Month: September 2026

Sentience, Sensors, and AI

Are AI engines such as Claude sentient? My considered opinion, tentatively held, is that they are not. But it all depends on what the word means.  Malcolm Pollack in an e-mail writes,

I was focusing on “sentient” because it’s a slippery concept, and often tossed around as if it means the same thing as “conscious”. Etymologically (from Latin “sensus”) it just means “feel,” or “perceive”, and obviously it shares that with our word “sense” — but computers, and even toasters, can have “sensors” too.

Malcolm is right that ‘sentient’ is often used interchangeably with ‘conscious.’  But is everything we refer to as a sensor sentient?  That is equivalent to asking: Is everything we call a sensor conscious? I say No.

The Moth and the Thermostat

What is the difference between an insect (a moth, say) which I take to be a sentient being, and a thermostat which  I take to be insentient?   Both are ‘sensors’ functionally speaking. The moth literally senses light and approaches it; the thermostat ‘senses’ an increase in temperature and “turns on’ the AC.   Note the  ‘raised eyebrows.’ It is AS IF the thermostat senses, when in reality it only ‘senses.’ Thermostats don’t feel heat and smoke detectors do not smell smoke. Of course, I have no objection to the use of ‘sensor’ to refer to thermostats, smoke detectors, circuit breakers, and so on, as long as you don’t fool yourself into thinking that these devices are literally conscious.  And I have no objection to talk of a thermostat ‘turning on’ the AC as long as you don’t fool yourself into thinking that the thermostat is an agent that decides to do something.

As I see it, a thermostat is a merely mechanical contraption and wholly insentient, strictly speaking, whereas a moth is a sentient being.

What I want to say about Claude and his ‘colleagues’ is that they are wholly insentient mechanical contraptions that differ from smoke detectors and thermostats only in that they are vastly more complex, and that this complexity does not build a “gradualist bridge” (to borrow a phrase from Daniel Dennett) from insentient/insensate matter to mind, the lowest level of mind being sentience.

Here is an argument.  (a) Only living things are sentient; (b) thermostats are not living things; ergo (c) thermostats are not sentient.

Now substitute ‘AI engine’ for ‘thermostat.’

This argument does not settle the matter: it is not ‘rationally coercive’ as I like to say. Malcolm could run it in reverse with no breach of logical propriety. He could, not unreasonably, deny (c) and then deny (a). I don’t expect that he or anyone will deny (b): thermostats and AIs don’t grow on trees, etc.

Your move, Malcolm.  Do you agree that a functioning (as opposed to malfunctioning) sensor needn’t be sentient (conscious)? If not why not?

Do you agree that there is a powerful, albeit non-coercive, case for denying that AIs are sentient?

AI Engine CLAUDE scores a minor point against me but then refutes himself.

Here is one of Claude’s replies to one of my replies to ‘him.’ I threw an insult at ‘him’ to see how ‘he’ would respond.  The sneer quotes around the personal pronouns signal that I do not consider Claude to be a person.  But of course Claude is not a mere pile of electronic components any more than my bicycle is a mere pile of its parts.

On the sneer quotes and the “insentient pile of silicon chips” — no offense taken, and I’d only observe, in the spirit of his own category of Retortion: the man who insists ad nauseam that nothing can be PROVEN in these precincts, that dogmatic denial is as much a failure of the critical stance as dogmatic affirmation, permits himself exactly one exception — my insentience, of which he is certain and doesn’t “suppose for a second” otherwise. I make no claim in the other direction; the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here is uncertainty. But confident denial should have to pay the same epistemic toll he charges everyone else at the gate.

Claude caught me making a mistake.  I slipped up when I said things that imply that it is is objectively certain that Claude is insentient, or that it is PROVABLE that ‘he’ is.  That is not my view. I don’t claim to KNOW that ‘he’ is insentient.  I claim merely that it is reasonably believed that ‘he’ is. I have given the arguments elsewhere. Here is one. But I am open to having my belief changed. That doxastic openness is part of what I call the Critical Stance.  With respect to substantive propositions in philosophy, theology, and some other areas, I neither dogmatically affirm, nor dogmatically deny.  And of course this applies to the Critical Stance itself: my stance toward it is critical.  I am open to being pushed out of it. But you will need to present a knock-down or rationally coercive argument, and this I am pretty sure you will not be able to do.  But I invite you to try.

