The Beginning

I had been thinking for awhile about starting a blog, but for one reason or another, never got around to it. Instead, I collected ideas that I wished to write about.

I have decided to finally give the blogosphere another go with my new blog "On Becoming Sentient" - I'd like to talk a little bit about what the title means.

Sentience is generally defined as the ability to have subjective, conscious, perceptual experience. It is one of (if not the) differentiating factor(s) between human beings and the machines we create. As of yet, our robots are not self-aware. Whether they ever will be is yet to be seen, although science-fiction supplies us with no shortage of thought experiments on what the outcomes might be like. 

Human beings are not robots - or are we? I will argue - in this blog - that we are robots, albeit a very different, special kind of robot. This idea was first borne to me some time ago when reading about Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis:

"You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

We are far-less in control than we think. We did not choose our parents, our birthplace, our genes, or any of the important things that set up who we are today. Instead, we make small choices that affect us in subtle ways. Our sensitivity to these slight changes allows us to devote great amounts of time to what others might call "trivial." The similarities between any two individuals are far more numerous than the differences. This tendency to focus on what is different between ourselves and others hurts our ability to notice how similar we are.

I generalize with the pronoun we because is it something we are all guilty of. But it is important to note that this method of thought is not our fault. It is rather the natural state of things, that can be only be escaped through patience and persistence. This form of escape is what I refer to as becoming sentient.

To become sentient is to acknowledge that the illusion of free will is just that - an illusion. It is to understand that the drives you feel (produced by millions of years of evolution) are no more in your control than the next sentence I type. It is to understand that you are just as insignificant as I am; as any individual is to anyone else in the grand scheme of the cosmos. It is to acknowledge a lack of rules or meaning set out from on-high. It is to understand all this and not feel sad, broken, or terrified. It is to understand insignificance and revel in it. It is to create meaning where the universe has given none.

This process is not easy, and I do not expect anyone to read the above paragraphs and immediately agree with me. In fact, I would be skeptical if anyone took all my claims at face value and felt none worth challenging. This introduction is not meant to convince, but to give the reader an idea of the content to come.

Not every post will relate to this thesis specifically; it should be thought of as a uniting theme running underneath every word. That is to say, the ideas I plan to present will make the most sense in the light of this framework.

Thank you for reading the first of many posts to come.