For us to have sentience, and I'm pretty sure you'll agree we do, and for our cells to have sentience, sentience must also be present in the molecules that make those cells and it must be in the atoms that make those molecules. — MikeL
There is certainly a sentience above us, that we have created, just like cells create the organism. We call that sentience the economy or society, and it acts to preserve itself too. — MikeL
Why does a cell want to preserve itself? — MikeL
Why does a cell want to preserve itself? — MikeL
Does it have a higher purpose? — MikeL
The cell performs functions that are characteristic of life. They replicate, they grow, they consume their environment, build some internal stuff and then excrete what they can't use, and they respond to their environment.This may be a good test to determine if something is alive or not, but it does not explain what life is. — MikeL
It looks like and smells like and is convincing enough to trick the insect into believing it is the other sex. — MikeL
It just so happens that the behavior it engages in DOES so — Jake Tarragon
The all encompassing "it just happens" theory for everything. — Rich
Maybe I didn't quite understand what you were saying, but the fact that there are emergent phenomenon suggests a lower level explanation does it not? After all, what is it emerging out of? I don't buy that it comes out of nothing. I think you trace the curve back towards the infinitely small until it becomes immeasurable. At that point people say, there's nothing there.Again, it is reductionist to apply lower level explanations to emergent phenomena. — Galuchat
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