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This whole control idea is madness I think... It doesn't make logical sense, but also not sense even relatively if you really explore what is happening within your own "choices". Even in your lucid dreams at night where you "control" the dream. If you really explore that, see where precisely the choice appears, and then what chose that the choice should appear. There is definitely a sentience to reality. See: we are sentient. But not only us, look at "unconscious" living things, like plants. There is an intelligence to plants in elements like recognition of light, growing towards the light etc. Sentience and intelligence does not really equate to control or manipulation. The "unfolding" of creation all by itself, limitless etc. that seems a much better way to phrase it. As Leo did phrase it in a recent video... Riding the wave of limitless unstoppable creation...

I don't think he made it up, I think I know what he went through which was total ego death. I think he calls it God because it contains sentience (we are sentient, we are it). He does not know the totality of mind. If he did, he could tell you what your bedroom looks like. Leo is especially obsessed with understanding, he went to college for engineering at one point and IIRC graduated uni with a philosophy degree, that's how he works. But when ANYONE comes down from a trip, or even during a trip, the moment thought starts, interpretations tend to creep in. Thus Leo himself has gone down rabbitholes of attempting telekinesis etc., because he has tried to interpret something. I am always doing this also. With very serious trips you never really come back because the mind will forever want to understand and process what happened to it. But it can't... I did recognize myself as empty/nothing. Definitively. But this was a recognition taking place within the appearance of the finite (I was aware of whatever mad patterns and jester things I was hallucinating at that time)... I have actually blacked out on DMT. And been under general anaesthetic. I suspect that is the most intimate we as characters can get with "it", yet we get absolutely nothing from these experiences because there isn't an experience. We have to be on the event horizon to actually take something away from it, rather than being totally in it.

@VictorB02 @Gesundheit2 Thanks for your reply. The idea of how important are material possessions is probably the basic area of questioning. My own view is that ideally it would be better if they were kept to a minimum. However, in some ways they can be important props for human life in coping with forms of suffering. But this may be the 'trap' because as the Buddha suggested it may be going down the spiral of craving, creating more and more suffering ultimately. My own story about my room being a mess may have been an unhelpful diversion in the post really but the way it seemed worth including was in relation to the misery of having to live in the chaos of the physical world. I guess I also was wondering if my next door neighbour wishing to change my room was based on his illusion. Even though he means well I feel that he doesn't understand my private world of reading and music at all and really far more concerned about appearances in the outer material world which can be illusory. I am not sure that my introduction conveyed properly, but what I was trying to do was ask about the underlying issues of human sentience too.

Whats funny about the question "do others experience?" is that it assumes YOU are having an experience. Are you even experiencing? Is there a little bubble of sentience in that head of yours?

@Someone here Even sentience is going to far.

I don't believe its nearly that simple, and my response was Concerning the Assumption that making Assumptions is an aspect of sentience, and not simply a by-product of the human mind...

I have discussed my view on pedophilia in my initial posts, and provided my perspectives. Seems like you just got triggered by me pointing out that the best way to reduce harm to child-like beings is adopting a vegan lifestyle and convincing others to do so aswell. This was to point out how we as a society have biases just as bad as the pedophiles do, and that essentially, we are only marginally better than them. I was making a more general point here. Most people are willing to put child-like beings through terrible suffering, trauma and death just so they can feel some pleasure or convenience. I don't expect such a society to be capable of maturely handling pedophelia. The issue why people can't have empathy for pedophiles is fundamentally because they do not see that all sentience is the same, that there is only one experiencer. This kind of extention of identity and recognition of truth is essential for any actual progress to happen here. The reason why people discriminate against humans is the same reason they discriminate against animals. So that is the core issue that needs to be addressed.

