Sentience definition philosophy4/17/2023 I agree with Pinker’s critique of humanism he points out our weaknesses. This of course is where humanities come in (or should come in). The difference, as Pinker points out, is that with the latter, it is at least possible to conceive of a scientific hypothesis that could explain these phenomena. Of course it has yet to really explain consciousness or evolution or the beginning of the universe or DNA–or it would be better to say that the explanations are in process, under discussion. What if we recognized that scientific, rational methods for explaining the world, while wonderfully effective most of the time, represent just one part of the many cognitive abilities humans have? Science cannot explain sentience. They’re just not scientific explanations. After all his discipline gets along fine without it, though he does point out its importance in "moral reasoning." At the end of the book, he suggests that the questions of sentience and free will, along with other philosophical questions, may be unanswerable by the human mind, that they represent our encounter of a certain "cognitive closure." We’re just not capable of understanding these things our brains have limits.īut that seems to ignore the fact that we do have explanations for why/how we are sentient (or not) and why/how we have free will (or not). Pinker essentially suggests that understanding sentience is perhaps not all that important in understanding human behavior. Poets understand the intersections of math, science, language and aesthetics, even if literary critics and evolutionary psychologists may struggle to see them. And, for the record, I am not the sterotypical anti-scientific, can’t do math, luddite humanities prof. However, despite these remarks, Pinker does seem to appreciate the value of art in the rich panalopy of human life, even though he views it as generally extraneous to the processes of evolutionary psychology. And if, the products of humanistic scholarship are often of little utilitarian value in the world, at least they are not gas chambers or atom bombs or weaponized diseases, to name just of few of the nifty products of science. I don’t disagree, though if we are going to compare egos, one could at least say that humanists don’t presume themselves to be gods, as science sometimes does. He characterizes much of the humanities’ study of art as status-building, as a way of seeming superior to the under class rather than anything else. Now as I intimated earlier, Pinker doesn’t hold much value in the humanistic in this text. This mystery, he continues, "remains a mystery, a topic not for science but for ethics" (148). However, science cannot explain consciousness as sentience, as "subjective experience, phenomenal awareness, raw feels, first-person present tense, ‘what it is like’ to be or do something, if you have to ask you’ll never know" (135). to tell me the dominant color of this website). Pinker finds science capable of explaining consciousness in terms of "self-awareness" or self-recognitin and gaining access to information in and through the body (e.g. One of the more thought-provoking elements which I don’t think I’ll get into my book is Pinker’s discussion of sentience.
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