Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

148 J HOW THE MIND WORKSbehavior, the only thing left missing by the lack of a theory of sentiencewould be an understanding of sentience itself.But saying that we have no scientific explanation of sentience is notthe same as saying that sentience does not exist at all. I am as certainthat I am sentient as I am certain of anything, and I bet you feel thesame. Though I concede that my curiosity about sentience may never besatisfied, I refuse to believe that I am just confused when I think I amsentient at all! (Dennett's analogy of unexplained wetness is not decisive:wetness is itself a subjective feeling, so the observer's dissatisfaction isjust the problem of sentience all over again.) And we cannot banish sentiencefrom our discourse or reduce it to information access, becausemoral reasoning depends on it. The concept of sentience underlies ourcertainty that torture is wrong and that disabling a robot is the destructionof property but disabling a person is murder. It is the reason that thedeath of a loved one does not impart to us just self-pity at our loss butthe uncomprehending pain of knowing that the person's thoughts andpleasures have vanished forever.If you bear with me to the end of the book, you will learn my ownhunch about the mystery of sentience. But the mystery remains a mystery,a topic not for science but for ethics, for late-night dorm-rbom bullsessions, and, of course, for one other realm:On a microscopic piece of sand that floats through space is a fragment ofa man's life. Left to rust is the place he lived in and the machines heused. Without use, they will disintegrate from the wind and the sand andthe years that act upon them; all of Mr. Cony's machines—including theone made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete ... in theTwilight Zone.