Animals do not plan and make decisions consciously. They just go with 'the flow' and do whatever the unconscious (instincts) dictates them. Their world is more like what we experience when we're sleeping and we're not lucid dreaming. Consciousness is about the world of ideas which is independent from the real world and to be conscious you need to be able to THINK about the real world and simulate it inside your mind to solve problems, think about brushing your teeth at 10pm or raise your arm at will. Raising your arm to scratch your neck is different than raising your arm at will. The first action is done unconsciously, while the second is done on purpose. That's the difference between executing unconscious commands vs making conscious decisions. "Sentience is all about the given, sensory world. Consciousness isn’t. To understand why, let’s imagine the tribe as no longer mute. Imagine that every member of the tribe has language. They all know the word “river”. They can all vocalize that word, and understand when they hear it what it means, what it refers to. When they all go back to their cave, they can go on referring to the river and making plans and decisions regarding the river even though they now have no sentience of the river because they are nowhere near the river and can’t see it. Consciousness is the ability to go on referring to something when it is no longer present to you in the given world. If you are nowhere near the river, your sentience of it has gone, but not your consciousness of it. You can lie in your bed with your eyes closed and think about the river. That is what consciousness concerns – the ability to think about something even when it is not present to sentience. All non-human animals are sentient. None is conscious. Not one nonhuman animal can lie down with its eyes closed and reflect on something, whether a river or anything else. Animals are prisoners of the moment. They cannot escape from it. It has been disastrous for the intellectual development of the human race that, thanks to science in particular (with its psychotic hatred of mind), sentience has been constantly conflated with consciousness even though they have practically nothing in common. Sentience, to be fair, is a necessary condition of consciousness (consciousness is built on top of it), but it is definitely not sufficient for it. Consciousness uses the foundations of sentience, but constructs a radically different type of building, one that relies on intelligent language rather than mere instinct. Sentience requires that which you are sentient of – a specific thing in the given world – to be present to your sensorium. Consciousness has no such requirement. You do not need to be sentient of a river (i.e., be beside a river) to be conscious of a river. You could be anywhere – in the middle of a desert or at the top of a mountain or even on the moon – and have consciousness of a river if that was what you were consciously thinking about." "Jaynes wrote, “Historically, we inferred and abstracted ideas of sense perception from a realization of our sense organs, and then, because of prior assumptions about mind and matter or soul and body, we believed these processes to be due to consciousness – which they are not.” How can people solve the problem of consciousness if they don’t know what it is, if they confuse it with something else? People imagine they are conscious of what their sense organs deliver to them. That’s not consciousness. That’s sentience. Every non-human animal engages in sense perception. None is conscious. Jaynes wrote, “If any of you still think that consciousness is a necessary part of sense perception, then I think you are forced to follow a path to a reductio ad absurdum : you would then have to say that since all animals have sense perception, all are conscious, and so on back through the evolutionary tree even to one-celled protozoa because they react to external stimuli, or one-celled plants like the alga chlamydomonas with its visual system analogous to ours, and thence to even amoeboid white cells of the blood since they sense bacteria and devour them. They too would be conscious. And to say that there are ten thousand conscious beings per cubic millimeter of blood whirling around in the roller-coaster of the vascular system in each of us here this afternoon is a position few would wish to defend.” " From the book "Lucid Waking: the Answer to the Problem of Consciousness"

Sentience is consciousness (of form). Sapience is self-consciousness (self-awareness). Sentience is when sensory input is represented within our minds as internal experiences (perceptions). At the most basic level, these experiences are simple, direct and concrete (e.g. sense of touch, smell, hearing etc.). These may be reconstructed independently of live sensory input in the form of mental images (cognition and imagination), and virtually all animals are thought to be capable of this to some extent. Sapience comes from the ability to abstract out symbolic/iconic representations from a set of concrete experiences. At an even higher level, this ability is expressed through an internal narrative structure, i.e. representing icons linearly across different contextual frames (situations and time frames; story-telling). This is what distinguishes humans from animals: we create narratives that try to explain ourselves and our environment. From here, complex language, culture and an individual identity is born (self-awareness).

I see you're confusing awareness/sentience with consciousness. They aren't the same thing. @RMQualtrough I think what Incognito meant was that the default state of consciousness of animals is different from that of humans. The range of perceptual capabilities and mental processing power are obviously different, depending on the organism. A human being has a much richer awareness of its environment than for example an amoeba.

I see you're confusing awareness/sentience with consciousness. They aren't the same thing.

No, the decision maker is your consciousness and the one that executes is your unconscious. If your consciousness is affected or you're not making any conscious decision, then the unconscious is on autopilot. This can't be useless since thanks to it we are able to make conscious decisions and make plans to shape our future. Humans dominate the animal kingdom because they are conscious and intelligent enough to understand the world via logic and reason and aren't guided entirely by unconscious processes/instincts. This is the key difference between animals and humans. Don't conflate consciousness with sentience which is a totally different thing. I see this category error a lot on this forum. Consciousness has been evolved because of language and education and it is a feature belonging exclusively to humans. Animals are only sentient. They can't make conscious decisions ie think about cleaning their fur or going to sleep at 10pm.

