If you’re going to use an unusual definition of a word like that, it’s usually a good idea to make that clear up front, so that you don’t get into this kind of pointless argument.
“Sentient” doesn’t have a standard functional definition for topics like this. It’s more of a search for an intended region of conceptspace and I think mine matches up with what humans would find useful after significant reflection.
Even if that’s the case, there’s little to no overlap between your definition and the one(s) we usually use, and there was no obvious way for us to figure out what you meant, or even that you were using a non-overlapping definition, without guessing.
Given sentience’s open status, each party’s definition should not be expected to be given in detail until the discussion starts to hinge on such details, and that is when I gave it.
I also dispute that there is little to no overlap—have you thought about my definition, and does it pass the test of correctly classifying the things you deem sentient and non-sentient in canonical cases?
Given sentience’s open status, each party’s definition should not be expected to be given in detail until the discussion starts to hinge on such details, and that is when I gave it.
It seems to me that the discussion started to hinge on that as soon as you claimed that paperclips are sentient, or when JGWeisman started talking about the ability to react to the environment at the very latest.
I also dispute that there is little to no overlap—have you thought about my definition, and does it pass the test of correctly classifying the things you deem sentient and non-sentient in canonical cases?
Given that I don’t believe that there’s an ultimate purpose of existence, your definition doesn’t properly parse at all. If I use my usual workaround for such cases and parse it as if you’d said “structured such that X is, or could converge on through self-modification, the “ultimate purpose of existence”, however the speaker defines “ultimate purpose of existence”″, it still doesn’t match how I use the word ‘sentience’, nor how I see it used by most speakers. (You may be thinking of the word ‘sapience’, though even that’s not exactly a match.)
True.
sentient(X) = “structured such that X is, or could converge on through self-modification, the ultimate purpose of existence”
Not a perfect definition, but a lot better than, “X responds to its environment, and an ape brain is wired to like X”.
If you’re going to use an unusual definition of a word like that, it’s usually a good idea to make that clear up front, so that you don’t get into this kind of pointless argument.
“Sentient” doesn’t have a standard functional definition for topics like this. It’s more of a search for an intended region of conceptspace and I think mine matches up with what humans would find useful after significant reflection.
Even if that’s the case, there’s little to no overlap between your definition and the one(s) we usually use, and there was no obvious way for us to figure out what you meant, or even that you were using a non-overlapping definition, without guessing.
Given sentience’s open status, each party’s definition should not be expected to be given in detail until the discussion starts to hinge on such details, and that is when I gave it.
I also dispute that there is little to no overlap—have you thought about my definition, and does it pass the test of correctly classifying the things you deem sentient and non-sentient in canonical cases?
It seems to me that the discussion started to hinge on that as soon as you claimed that paperclips are sentient, or when JGWeisman started talking about the ability to react to the environment at the very latest.
Given that I don’t believe that there’s an ultimate purpose of existence, your definition doesn’t properly parse at all. If I use my usual workaround for such cases and parse it as if you’d said “structured such that X is, or could converge on through self-modification, the “ultimate purpose of existence”, however the speaker defines “ultimate purpose of existence”″, it still doesn’t match how I use the word ‘sentience’, nor how I see it used by most speakers. (You may be thinking of the word ‘sapience’, though even that’s not exactly a match.)