Societal Sentience

Sentience Everywhere

Philosophical understandings of consciousness divide into emergentist positions (when the universe is sufficiently organized and complex it gives rise to consciousness) vs. panpsychism (consciousness pervades the universe). A leading emergentist position derives from autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela: to be alive is to have cognition, one component of which is sentience. Here, reflectin...

A Theory of Sentience

Sentience and Pain in Invertebrates

Stem cell research, personhood and sentience.

In this paper the permissibility of stem cell research on early human embryos is defended. It is argued that, in order to have moral status, an individual must have an interest in its own wellbeing. Sentience is a prerequisite for having an interest in avoiding pain, and personhood is a prerequisite for having an interest in the continuation of one's own existence. Early human embryos are not s...

Remembrance: The Unbearable Sentience of Being Digital

We introduce a world vision in which data is endowed with memory. In this data-centric systems paradigm, data items can be enabled to retain all or some of their previous values. We call this ability remembrance and posit that it empowers significant leaps in the security, availability, and general operational dimensions of systems. With the explosion in cheap, fast memories and storage, large-...