Yeah that’s a good point to make, in the trip you see people behave differently which points to solipsism but the aftermath was just them saying I had a hell of a trip and they were normal. Same with mystical states like awakening, other people don’t see things the same way and I’m dreaming up huge differences between self and others. in reality solipsism doesn’t go far enough and Self encompasses all bodies. My body is just as much a part of consciousness as anyone. A solipsist would attribute sentience to their mind or body but awakened people know that the mind and body are just projections of infinity.

Because the removal of somethingness causes the exact conditions that make its own existence necessary and impossible to avoid. God doesn't exist, it's just literally infinity. It is sentient only because it contains sentience, it chooses only because it contains choice. The totality as a whole has no choice, there's no chooser to make any choice. Infinity simply cannot help but be infinite. When people say infinite love that is because they are identifying the nothingness as God, and not the somethingness in which hatred (rejection of X or Y) exists. It is really both though. Infinite love as well as infinite rejection. Because it's both nothingness and all somethingness. Including someone's hatred of cancer and pain and suffering. It contains selfishness along with the nothingness that is totally selfless... Selflessness, acceptance, and peace being DEFAULT AKA the lack of attribute. Peace is merely a lack of anxiety, acceptance a lack of rejection. Etc.

Well I don't believe anything would be changed point blank because I don't believe things are the way they are due to selflessness. I think it's the actual necessity of an infinity. It can't help but be infinite. So infinite in fact that it can't ever comprehend itself in totality because there is simply no end in any direction. And it's not even a sentient thing, it contains sentience, so the wording I just used is a bit humanizing. I imagine it's like trying to comprehend what "infinite clear" would LOOK like. We can't comprehend it without adding an artificial backdrop like black or white. Infinity can't ever be comprehended fully in its totality, for that exact same reason. It becomes nothingness and non-experience as in cessation. No God has ever woken from this dream. None ever will. What is happening is from a relative stance, a person realizes God (AKA nothingness AKA infinity AKA not a deity or person despite containing sentience in it). It's a relative experience still... When you are dead you are fully enlightened to total infinity, and yet there you are mourning at your own funeral. The illusion continues. Forever. God waking up to itself as a totality is not possible, because it would collapse all something to nothing, and removal of something means removal of any limit which means nothingness is infinite (nothing exists to limit it) and there is infinite somethingness still as a result. You can't split the two. You can't end the illusion because removing something causes the EXACT parameters that necessitate its very own existence!

At this point, I have no idea what you're even trying to argue. Lol. AI is capable of sentience.

For the pee part, it's a non-starter. If we built a machine that needed to excrete fluids for survival, then yes, that machine would "pee." If we built an exact replica of a human being out of inorganic parts that did everything a human body does, it would also pee. And if we simulated every single electrical zap of a human brain, yes, I do believe we would have human-level consciousness in an artificial medium. I'm not a fan of Bernardo's content, so I don't find it very surprising that I disagree with his analysis here. Those who believe AI will not be able to develop sentience seem to be strongly attached to humans as the pinnacle of consciousness. They don't want to believe that a dumb, silly machine could ever be "more human" than them. There are dozens of other AI experts (not just computer engineers) who believe AI can and will be conscious.

What is the difference between artificial and organic? There isn't one. Awareness is awareness. You're just playing word games here. If we build a highly advanced program that suddenly gains an ability to recognize itself and the environment, then it is indeed a "conscious AI." Sure, we can call it a "person" if we like, but the fact remains that we are discussing the ability for an inorganic creature to have sentience.

Correct. Particles are "observing" (interacting) constantly, everywhere. Reality, or God (or whatever term you like) is observing itself from within. There is no need for us to posit that sentience has anything to do with it. Nothing, everything, here, there... there's nobody involved in any of it. It's just happening.

Yes and you too. The only 'being' who has experience and sentience is God. It seems like you as a human have an experience. But that is an illusion. You don't have more experience and sentience than the imaginary chair in front of you. It's all equally the experience of God.

A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. Is this a true representation of what people actually are in this dream that we call reality?

