Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
As far as I understand it, there are three broad buckets on the spectrum of what is considered sentience:
On the most open end (call it 0) it's the ability to experience sensation (this might be the original definition, but language evolves); literally just being able to process and react to input by some mechanism. By the broadest, most open interpretation of this idea, even plants are sentient. Certainly chickens are, to say nothing of dogs and cats, and of course humans.
More toward the middle (5) is the capability for experience and intent; not simply to sense and react, but to recognize a feeling and make a choice, however dimly, to pursue a course of action as a result. You might get higher-order emotions like love as a requirement for sentience with this definition. Here, plants are clearly not sentient; their reactions are simply the result of chemical processes. Chickens are on the line; I'm not an expert on chicken neurology, but as a person who lived in a rural area growing up, I think I could pretty well make a case on either side. Dogs and cats seem to certainly be sentient by this interpretation, and humans are as well.
On the most restrictive end of the spectrum (10) is something more like human-level consciousness; tough to define without using fuzzy words like "feel" and "think," but being able to reason and plan for the future in some way is one part. Another part I've seen a lot that seems like it's in this bucket is being able to choose to follow or eschew raw impulses. This is the end of the spectrum that most sci-fi leans on when they discuss "sentience." Chickens are probably not sentient by this measure, but dogs and cats may be. Humans are, as the prototype of our understanding of the term.
So, to answer your question, I'd say that chickens seem to be the midpoint of the spectrum. There are probably about as many definitions which include them as don't include them. A manosphere meatfluencer would probably put sentience at a 9 or 10 on this spectrum, while some religious traditions might put it at a 1 or 2, or even as low as 0 in some cases.