Degrees of sentience?

Sentience Everywhere

Philosophical understandings of consciousness divide into emergentist positions (when the universe is sufficiently organized and complex it gives rise to consciousness) vs. panpsychism (consciousness pervades the universe). A leading emergentist position derives from autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela: to be alive is to have cognition, one component of which is sentience. Here, reflectin...

A Theory of Sentience

Sentience and Pain in Invertebrates

Remembrance: The Unbearable Sentience of Being Digital

We introduce a world vision in which data is endowed with memory. In this data-centric systems paradigm, data items can be enabled to retain all or some of their previous values. We call this ability remembrance and posit that it empowers significant leaps in the security, availability, and general operational dimensions of systems. With the explosion in cheap, fast memories and storage, large-...

Experiencing Michael: Sullivan’s Modes of Sentience

Harry Stack Sullivan proposed a developmental model of sentience, of “any...primary data of experience” (Sullivan, 1953, p. 28). This article uses theory and case study examples to explore Sullivan’s developmental model in two ways. First, the scope of applicability of the model is extended to everyday experience. Second, using Sullivan’s other developmental theories as analogy, extension of hi...