Hello everyone,

I was discussing sentience with myself and whether it was evidence of a soul (something additional to matter and energy that exists in space) and thought I would get all of you involved!

So, I’m sort of trying to tell myself that souls don’t exist but I can’t convince myself because of sentience.
There is the view that sentience is just a physical result of brain chemistry. I can barely believe that. That’s because I sincerely do not believe robots are sentient. Yes, they have sensors allowing them to “see” objects and process the information to avoid the object. But they’re just following a program and they don’t actually see an image form within their consciousness, it’s just machinery and electricity in there. From there, if the body is just a robot, then, there is no reason consciousness would exist. Computers, televisions, robots work very well without consciousness. If we are determined by cause and effect laws, there is no reason we would be forced to experience the flow of this cause and effect perpetuation. Also, it doesn't make sense to me that aggregation of protons and electrons can experience consciousness.

What do you all think about this?

If there is no soul and consciousness is a chemical process (which doesn’t make sense to me), then I think robots do or will in the future have consciousness and animals do to, just as we do. As a consequence, animals and robots should have equal rights.

In the other scenario, then, we have souls which I would define as another substance, not energy, not matter but a third thing that experiences the world. This wouldn’t mean that souls cannot exist in animals and robots and if they did, then animals and robots would, again, deserve equal rights. If not, they wouldn’t but there is no way to test that in my opinion. The mirror test doesn’t test for sentience; it only tests for whether something’s program allows it to recognize itself in a mirror.

Another thing I’d like to add is if consciousness is just a product of a group of communicating bodies feeling the stimuli that they are receiving as a whole, just like cells communicate together and “feel” their environment thus causing us to be sentient, then, is there a greater consciousness for all of the people on this Earth who also communicate together and “feel” their environment?