bacteria are too simple to be sentient, so which organisms are sentient and which are not?

Part of the problem is that we don't have a good definition of what "sentient" means, but the other part of the problem is that you could never know what another creature is thinking, whether it is self-aware or not, what thought processes it is going through.

Actually, 'sentient' means 'having senses' -- that is, a creature capable of experiencing its environment. Guess what? Plants are sentient. They recognize where sunlight comes from and turn their leaves to face it. That is proof of 'sentience' ... What people think this word means is 'self-aware' or 'intelligent'. It doesn't.

And yes, animals are smarter than we generally believe. They have just managed to prove that dolphins use individual names, for example.

http://today.reuters.com/News/newsAr...E-DOLPHINS.xml

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n..._dolphins.html

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...whistles_x.htm