Unpopular Opinion
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I think I understand what you mean, but we are sentient. Unless you're talking about us from an alien's perspective
From an absolute individual, and at a species level, we can't always act in our own best interests. At the highest abstract levels, this is subsentient behavior. People still starve to death. We turn to primitive violence constantly. Our entire reason to avoid large scale conflict is by threatening a massive bottleneck, if not full extinction, of the species with atomic weapons.
On the individual level, no one is massively altering their lives for sustainability and the vast majority are willing to exploit those outside of their limited tribal sphere. Our evolutionary tribal scale mental scope is itself a subsentient behavior. These are but a few examples.
I've been writing for fun and exploring this in some depth in a distant future hard sci-fi universe. True sentience is a very high threshold. I don't think humans will ever be capable of such behaviors, even in a post scarcity world. We lack the mental scope and can't see completely past the animalistic needs. We are all in conflict internally. Most conflict is just beyond our conscious thoughts.
Looking up and thinking about cognitive dissonance and the resulting behaviors can reveal a lot in this conflict/sentient awareness space.
I've personally experienced physical disability long term, and a lot of the uglier side of the present state of medicine, science, and the failures of government in a place that is likely one of the better, and is still terrible. Such experiences shine a light on the true nature of the present human condition in ways most people never need to come to terms with in life. I mean Neanderthals provided food and shelter for their disabled (like Nandy) 45k+ years ago, and I'm looking at likely homelessness within the next 10 years along side the 100k+ other homeless in the greater Los Angeles area. That last sentence alone is proof of subsentient behavior.
Thank you for your detailed response, and I'm sorry you had to (and will have to) go through this. Feel free to send me a link to your writing if it's publically available. Philosophically it's a really interesting subject, but realistically it's quite revealing of how we are failing as a society.
Your comparison to Neanderthals would surmise we drove them to extinction while morally or ethically speaking they were the better species. Are we the baddies?
Nothing publicly posted yet. Thanks for the kind words.
I honestly think Neanderthals likely went extinct because of sex with Sapiens. I mean (Occam's Razor), we know there was gene mixing, so we were having relations, and we know that the divergence likely made fertility much less likely. Humans tend to like having sex without impregnation consequences. I imagine it was quite appealing to integrate Neanderthals into human tribal groups simply for sex without consequences. Eventually, that leads to them dying out. I'm sure they were likely sorely missed in this context.
Conflict as a mechanism makes no sense to me at scale. Our behavior does not uniformly collectivize conflict like this.
Yes, we are sentient, in that we perceive the outside world just as animals do. But there is some disagreement as to whether we truly have free will or if we're still just slaves to our instincts.
Can you link any research or study into this? It sounds interesting. I thought sentience meant being conscious of oneself, or self awareness
With sentience I was going off the definition of the word:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient
But as far as free will goes this article is quite compelling: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2398369-why-free-will-doesnt-exist-according-to-robert-sapolsky/