Re:We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop ac...
by undreren on Monday June 13, 2022 @02:24PM
(#31729381)
I don't know what context you read my comment from, but the comment I responded to ended with the following paragraph:
> The "hard problem" seems to mostly exist in the minds of people outside the field who are unsettled by the thought that we might not be special (a pretty common reaction whenever science makes progress on subjects).
I don't need consciousness or sentience to need a special or magic substrate to combat existential dread, because I don't feel it in the first place. My comment was not meant to be an explanation either, and I honestly can't see how you read that into it.
Sentience is literally the thing that defines our experience of the world. It's irrational to dismiss it as "Oh, that's nothing. Don't worry about it."
It may well be "a semi-random by product of natural laws and processes", but that's a hand-wavey non-explanation.
Whatever the details are, we're so completely ignorant of them we can't even hazard a reasonable testable hypothesis about how exactly natural laws and processes create self-awareness.
Saying it's a non-problem because "obviously" it just is, is the opposite of science.