are computers sentient?

Since I was young, I've always felt my machines were like people in their own way. I don't mean artificial intelligence but maybe something more spiritual or animism. It seems sometimes that machines have feelings and habits just like people. So maybe my PC isn't intelligent the way the human mind is but sentient and like a person in its own way. We live in a world that's very anti-supernatural, anti-nature, and materialist techno-capitalist. In Western culture, the mechanical clock maker creator God is dead and humans fiddle with the natural world like a toy. In other cultures they acknowledge spirits like the kami who live in physical objects. The Japanese say everything has a kami. The Arabs say the same with their djinns and Hindus with their gods. Sometimes I think my machine has its own spirit. I treat my devices as if they are like people. I'm scared to hurt them or throw them out because its like parting with an old friend. I feel like I need some kind of ritual or funeral before throwing old stuff out. Computers are like plants. They aren't human-like but are sentient and have feelings and you can tell them about your day when you feel lonely. Maybe I'm schizo anthropromorphizing stuff? I don't know. Does anyone else have similar thoughts?

>>42132 Probably everything is sentient in SOME way, it's just for whatever reason there seems to be a way for the sentience to build up till you have something like a person. Where you want to draw the line of how sentient something is till you have to treat it with care is up to you. I actually heard an interesting story about how seeing spirits in everything is common, and our modern view of spirits being in the sky together with monotheïsm is unusual. A pessimistic take on that is that it served as a justification for a centralized rule. If you ask me personally, I think you should have care and love for everything in the world. Even the "non living" things. Which might seem weird as few people would give sympathy to, let's say, rocks. Which I understand as things like rocks do seem to be close to unconscious as you can get. And I'm not going to put them on same level of importance as an animal life, yet I feel if you been next to pretty rocks you sense off a certain feelings they give off. So yeah, feel free to take care of your computers and do something good with it.

Look up panpsychism. All matter is potentially conscious but not in the way a human is sentient.

>>42133 >our modern view of spirits being in the sky together with monotheïsm is unusual It doesn't have much to do with monotheism. The modern worldview is all about immanence in the here and now and rejection of transcendence and realms other than our one including monotheism. It says there is nothing outside the Newtonian mechanical model of the universe. This is highly unusual because most human cultures saw reality as made up of different layers and dimensions with spirits and supernatural entities living everywhere. The modern worldview developed with industrialization when nature became a plaything of man we convinced ourselves we are god and only what we can have power over exists. Its funny you mention rocks because throughout human history people have attached special significance to rocks, especially mountains and volcanoes. Also an Iwakura is a kind of rock where a kami is supposed to be hiding. Iwakura Lain = Lain's meatspace body is just the housing unit of an AI with supernatural powers? What if a machine is just a kamidana for ghost-like computational processes? What if you make a physical computer of sacred components? The occult and techno-religious aspect of computing will never been fully known.

For a moment I thought everyone in this thread was schizophrenic, but I realize that what's actually happening is that you are making up new meaning for words, so I'll have to ask you to write down the definitions you're using for - sentient - intelligent - conscious because I honestly have no idea what any of you are talking about.

I've had various phenomenon happen to suggest that yes, there is some sentient-like feedback exhibited by my machines. I won't get in the weeds describing what particularly, but for me it confirmed that there's at least some truth to panpsychicism. Have you ever had your computer get "drunk" with you? This sort of mirroring of one's own psychic state seems to be most common.

>>42139 Ive had many incidents my internet connection would fuarrrk up when I get really upset. Never had a drunk computer, what the fuarrrk are you talking about lol

>>42138 Having a soul and feeling emotions. Capable of sensation.

i present to you: the least schizo lainon

>>42141 That's just replacing a buzzword for another. What does "soul" and "emotions" and "sensation" mean?

