Sentience

Sentience is the manifestation of a mind, linked to intelligence and cognition. Sentient beings display the properties of consciousness and intelligence. The idea of sentient beings extends to other animals but not to plants. Plants have a strategy of existence, remarkable forms, beauty and adaptability, but no minds. In a modern sense, sentience is a composite property of brains that varies approximately with the size, organization and complexity of the brain.

A hierarchy of sentience exists in the living world. The hierarchy of sentience follows an evolutionary path with the oldest creatures such as worms and shelled creatures of the sea at the lowest levels of sentience. 

Mammals are more recent and more elaborate creatures with high levels of sentience. Humans are mammals and have a natural affinity for some but not all other mammals. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that dolphins, whale’s, apes and humans have similar sentience.  While dogs are sentient beings with consciousness, feelings and behaviors that are mostly congruent with human feelings and behaviors, they have smaller, more specialized brains. It is reasonable to assume that dogs operate at a somewhat different level of sentience.

Chimpanzees and Bonobos are our closest primate relatives; their sentience is similar to ours and they deserve our protection and respect. When you examine human and chimpanzee cognitive abilities in detail, there are differences between their ability and ours. For example, chimpanzees can learn “language” from human teachers, using symbols, signs and keyboards, but they are unlikely to create a virtual reality from sounds and symbols as humans do. Their social communications are rich and complex, however, and provide us with insights into the development of human spoken language.

Members of the philosophy departments at universities point to books and journal papers as evidence of the thought process and will cite intelligent argument or “reason” as the indispensable tool of philosophy.

The word “thought” is not so easily defined. In common use, thinking is equivalent to selftalk, the process of talking to yourself when you are not busy doing other things. Selftalk has important limitations that need to be understood before human cognitive processes can be understood. Self talk extends to conversation as group thinking, lectures, books and the constant chatter of media.

Neuroscience Notes places the human brain at the center of the universe. Since the brain is the organ of the mind, consciousness and all knowledge is contained within the brain. Neuroscience Notes is part of the Persona Digital Psychology and Philosophy Series of related books. The most closely related volumes are the Human Brain and Intelligence and Learning. We offer two sources of our books. Alpha Online ships printed books and nutrient formulas to the US and Canada. Click the green order button on the left to order printed book. Persona Digital Online offers downloads of eBooks, music and other digital documents available to customers all over the world. Click the yellow download buttons on the right to download the PDF eBook  from this website.

Neuroscience Notes

	Human Brain in Health and Disease
	Intelligence and Learning

Neuroscience Notes is published by Persona Digital Books. Copyright 2010. All rights to reproduction by any means are reserved. We encourage readers to quote and paraphrase topics from Neuroscience Notes published online and expect proper citations to accompany all derivative writings. The author is Stephen Gislason MD. The date of publication is 2010. The URL to the book description is http://www.personadigital.net/Persona/Neuroscience/

Persona Digital Online is a download server for digital media.  Also See Persona Digital Music Studio