{"id":14545,"date":"2026-10-19T16:57:55","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T23:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/?p=14545"},"modified":"2026-10-19T16:57:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T23:57:55","slug":"michael-polanyi-on-sentience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2026\/10\/19\/michael-polanyi-on-sentience\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Polanyi on Sentience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Polanyi, <em>The Tacit Dimension<\/em> (Anchor Books, 1967, p. 37):<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">. . . it is taken for granted today among biologists that all manifestations of life can ultimately be explained by the laws governing inanimate matter.\u00a0 [. . .] Yet this assumption is patent nonsense. The most striking feature of our own existence is our sentience. The laws of physics and chemistry include no conception of sentience, and any system wholly determined by these laws must be insentient.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#8220;Any system&#8221; includes today&#8217;s advanced AI engines. They too are &#8220;wholly determined&#8221; by the laws of physics.\u00a0 This is one of many passage from Polanyi&#8217;s work I could cite in support of my claims about the lack in these AI systems of\u00a0 both sentience and intrinsic intentionality.\u00a0 They are nothing but super-complex and superfast <em>simulators<\/em> of the genuine intelligence we find in ourselves.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I heard Donald\u00a0 Trump say this morning once again that &#8216;AI&#8217; is a misnomer and that the the correct name is &#8216;SI,&#8217; which abbreviates &#8216;super-intelligence.&#8217; Two points.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">First, AI engines cannot be super-intelligent because they are not even intelligent <em>sensu stricto<\/em>. I grant that there can be reasonable debate about this first point.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Second, Trump&#8217;s claim that artificial intelligence is not properly so-called because whatever is artificial is fake, is plainly and indisputably false.\u00a0 To adduce\u00a0 just one of many counterexamples, a properly functioning artificial\u00a0 aortic valve is not a fake valve, but a genuine valve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Anchor Books, 1967, p. 37): . . . it is taken for granted today among biologists that all manifestations of life can ultimately be explained by the laws governing inanimate matter.\u00a0 [. . .] Yet this assumption is patent nonsense. The most striking feature of our own existence is our &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2026\/10\/19\/michael-polanyi-on-sentience\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Michael Polanyi on Sentience&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,890,899,293],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-biology","category-michael","category-sentience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14546,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14545\/revisions\/14546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}