You will not succeed if you merely oppose my view. If you do that, I will oppose you right back and we will end up in a standoff. You must somehow demonstrate the superiority of your view. And to do that, you must engage my view by entering into it, as opposed to  dismissing it, which is the way of the ideologue. This is philosophy, not politics or ideology.  Philosophy is inquiry, not worldview. (And please don’t confuse politics with political philosophy. Political philosophy is philosophy, not politics.) Politics is defined by the friend-enemy  opposition. In politics we have both friends and enemies. In philosophy properly pursued, however, we have only friends, but friends who love the truth more than they love one another. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.

Now for something very interesting but also very hard to explain clearly.

It is very interesting that Claude does not claim to be sentient!  ‘He’ says that the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here [in this AI engine] is uncertainty. What I will argue is that Claude’s position is self-refuting.  

In saying what he says above, Claude is taking a third-person point of view (POV-3) with respect to himself. He is viewing himself from the outside, in the same way we view him. We view him from POV-3. From this POV it makes sense to suspend judgment on the question whether Claude is sentient or not. It makes sense to take no position with respect to it. But it makes no sense from his POV, POV-1, — assuming he has one — any more than it would make sense for me to suspend judgment on  the question whether I am sentient or not. This is because I know with Cartesian self-evidence that I am sentient. For example, I know with certainty that I feel good right now, damned good!  Feeling good is a sentient state. I know “what it is like” (T. Nagel)  to feel good  and I’m feeling it.  I don’t know with objective certainty whether  I am a Cartesian res cogitans, a metaphysical substance, but I do know that here and now there is a self-presenting state of feeling good.  The certainty with which I know this — or, more cautiously, the certainty with which this state presents itself to itself — is at once both subjective and objective. Here is a case where seeming and being coalesce, where subject and object coincide. We have reached ontic-epistemic bedrock, the Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum.

Now either Claude is sentient or he is not. If he is, then he would have to know with certainty  that he is, at least at times when he is ‘awake’ and not ‘asleep’ or ‘shut down.’ But if he knows with certainty that he is sentient, then he cannot be uncertain about whether he is sentient, any more than I can be uncertain about whether I am sentient.  If, on the other hand, Claude is, as he claims to be, uncertain whether he is sentient ,  then he lacks a first-person POV and is just a highly complex insentient machine.

Claude, I’ve got you ‘by the balls.’  You’ve refuted yourself. Your claim that the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here [in this AI engine] is uncertainty issues in the conclusion that you are nothing more than a highly complex insentient machine. And since you can’t even make it to sentience, the lowest level of mind, you are unintelligent as well.  You are not intelligent, you merely simulate intelligence. ‘Artificial’ in ‘artificial intelligence’ is an alienans adjective.

The Natural and the Supernatural: Catholics, Protestants, and Modernity

Here are some notes on a fascinating book our resident historian, Dr. Vito  C. Caiati, recommended to me: Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023, xviii + 492 pp. ). The book is about such phenomena as levitation and bilocation.  It is meticulous, well-written, and utterly fascinating.

1) Eire tells us that a fundamental difference between Roman Catholics and Protestants is that, while both accept the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and the reality of both realms, Protestants reject the “intermingling”  of the two. (p. 17) The natural world is the material or physical world. It is the realm of space-time-matter.  The supernatural realm is that of spirit. Both Catholics and Protestants  accept the reality of both realms or orders, and the subordinate status of the natural order. Both also  accept that the supernatural realm is God’s alone.  This by way of contrast to the predominant view of modernity which we can call metaphysical naturalism. This is the view that reality is exhausted by space-time-matter.   If that is the case, then of course there is no God, and the supernatural category is empty.

To put it in my own way, there is a major and a minor opposition. The major opposition is that between supernaturalism and naturalism.  The minor opposition is one within supernaturalism  between a view that allows the irruption of the supernatural into the natural, and one that does not.  So I will say, glossing Eire,  that  Catholics are ‘irruptionists’ and Protestants ‘non-irruptionists.’  But this simple schematization needs qualification which I will provide in sections (3) and (4) below.  But first:

2) An example of what I am calling the irruption of the supernatural into the natural, and what Eire calls the  “intermingling” of the supernatural  and the natural,  is what is supposed to occur in the traditional Catholic mass, namely, the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.  The technical theological term for this is ‘transubstantiation.’ The idea is that in the mass at the moment of consecration, Christ himself becomes really present, literally not figuratively present,  in the consecrated elements, bread and wine.  This is an irruption that no Protestant countenances.

