Ross Mayhew wrote:


>
> The question: can the most intelligent of cephalopods be considered
> self-aware in the same sense that elephants, primates and people clearly
> are?  What has recent research demonstrated with regards to this
> matter?  What exactly would they have to do, before they would be
> generally accepted as sentient beings? (or for that matter, is
> "sentience" the same thing, or as simple as being aware of one's self as
> an individual?

Intelligence, sentience, self-awareness, etc are terms defined by humans
to justify our self esteem, and all refer to an electrochemical process.
That process takes place in humans in the brain, and we just assume that
no brain = no electrochemical process leading to all that stuff.

In fact, every living thing is electrochemically active and it is just
our egos that leads us to the conclusion that the average cabbage is
less sensitive than Hillary or that a Bill feels your pain but a
cephalopod does not.

No human has ever conferred with cabbages or cephalopods about this
matter because no human has developed the intelligence to do so. While
the cabbages and cephalopods are shouting out the answers to humanity's
knottiest problems, we can't hear - it's all Dutch to us. And those
dumass cabbages just can't seem to learn English, either.

Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, and Roger Penrose have each considered
your question at great length, and the result is a hypothesis called
panpsychism, a sort of Darwinian approach to awareness. Check out Galen
Strawson's book "Consciousness and its Place in Nature".

m

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