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Tree@lemmy.ca 2 weeks agoi dont think they are sentient. the ones made from silcon i mean. why? bec sand isn’t alive,but we have proof neurons arw alive since our brain is made of them.
at what point do you distinguish a thing from the components it’s made of?
You say neurons have qualia, but its parts certainly don’t. Proteins don’t. Lipids don’t. Molecules don’t. But when you put them together in a specific configuration you say they do?
How is this different from silica? Why can’t a thing composed of silica have qualia even if the parts individually don’t?
ok this do you believe what are the least needed parts to make a being sentient? i believe 3 parts are needed,a heart,nervous system,and a brain. less than that it may or may not be sentient idk thats why i asked for other people opinions here.
I don’t think we understand sentience yet. I think it is possible, if not likely, that there are sentient things which we believe are not.
i also don’t think a heart is relevant at all to sentience, as it plays no role in perception which I believe is the core of sentience. The heart is just a pump that moves resources through the body.
I don’t think a nervous system is necessary either, unless you define “nervous system” very broadly. I think any sufficiently complex sensory input system would be enough to provide the elements of perception required to foster sentience.
As for the brain…. I’m not convinced it has to look like a brain as we know. The brain provides a few primary functions, but only a few of them are related to perception (many are instead related to automation of bodily functions). I think any system that can receive input, store a memory (and I don’t mean cognitive recall, I just mean historical record in the loosest sense), and perform complex conditional responses based on the input and memory could produce something we would call sentience.
A component of a component of a living thing is not inherently alive. We know neurons are alive not because they are part of the composition of the brain, but because they exhibit properties of life. Neurons being alive doesn’t mean that atoms are alive, for instance. Similarly the brain also contains water and fats which are definitely not alive.
You’ve touched on a very old question in biology: “what does it mean to be alive?” and the answer to that is going to change somewhat on who you talk to and what your subject is. Cells are alive, but in a completely different way from both “simple” multicellular life and “complex” cellular life, but I’m not really aware of a clear boundary existing.
Like all fields of study, there are orders of magnitude more information available at higher levels of research than what most people are taught in school. Clinging to the simplified views of biology organized for university or lower grades as being the end all be all of the field is a great way to harbor ignorance and bigotry.
i will search more on this topic to see if my current views on it are wrong or right,according to my religious beliefs ,and how science actually treats and talks about them.
if you have any points to tell me about it im happy to engage in a discussion.
cattywampas@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What does it mean to be alive? And how do you know that something is or isn’t?
Tree@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
i think the answer would be if it has internal quaila or not. i think neurons do have them.