12-18-2015, 06:53 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-18-2015, 06:58 AM by stevebowers.)
One interesting thing about animals is that they can have psychological states. Animals can be happy or sad, confident or depressed; this behaviour is often obvious in mammals, but can be seen in birds and reptiles, and sometimes even in arthropods (invade an arthropod's territory too many times and it appears to become apprehensive and cautious). Any entity that is sophisticated enough to have a state of mind is sentient, and there must be something that it is like to be one.
Sophonce seems to be a sophisticated kind of sentience wrangling. If you are aware enough to model another being's behaviour and predict it accurately enough to catch it or mate with it or drive it away, then you are sentient; if you are self-aware enough to model your own behavior and imagine what you want to do in the next five days, weeks or months, and to worry about your own state of mind and what you can do to improve things, you are sophont.
Sophonce seems to be a sophisticated kind of sentience wrangling. If you are aware enough to model another being's behaviour and predict it accurately enough to catch it or mate with it or drive it away, then you are sentient; if you are self-aware enough to model your own behavior and imagine what you want to do in the next five days, weeks or months, and to worry about your own state of mind and what you can do to improve things, you are sophont.