Ad Astra Per Aspera

Office hours are a mostly dull and uneventful time. There are, however, a few exceptions. These exceptions occur mostly when a due date is impending and undergrads need last minute reassurances that their ideas are not as weak as a Frenchman’s courage in 1940. After the first office hour I spent climbing the walls out the sheer boredom of being confined to a windowless Teaching Assistant office, I learned to always bring something to read. So there I sat today, feet resting upon the furniture like I owned the place, reading. One character in the book asked another why he went on a four hundred mile trip through the mountains and his answer was, “[for] The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life.” Sufficed to say I was enthralled by those words. Thanks to Ursula K. LeGuin I now have the perfect answer when somebody asks me the most asinine question in the universe, “Why would you want to do that?” This brings me to the topic that I want to address this week: Sentience. An interesting word, and an even more interesting condition. Tackled quantitatively it is relatively simple to define. The axiom of cogito ergo sum is the historic proof. I think, therefore I am. Possessing the awareness to recognize the fact that you are a thinking creature validates your existence. If life is a dream of the divine, your own sense of awareness validates your role within the dream. But does sentience end there? Is fusion of self-awareness and consciousness limited to the realm of the quantitative? Does our sentience plateau upon the first utterance of the first person singular? Maslow would argue that it doesn’t and then cite his infernal hierarchy of needs. However that still seems like quantification and reduction of sentience to a dualism of needs met and left wanting. Besides, his discourse is weak. (Just for you RK) Is sentience lost in some people? Somewhere in a person’s cognitive, physical and spiritual development can you lose the self awareness to turn your perception inward? A person like that would regress to nothing more than a being responsive to conditioning and training. Insert stimulus, observe reaction, repeat as necessary for sixty to one hundred years. As an acute observer of humanity I could give more than a dozen examples of people that I think exist on a day to day basis responding only to outside stimulus without any sense of awareness in their life. If the qualification for sentience is nothing more than a childlike statement from Descartes, where you recognize yourself as a thinking creature, should it not follow that as we grow to adulthood the definition of sentience must be expanded? Simply being aware of your location within a room, going to work, doing your taxes, can not qualify as sentience. A job is worked to satisfy basic needs of home and hearth. Taxes are paid because you are told to pay them lest go to prison. Red lights obeyed for self preservation and because you are trained to stop. But Adam, you say, I am aware of the fact that I am doing my taxes and working my job, doesn’t that make me sentient? No. That’s called being awake. We must be measured by what we are capable of achieving. A dog who knows not to go into traffic is doing quite well for itself because the average dog thinks its tail isn’t part of itself. Humans have minds with the capacity to think any thought that we have the will and courage to conjure. The limits of our consciousness are only those that we place on ourselves. We are all born titans of thought, even if some of us either lose our way or choose to abandon sentience in lieu of a path more easily traversed – a Newtonian life of actions and reactions. Sentience must be something that is grappled with throughout life, not as a goal but the journey itself. The pursuit of sentience therein must take on the form of an individually directed purposeful introspection for the sake of the augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life. In considering the nature of sentience I am more than willing to entertain the notion that I am wrong. Perhaps, all that is necessary is the ability to speak the first person pronoun and be aware that you are talking about yourself. So if that is the case, then it would mean that this is the world that sentient man, gifted with limitless imagination, has created. If this is what we have created at the height of human conscious thought and awareness then I am left with no other conclusion than there is something rotten within the essence of humanity. That being the case, Terra should be wiped clean humankind before we pollute the cosmos. However, if we admit that we still have much to learn as a species, then this place will come to pass as more people grapple with their sentience and shape the world as one that befits a race with limitless potential.