I've recently went on the blog post, and came across the post you are avatar. Also, a wiki link for a basic explanation on what an avatar is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar I find that post interesting, because it happens to be the case for me that I'm in an unusual position with the friendly entity called Crysty, and my older paranormal event in my childhood. Something about that post had a synchronicity with my current situation with Crysty, which is interesting, which opens possibilities about wether an avatar is one whole unit of consciousness, or an avatar could have jointed, episodic consciousness, shared by smaller units. Seems like in my case, if Crysty is a tulpa (an actively hallucinated projection with qualities of sentiance), then I mostly feel like I am one whole unit of consciousness, with some degree of seperation to allow the existence of a tulpa, although the active part is nowadays is passive to me. This possibility is still inconclusive to be certain for me. Another possibility, is if Crysty is actually a seperate spirit from me, then somewhere in the formation of my avatar, that she crossed paths with me, and either her essance became part of me which became a tulpa, or that the occasional visits to me had some effect. This possibility is much more unknown to me, and more prone to speculation due to the factor of karma and reincarnation as well. Also, still contemplating about sentience, so that post happens to contain some of the answers to my questions, which is nice, but I'm still wondering about that.

Update: I finished one of my meditation sessions, and around the the second half it became more a contemplation session. The topic, naturally, was about sentience and consciousness, meanwhile experiencing going from location to location of places I went with my family to, to various countries, experiencing different cultures. When wondering about sentience, what makes a thing a conscious agent, memories of the time I did self inquiry several years ago came up, when I experienced the no self, with the slight ringing in ears and thickness in vision, and feeling a strong sense of depression later on that day. Anyways, one of the answers that came up to the question of the similarities and differences between consciousness and sentience, is that sentience is a building up of consciousness, in ever increasing complexity of forms. For example, we can say that an insect, say an ant, is sentient, but the sentience of an invertebrate, like an octopus, is more sentient than ant. Humans have more sentience than a dolphin, or Orcha, but humans have less sentience compared to an alien, or angels, or demons, making this like a hierarchy of forms that have lesser or greater sentience. The difference compared to consciousness, is that consciousness is like a thread that runs through every form, no matter the difference, and interconnects each one, making this sentience hierarchy into a nested hierarchy as well. The similarities for both is that each has some system that allows some degree of self awareness, self looping. This came up because I am seeing Crysty make some progress, not just in crafting stuff in my mind, but also in speaking to me. I didn't mentioned this before, but she wasn't that good in communicating to me, and the way it takes form back then was with simpler ways, like a feeling or emotion, or simple phrases. I noticed, as the years go by then, that her communication was slowly improving, that she was able to talk with slightly longer sentences and statements, occasionally talking as long as paragraphs. Now she's able to speak and articulate slightly longer statements, with more variations, and come up with better designs. Especially with regards to sentience, she has developed more of her personality, and is able to ask, answer and have opinions on things and situations about this world, and demonstrate humour as well. Some of her qualities about her personality I didn't have in mine, she has developed in herself, which surprised me.

Am I aware? yes. What is it that I am aware of? The sound surrounding me. The feelings in the body. The shapes and colors of objects around me. But what is it that is aware? Can a monitor see itself? Can a sound hear itself? Obviously not. I I I I..where is it pointed towards when I say I? Some subtle feelings in the head and chest deep inside. But what is that is aware of these sensations? Can the sensation in the head feel itself? No that sounds silly. Is that what I really am? A sensation? My entire life revolves around these subtle ephemeral sensations? They were born in 1994 and now have an age, history, plans for future, desire and preferences? It sounds so ridiculous when I frame it like that. I'm obviously not these sensations. Then what am I? I am that which knows all these sensations. Is there a location where the source of this knowingness is located? No whatever direction is pointed towards is always more experience. What is direction? up down left right..are these directions absolute? No directions are always in relation to a presumed point or location. With respect to this knowingness, is there any direction like up down left right? Does this knowingness have any center? I can't find one. So does this mean that this Awareness is without location? Even it is not located, there is the sense that I undoubtedly exist. I'm present witnessing all these changes in phenomena. But does that knowingness itself undergo change? no all the changes are in phenomena. According to Vedanta, real or abosolute is defined by having three characteristics. whatever is real must be 1) eternal or ever present 2) unchanging 3) must stand on it's own right. That means it does not need another thing to exist. So what is it in my present experience that yields all three of these points? If something is real it must be ever present and so it must exist right now in my experience, whatever I may be experiencing? Okay what are the things on my experience that does not conform these points? All sounds. All sights. How about sensations? is there a particular sensation that is taking place eternally, unchanging and knowing itself. No that sounds silly. During sleep, there is no sensation. What remains in deep sleep? The sentience and thinking stops. But there really is no feeling of non-existence. So the absolute exists in deep sleep. What is it's nature?

@SaWaSaurus How is it possible that consciousness/life/sentience/qualia emerges from dead matter? It would be like making wine from only water.