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How Sentience Emerged from the Ancient Mists of Evolution


Portre

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Key points

  • Neurobiological emergentism proposes that sentience arose via standard physical processes (“weak” emergence).
  • It emerged along an evolutionary path from early life processes to simple sensing to complex neural systems.
  • Qualitative aspects of organisms’ experience are inherently subjective—inaccessible to objective explanation.

In From Sensing to Sentience, Feinberg proposes a new theory he calls neurobiological emergentism that is based upon a biological-neurobiological-evolutionary model that explains both how sentience emerges from complex nervous systems as well as scientifically resolving the “explanatory gap” between the observable physical nervous system and subjective experience.

Feinberg frames sentience as an emergent property, arising from the hierarchical organization of neural systems. Emergent phenomena exhibit novel properties that arise naturally from the interactions of simpler components within a complex system. These properties cannot be fully reduced to the system’s parts; they reflect the organization and complexity of the whole. For Feinberg, sentience is one such emergent property. More specifically, it is a phenomenon of “weak” emergence, meaning that the emergent properties can, in principle, be explained or derived from the system's underlying components and rules and do not require invoking metaphysical or nonreductive explanations.

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2 hours ago, Portre said:

and do not require invoking metaphysical or nonreductive explanations.

👍

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I think I can make a pretty good case for the idea that you can't have sentience without a language system, and that language emerged as a result of needing to remote control children to improve their survival chances.  The more complex the language, the greater the sentience.

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21 hours ago, Portre said:

Feinberg frames sentience as an emergent property, arising from the hierarchical organization of neural systems. Emergent phenomena exhibit novel properties that arise naturally from the interactions of simpler components within a complex system. These properties cannot be fully reduced to the system’s parts; they reflect the organization and complexity of the whole. For Feinberg, sentience is one such emergent property.
More specifically, it is a phenomenon of “weak” emergence,

 

14 hours ago, Alchopwn said:

I think I can make a pretty good case for the idea that you can't have sentience without a language system, and that language emerged as a result of needing to remote control children to improve their survival chances.  The more complex the language, the greater the sentience.

 

Fineburger's example of an "emergent property" is  weak indeed if only mapping the "hierarchical organization" from 
"From Sensing to Sentience".
Ignoring what precedes and generates said emergence of sentience from sensing is a pretty shallow dive.

How conscious does an organism need to be "sentient" ?

 

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"The more complex the language, the greater the sentience."
That statement is pretty hard to argue with, 
but  "language emerged as a result of needing to remote control children" 
begs the question of how far back in the evolutionary tree of species that premise defines language ? 

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On 1/25/2025 at 12:06 PM, seasmith said:

"The more complex the language, the greater the sentience."
That statement is pretty hard to argue with, 
but  "language emerged as a result of needing to remote control children" 
begs the question of how far back in the evolutionary tree of species that premise defines language ? 

Well, we can see simple warning behavior present in modern day communities of meercats.  They have warnings for snakes, that differ to the warning calls for eagles and hawks, and to warning calls for land based predators like wild dogs and big cats.  We also know that adult primates who learn sign language manage to transfer that information to their offspring despite making no effort to teach it, as a result of contact observation by their young.  Now obviously it is a long walk from there to Immanuel Kant, and I am not making huge claims about primate advanced sentience, but we can see that these patterns perpetuate themselves in a state of nature.  I consider meercats to be exhibiting basic language for remote controlling their children.  We know about all the other valuable tricks language opens up, such as skill training, forward planning, as well as different forms of reasoning, and providing a framework for locating events in time, just for a start.  Training your children to avoid threats at a distance is far more plausible than hunting as an origin point however, given that most pack predators hunt silently and communicate with mere head gestures. 

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On 1/24/2025 at 11:41 AM, Alchopwn said:

I think I can make a pretty good case for the idea that you can't have sentience without a language system, and that language emerged as a result of needing to remote control children to improve their survival chances.  The more complex the language, the greater the sentience.

I don't really agree with that. There are people who say they think in words, that they for example start thinking in another language when moving to another country. To me, that seems strange. I don't think in words. It is first when I have to convey my thoughts to other people that I have to find words for what I'm thinking.

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