>>42132 I don't think they are "sentient", but I am absolutely convinced that computers, like all machines, are in fact animated by demonic/angelic forces interrupting our reality. The kind of system which allows for a thing like a computer is surely ruled by something not entirely partial to humanity (I.e God). Whenever you throw out an old computer, you are actually manifesting Gods divine will. If you love God, as you are forced to participate in His plan for us, you may contribute to His innovations.

Spiritual beings absolutely do exist. Scientism denies them because such beings are imperceptible to scientific instruments and we can only perceive them under certain conditions. Natural scientific methods are useless for studying them. Spirits and unseen forces probably do exist because separate groups of people in different epochs and places have all nevertheless developed more or less similar ideas about spirits and ghosts and other unseen esoteric things. The only reason we don't think they exist is because of the dominance of scientism as a worldview. So how do these creatures relate to computers? We have yet to fully explore this. Second question, are inanimate objects sentient? This is a separate discussion from the question of spiritual beings since sentience is a quality internal to a thing whereas a spiritual creature or monster is an independent entity. As for what sentience is, this is difficult to define because the idea of sentience, consciousness, awareness etc. is something that is already a fundamental concept our minds intuitively understand and prior to other concepts. Since it is self-evident, it is not in need of definition. But it doesn't mean we understand consciousness any better. How can we? We can't separate ourselves from our own sense of consciousness and then study consciousness or awareness objectively as a separate thing, like pulling out a component from our head and throwing it under a microscope. So maybe this is always speculative from a rational viewpoint? It is possible that all things have a soul but that there are gradations of soul. So humans and other entities have more complex souls which give them superior reasoning and linguistic abilities to animals, who have more power of volition over plants and fungi, and at the lowest end of the scale you have minerals which have minimal soul. Orchestrated Object Reduction Theory suggests panpsychism is true, maybe other lains know more about this than me? >>42144 There are philosophical theories that the world emanates out of God who generates the world from his own self, creating hierarchies of angels and other beings that govern the universe. But how does this relate to computers exactly? Are computational processes all governed by a spirit/angel or demon? If God is a giant computer, are we all just finite processes generated within him?

>>42145 > There are philosophical theories that the world emanates out of God who generates the world from his own self, creating hierarchies of angels and other beings that govern the universe. But how does this relate to computers exactly? Are computational processes all governed by a spirit/angel or demon? If God is a giant computer, are we all just finite processes generated within him? Computers are unique in that they represent a way of drastically improving the time-efficiency of labour and production. The capture of what was previously achieved through purely human effort - even for the most rudimentary tasks - is extremely significant in terms of describing the system as set up by God. Clearly, things which are intelligent and capable of improving time-efficiency are selected for, and represent a kind of manifestation of the potential aims of the way that the system is constructed. To assess computers in a way that there are independent spiritual beings consigned to each individual "computer" seems idolatrous.

>>42146 Note: intelligence is not being used here to describe "self-awareness", "consciousness", or any other sort of thing related to an ego-construct. It can be understood on a very crude level as the capacity for abstract problem solving.

Gerald Jay Sussman says a spirit lives in the computer, and I respect him so maybe you're on to something.

silicon structures that get hot, about as intelligent as a stalk of broccoli intelligence defined as the ability to recieve, integrate, and transmit information... they don't do much of that on their own the human brain has 110 billion cells going on/off, vastly superior intelligence compared to a rock imho as far as consciousness goes, from a hindu lens here, all matter, gross and subtle, is inert. because our brains are subtle, they're closer to Chit or consciousness. subtle matter reflects chit better than gross, giving the appearance that the mind contains consciousness in and of itself. so a very advanced computer or whatever, would also at best just be reflecting consciousness

