To generalize across disciplines, a critical aspect of human-level artificial intelligence, requires the ability to observe and compare. This is a feature of sentience. All sentient beings are conscious of their existence. Non-sentient conscious beings exist, of course, but none who could pass a Turing test or a Coffee-making test. That requires both sentience and consciousness.
Sentience is one facet of consciousness, but it is not the only one and plausibly not the one responsible for “observe and compare”, which requires high cognitive function. See my list of facets here:
Good list. I think I’d use a triangle to organize them. Have consciousness at the base, then sentience, then drawing from your list, phenomenal consciousness, followed by Intentionality?
I see it as a hierarchy that results from lower to high degree of processing and resulting abstractions.
Sentience is simple hard-wired behavioral responses to pleasure or pain stimuli and physiological measures.
Wakefulness involves more complex processing such that diurnal or sleep/wake patterns are possible (requires at least two levels).
Intentionality means systematic pursuing of desires. That requires yet another level of processing: Different patterns of behaviors for different desires at different times and their optimization.
Phenomenal Consciousness is then the representation of the desire in a linguistic or otherwise communicable form, which is again one level higher.
Self-Consciousness includes the awareness of this process going on.
Meta-Consciousness is then the analysis of this whole stack.
THis is a surprising statement. Why do you think so?
Thank you for asking.
To generalize across disciplines, a critical aspect of human-level artificial intelligence, requires the ability to observe and compare. This is a feature of sentience. All sentient beings are conscious of their existence. Non-sentient conscious beings exist, of course, but none who could pass a Turing test or a Coffee-making test. That requires both sentience and consciousness.
Sentience is one facet of consciousness, but it is not the only one and plausibly not the one responsible for “observe and compare”, which requires high cognitive function. See my list of facets here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8szBqBMqGJApFFsew/gunnar_zarncke-s-shortform#W8XBDmjvbhzszEnrJ
Good list. I think I’d use a triangle to organize them. Have consciousness at the base, then sentience, then drawing from your list, phenomenal consciousness, followed by Intentionality?
I see it as a hierarchy that results from lower to high degree of processing and resulting abstractions.
Sentience is simple hard-wired behavioral responses to pleasure or pain stimuli and physiological measures.
Wakefulness involves more complex processing such that diurnal or sleep/wake patterns are possible (requires at least two levels).
Intentionality means systematic pursuing of desires. That requires yet another level of processing: Different patterns of behaviors for different desires at different times and their optimization.
Phenomenal Consciousness is then the representation of the desire in a linguistic or otherwise communicable form, which is again one level higher.
Self-Consciousness includes the awareness of this process going on.
Meta-Consciousness is then the analysis of this whole stack.
See also https://wiki.c2.com/?LeibnizianDefinitionOfConsciousness
Yes, I like it! Thanks for sharing that analysis, Gunnar.