To give examples from media properties rather than quizzing everyone on philosophy stuff I only learned this year: Blindsight and Westworld
Personally I find the insistence on this annoying and I think consciousness is really important for correcting errors in vision. Who decides when to loose the arrow on the deer, so you don’t starve? That’s not something which can be handled subsconsciously, training to do it requires presence of mind and imagination.
Let me know if you think I’m misinterpreting it. I am curious what everyone thinks about the fabric of reality.
See, compiling and uploading stuff is good for the brain, it gives us time to reflect. 🧘♀️
Edit: want to add that treating human nature as the driving factor in human extinction (which won’t happen btw we will win) instead of capitalism is Bill Gates tier liberalism. I am deeply skeptical due to having done a little research on why this stuff is promoted, but dismissing it outright wouldn’t make sense, as people with a sufficient amount of money thrown at them in academia tend to produce some valuable nuggets
I believe your questions would be better directed at the topics of free will and inner monologue than sentience.
The mention of a “conscious” decision to loose an arrow leans more toward those than basic sentience.
Feelings are feelings; they’re a brain chemical response that assists with instinct development/control and reinforcing patterns of behavior. All evolutionary effects are, kinda, side effects, and the ones that help or don’t hurt too too much get kept.
Actual commentary on the topic
But, flipping back to the “you gotta learn when to loose the arrow”–not really? Like, that’s not exactly a conscious thing. You consciously analyze it after the fact, and (until you’re totally awesome at it) make a plan for what to do going into it, but done right it’s mostly a zen/muscle memory thing. Anecdata, sure, but I’m speaking as a decent amateur archer and highly adept firearm user.
I don’t know if my cats have a true train of thought, but I know they got better at pouncing with practice. There’s no inner monologue, but they’re conscious and sentient.
I’ve also been high enough to notice that my body just kind of does stuff without me prompting it, including real useful stuff like grabbing water and food–this goes back to the action potential thing in the neuroscience of free will article. We’re extremely complex systems that continue to exist and survive even when significant chunks of “the norm” are missing. Aphantasics can still create. Anendophasics can still put together stories and design intricate systems. We’re thoroughly redundant systems thanks to the sheer screwiness of evolution.
I look forward to someone using my posts as evidence people can do things automatically without an internal monologue. Glad we have a ranged weapons user in the chat since I mainly miscast spells. I considered that example might be weak, since I don’t hit things with projectiles (or miss them). Comparing it to a cat pouncing is a good rebuttal, but I think that is melee enough that you could do it totally unconsciously. To point to actual blindsight experiments, people were able to point at or move their eyes towards a hand jutted towards them. I shouldn’t even guess about this, but isn’t that just for protecting the face, especially the eyes from pokes and gravel? To hit a living creature with a sling you do better to consider where it wants to go, you could intuit it is going to land on a branch and nail it. To dodge a falling rock you only need to judge basic physics. But again yeah none of that is really falling under why you hunt, practices like deciding to limit what you go for, cultivate foods en masse like Black Soil in the Amazon. Do you think a better question would be if a cat could hunt better with a theory of mind for a mouse? Do you think a STEM student could study philosophy on the side better if he got hit by a fast rock?
No but seriously, the better example was probably the one I came up with while misreading another guy’s response. Which is you need human writing and culture to manage food storage and production (not entirely strictly as I have read in some anthropology books that humans developed debt systems well before writing, but spreadsheets make that scalable). Unless you are a nonsentient computing blob of orbs in the outer solar system and you don’t need a temple granary at all. Why were there vampires in that book. No really I’m going to bed now you guys are safe.
I wonder if crows are able to keep track of my bread balance sheet or it’s more of a vibe system.