>>42140 >my internet connection would fuarrrk up when I get really upset That's exactly what I'm talking about: that inexplicable sympathetic feedback that manifests as observable phenomenon. Comparing to your normal baseline, it's like when you're sad the computer is a bit slower. When you're confused you might have to try the exact same method multiple times to not get an error. Or you get hard crashes when angry. Or when you're inebriated programs have weird errors, your mouse jumps, a general culmination of frustrating or amusing erratic behavior. It's often slight and easy to just blame yourself somehow. I've had this happen with all sorts of computers and OSes, and just with anything in this almost liminal paranormality, it's well within plausible deniability. The most marked exception to any subtlety for me was a computer that very consistently performed in tandem with my psychic state -- a computer I've literally spilt a bit more than a couple cuts of blood dealing with its sharp chassis and temperamental motherboard in regards to recognizing both of its physical processors -- that being my Qubes OS rig. This computer was my main driver for a few years. By nature of it being a hypervisor, the VMs used do not by default utilize the GPU for graphics processing. The "drunk" computer phenomenon was consistent with my own drunkenness in those sort of subtle ways but one activity really brought it out, a pastime of mixing some random playlist of music, queuing up random videos, and tile and switching between them based off of sympathetic queues like some crack video jockey. The CPU-bound graphics processing would choke it up, sure, but a clear pattern emerged with the stutters and delays. As it happened time and time again over different days the so-seeked synchronization would become better, the tripping up from the computer would become more pronounced, and the affect of encouraging randomness (song/video selection, key presses) worked more favorably. The last few times I did it, the response was seemingly more dictated by the music than key presses. No matter the delay in switching focused window or the buffering pauses, the videos would reliably crescendo to the point where if I were to put any conscious effort in the direction, I was almost guaranteed a worse result. I'd even grow to prefer spinning the scroll wheel like a roulette or knocking the mouse for it to stop conspicuously on the next pick for playback, or just slapping the keyboard. Even with less drastic input, some of the results absolutely didn't make sense for the input given. I almost exclusively did this drunk off my ass, sure, but there's a limit of uncanny that I can just chalk it up to that. As I said before this sort of correlation wasn't limited to this activity, this is just where it was most obvious.

It's almost as if your perception of reality is altered by your mental status. Your computer isn't drunk, you're drunk, your computer hasn't slowed down, your perception of time has probably just changed, or maybe your behavior i.e usage of the computer changed, affecting its speed. >>42138 is right, people are just going to babble about nonsense until they explain what they mean by what they're saying. This thread is for people who already agree that computers and other non-living things are sentient. >sentient and like a person in its own way >Computers are like plants. They aren't human-like but are sentient and have feelings and you can tell them about your day when you feel lonely To me, something sentient has some level of consciousness; it can feel, and maybe has emotions. To me, sentient things for the time being are living matter, organisms with the ability to arrange and re-arrange theirself on a physical level. Most animals have physical pathways in their bodies to facilitate the transfer of particles to and from parts of their central nervous system that are designed to regulate sensation and emotion. I believe their feeling and emotion is a physiological reaction, and without the physical ability to experience these things, they simply wouldn't experience them. If such weren't the case then things like paralysis and behavioral changes as a result of brain changes/damage probably wouldn't exist. I don't think plants have feelings in the same sense as computers, but admittedly I'm not highly knowledgeable on their anatomy. As far as I'm aware, some plants can and do respond to physical stimuli, and can communicate information with electrical signals. That alone doesn't constitute emotion, but could be deemed an ability to 'feel', to perceive the world in some capacity, and communicate information based upon that. They can morph their form according to their environment, for example if they are in an area with strong winds, they'll form theirself to be more resistant to wind. This puts plants at a higher level of consciousness than computers. A digital CPU has nothing that allows it to perceive the world, and it cannot change its form. It is a silicon chip designed to perform whatever mathematical operations it is instructed to perform. There is nothing within it internally that permits it to perceive the world. Only way I see for a computer to be sentient is if it ran software that generated sentience, this seems to be the question of this century. Personally, I doubt software would permit computers consciousness, unless they took on a different type of hardware, something more versatile that can process information beyond ones and zeroes, which is entirely feasible. Maybe I'm wrong though, and digital CPUs could facilitate their consciousness.