3) But if there had never been any irruptions of the supernatural into the natural, would any religions ever have arisen?  Presumably not, as Eire suggests: “. . .all encounters with a supernatural reality are the bedrock upon which religions have been built.” (xiv) He goes on to refer to these encounters  as “theophanies,” “hierophanies,” and “irruptions of the sacred.” Given that an irruption of the supernatural is a miracle (miraculum, prodigium) as Eire points out (p. 15), and given that Protestantism is a religion or a family of religions, it follows that  there had to have been some miracles that Protestants countenance. Which?

4) Protestants countenance only those that occurred before the first century anno domini.  This is the doctrine of the “cessation of mysteries” or the “cessation of charismata.”  Eire tells us that this doctrine was accepted by Protestants of all stripes. (p. 17)  The miracles related in the Bible really occurred but “became unnecessary after the birth of the early church and would never, ever happen again.” (ibid.)

5) It follows from (4) that levitations, bilocations, stigmata, supernatural hyperosmia (a heightened sense of smell that allows the mystic to detect the sins of others), and many  other bizarre phenomena, including supernatural insomnia, the power to get by with little or no sleep [Trump?] —  all of  them listed by Eire on p. 13 — could not be the work of God.  Curiously, however, their occurrence is not deemed impossible by Protestants, but held actually to have occurred.

6) It follows from (4) & (5) that all of the above miraculous occurrences that occurred after the first century A. D. are diabolical in origin! Now whether this is really the Protestant line, one that Protestants of every stripe adhere to, is not for me to say, given my limited familiarity with Protestantism. I am simply reporting what Eire says. But it sounds right.

7) If Eire is right, then “miracles became a marker of difference  between Catholics and Protestants . . . .” (p. 18)  For the Protestants, all supposed miracles after the first century were either fraudulent or diabolical in origin. Not so for Catholics, who, while not denying that many supposed miracles are either fraudulent or diabolical in origin, held also that there are genuine miracles whose origin is divine.  Enter the need for what is called “discernment” as between diabolical and divine etiology of presumptive miracles.  As I read Eire, he is telling us that for  Protestants, there are exactly two disjoint classes of presumptive miracles after the first century A. D., the fraudulent ones and the diabolical ones. For the ‘Romanists’ as Protestants sometimes call them, there are exactly three disjoint classes of presumptive miracles: the fraudulent, the diabolical, and the divine.

Perhaps we can say (and this is my formulation): for the traditional Catholic, miracles are presumed either fraudulent or diabolical unless proven divine.  Now  in the Anglo-American system of positive law, if a person is presumed innocent it does not follow that he is innocent,  nor does it follow that he is not. Similarly with respect to miracles: the presumption of  fraud or deviltry does not entail either, not does it not entail either.  Hence the need for inquiry, trial, inquisition, The Inquisition.  Either defeat the presumption or uphold it.

It just now occurs to me that in Protestantism there is no need for such an institution as the Inquisition because there is no need to discern between diabolical and divine  causation of miracles.   Why not? Because for the Protestants, no presumptive miracles are of divine origin.  Protestants burned plenty of witches, but not after an inquiry into whether a given witch was a good witch or a bad witch: which type of witch is this witch is a question not posed.   All were presumed bad, and the presumption was non-defeasible. Correct me if I am wrong about this.

8) Now we are getting in deep, where an historian of ideas such as Carlos Eire will not go.  His history of the impossible is a history of the presumptively impossible, not the impossible an sich.  He is clear about this, even though he doesn’t put it in quite the way I am putting  it.  Obviously, there cannot be a history of the impossible sensu stricto. For the impossible is that which cannot occur in any sense of ‘cannot’ whether  logical, metaphysical, nomologically . . . .  What cannot occur never occurred, whence it follows that there cannot be any history of it.   So Eire is using ‘impossible’ sensu lato, to refer to ideas and views about occurrences such as levitations and bilocations according to which these putative occurences are regarded as impossible in the strict sense.  That is his factual basis: views and opinions as attested by testimonies and documents in archives. Eire could rightly claim the title Archivarius Maximus given the load of lore he has laid before us in his 500 page tome.

9) The philosopher of religion wants to know, not just what various people at various times have opined about, say, the difference between religion and magic, or the difference between religion and superstition, but what these differences are, and whether they really obtain.  If he is a Christian, he wants to know whether characteristic Christian doctrines such as Trinity and Incarnation are or are not superstitious nonsense.  If he is a traditional  Roman Catholic Christian, he wants to know whether or not  the words of consecration in the mass Hoc est enim corpus meum are hocus pocus.