![]() ![]() Sentience is simply awareness prior to the arising of Skandha. In Buddhism, the senses are six in number, the sixth being the subjective experience of the mind. Sentience in Buddhism is the state of having senses ( sat + ta in Pali, or sat + tva in Sanskrit). The first vow of a Bodhisattva states: "Sentient beings are numberless I vow to free them." In Mahayana Buddhism, which includes Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, the concept is related to the Bodhisattva, an enlightened being devoted to the liberation of others. According to Buddhism, sentient beings made of pure consciousness are possible. Man is considered to be a sentient being of the fifth order. Water, for example, is a sentient being of the first order, as it is considered to possess only one sense, that of touch. In Jainism, all matter is endowed with sentience there are five degrees of sentience, from one to five. In Jainism and Hinduism, this is closely related to the concept of ahimsa, nonviolence toward other beings. Eastern religionĮastern religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism recognize non-humans as sentient beings. Other philosophers (such as Daniel Dennett) disagree, arguing that all aspects of consciousness will eventually yield to scientific investigation. They do not deny that most other aspects of consciousness are subject to scientific investigation but they argue that subjective experiences will never be explained i.e., sentience is the only aspect of consciousness that can't be explained. Some philosophers, notably Colin McGinn, believe that sentience will never be understood, a position known as " new mysterianism". Sentience is a minimalistic way of defining " consciousness", which is otherwise commonly used to collectively describe sentience plus other characteristics of the mind. ![]() This is distinct from other aspects of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts that mean something or are "about" something). In the philosophy of consciousness, "sentience" can refer to the ability of any entity to have subjective perceptual experiences, or " qualia". Sensation, sense, sensory faculty, sentience, sentiency - sense - sensitisation, sensitization - perception, percipience, sensing - detector, sensing element, sensor - feel, tactile property - aesthesis, esthesis, feeling, sensation, sense datum, sense experience, sense impression - feeling - sensible - sensible, sensitive - sensitive Īesthetic, aesthetical, esthetic, esthetical - conscious ĭesensitise, desensitize - extrasensory, paranormal, supersensible, supersensory, suprasensitive (percipience sensing perception), (receptive susceptible amenable perceptive sensitive softhearted soft-boiled), (synoptic), (synoptic) Ībility, capability, capacity, faculty, power, skilfulness, skill - alter, change, modify - comprehend, perceive - detect, discover, find, notice, observe Percevoir par la peau (fr) Īptitude intellectuelle de l'individu (fr) Image (and it’s a great one!) courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.Faculté de l'esprit (fr) Įnsemble (réunion d'éléments) (fr) See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here. Please nominate a word or metaphor useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. What of the invisibilia under the microscope? What is consciousness? Animals have it and, perhaps, plants. Second-and-third-order definitions of “sentient” include being “conscious” of something. Need I feel guilty, then, as I fire up my chainsaw to prune the cedars near my house? Plants turn to the light, after all, but as stated in an article by Calvi, Sahi, and Trewas (2017), we cannot assume plants are non-sentient because of the “bioelectric field in seedlings and in polar tissues may also act as a primary source of learning and memory.” In its oldest sense, “sentient” can include animals or other organisms if they are “capable of feeling having the power or function of sensation or of perception by the senses.” So for sentience, it would mean responding to stimuli not automatically, but by the senses. So what do those most sentient of dictionary editors at the OED Online say? Of course, other stories have aliens wiping humans out and saving other species because humans so seldom employ reason, reflection, and logic. Often in that genre of fiction, an alien life-form is either an animal or a “sentient” being, meaning (to me) that it acts according to reason, reflection, and logic. I have used “sentient” incorrectly for years, in in my class about reading science fiction. Joe’s nominated word is certainly a good one to employ. Joe Hoyle, Associate Professor of Accounting at UR, told me that a 2019 goal of his has been to hone his vocabulary. What do these images have in common? They represent sentient beings.
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