The answer to Could a sentient machine suffer? suggests that
The ability to suffer would not seem to be a necessary condition for sentience
This made me wonder what the minimum necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be considered sentient are?. The 'something' here does not necessarily have to be human or animal; I'm interested in the abstract notion here.
A little more formally:
Given an X. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for X to acquire sentience?
Although this will seem at first glance to be a bold statement, the answer to these questions is actually remarkably simple: it's all in how you define sentience. That is, the necessary and sufficient conditions for sentience would be precisely as they are defined. I think what people really want to know—in fact what they might have meant to ask in the first place—is "how would one measure X in another entity?", X being sentience, consciousness, whether it can actually feel pain/love/happiness/sadness, etc. That's where the real challenge lies. This touches on ideas like Solipsism, Searle's Chinese Room Argument, and the mind-body problem in general. But when you are asking for the conditions which make X, you are simply asking for the definition of X; i.e. that which makes X distinct from everything else.
In this case, the necessary and sufficient conditions for sentience are (depending on how you define "sentient"):
Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences.
–Wikipedia
Conscious or aware; Experiencing sensation or feeling.
–Wikitionary
Having sense perception; conscious; experiencing sensation or feeling.
–The Free Dictionary
- having the power of perception by the senses; conscious.
- characterized by sensation and consciousness.
–Dictionary.com
Obviously, the question here is one of definition; how one defines sentience.
You quote an answer on an earlier thread, where someone wrote:
The ability to suffer would not seem to be a necessary condition for sentience
From a Buddhist perspective, this is exactly wrong; in Buddhist philosophy, sentience is defined as "the ability to suffer" (which is identical to "capable of sensation.")
Sentience can not be aquired like a possession. It is an attribute that is either there or is absent.
To be considered sentient there are several things that are required:
