like i’m watching blue planet and i’m yelling at the tv!
there’s all these yimmer yammer hand-wavey scientific rigor lines where it’s like ‘we may believe that these animals do on occasion have a base brain-related impulse that allows them to experience feelings somewhat like to those of friendship’ or whatever in the script on top of footage that they then describe as ‘it seems as though these two groups [of fish, different species] are old friends…’ in an almost whimsical manner.
can’t they give them some credit! they have eyes and a face, why is it so insane to think they can’t experience friendship or love or joy just like us? ‘buhhu uhhh its only accurate science if we only observe observable behavior’ why?? you’re neglecting a whole part of any living thing’s experience! inner life can’t be hand waved away! even for a mollusk!
and people loved doing this on reddit as well – oh actually your cat doesn’t understand love or joy or humor, it is simply reacting to the physical warmth of your lap, they don’t actually care for you. don’t worry, depth and emotion does not exist!
That’s one of those questions that’s all too often used for some cheap attempt at a trap. The question is what sort of proof is acceptable in which line of science. You can’t prove sentience in the absolute way physics can prove things. That’s just natural for scientific disciplines like psychology. Furthermore y you’d first have to define what constitutes sentience/sapience
I think that’s kind of the point though, we could meet space traveling aliens and deem them non sapient beings without emotions using the same logic we apply to animals because there’s no empirical way to prove that any creature isn’t just the sapience equivelent of a chinese room.
There is, though. The easiest one being that a sentient creature will react differently to it’s outside world, most importantly in an unpredictable manner. Think about a fish reacting to it’s surroundings and then picture a cat. One will very likely do the same thing given the same circumstances. The other won’t.
So would a fish that’s eaten a device that administers a small electric shock at random intervals and with random intensities. I don’t think that eating such a device made the fish suddenly sentient, but it would suddenly change the outcome of your test.
A p-zombie I think.
The only trap here is that my point was that it’s not ignored by science. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Just because we have no way of proving a theory, doesn’t mean we don’t try and find ways to do so. We still make hypotheses and theories even if we have no proven way, or understanding of how we might prove them. That’s still science.