Sentience vs intelligence
Posted on: May 24, 2007 - 1:08pm
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Sentience vs intelligence
In the atheist vs theist form I offer a "proof" for god (the thread "A Set" if you are curious). Somebody objected to the use of sentience rather than intelligence. So I'm wondering how you see the two as different. I don't see them as the same, either, but I'd like to have a clearer distinction between the two in my own thinking.
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Sentience means being conscious, having sense perception, but not necessarily inteliligent. Animals and insects are sentient. Plants aren't.
Me, I'd glomp it into the pile of words marked "too woolly to be of use in a logical discussion, without further definition by the user".
If it means "having senses", as Strafio's Wikipedia link claims, then is a venus flytrap sentient? Is it basically "the ability to react to sensed stimuli"? That's one of the prerequisites for life, under some definitions.
Like self-awareness, judgement, sapience, atheism, Christianity, agnosticism, goodness, evil, etc, it is a good idea to define what you mean by the term before you use it in your argument.
I'm sure there is some cool rule about which terms you should bother to define, but I don't know what such a rule would be.
T="theists who's posts are fun-to-read, truth-seeking and insightful". Your own T will be different, but Tdewi includes { Avecrien, Cory T, crocaduck, JHenson, jread, wavefreak }
Sentient would be like... where you read in fantasy books and see on games where weapons and items have minds of their own. Sentient implys that something has thought, cognitive though. That implys to anything that has, or does not have life.
"Why would God send his only son to die an agonizing death to redeem an insignificant bit of carbon?"-Victor J. Stenger.
I think maybe you're right. This is definitely a word that could take on many meanings. So to use it in an argument it would need to be defined for the context of that argument.
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