Sentience - Who Needs It?

In my December 23 post, I raved about Peter Watt’s new novel Blindsight calling it “Wicked Good” and “a novel of ideas.” One of the ideas in the book is that sentience (or consciousness) is not needed for intelligent life. The book doesn’t explicitly define “intelligent life” but seems to agree with the commonsense definition of “building technological artifacts” like spaceships. I disagree with the idea that sentience isn’t needed for intelligent life, and in fact argue that it is vital.

Now, Watts has a Doctorate in Biology, making it safe to say that his big toe forgot more about biology then this History / Business major will every know, so I approach this argument with trepidation. Watts makes a very vigorous and cogent argument at his web page in the “long-winded version” of the book’s endnotes. (footnote 19 is especially interesting, leading to various optical illusions pointing to how flawed consciousness is.) But to summarize the argument (any errors are mine) he says that consciousness has no evolutionary advantage. My response is simple: fire.

Fire, or rather the mastery of fire, gave the early humans (Homo Erectus, starting about 2 million years ago) a HUGE evolutionary advantage. You don’t get spaceships without fire, and you don’t get fire without consciousness. First, let’s look at the non-controversial part of that statement (fire is good), then I’ll discuss why I think consciousness is required to get there.

Control of fire gave humans a number of evolutionary advantages, which I will discuss in no particular order. First, it allowed humans to cook food. This increased the types and digestibility of foodstuffs, and (since heat kills bacteria) made the food safer to eat. Dysentery kills right quick. Second, animals avoid fire, because it’s dangerous. So fire helped keep humans off the dinner menu. Third, humans evolved in tropical Africa. We can still die of hypothermia in weather as warm as 50 degrees F.

Moreover, fire requires fuel. Since there are only so many dead branches on the forest floor, tools were needed to cut trees and shrubs for fuel. This leads to improved tool making skills. Adding to the pressures for expansion and tools were the increase in population. More mouths meant you needed to get good at hunting and gathering. In short, there is no way Homo Erectus was able to expand out of Africa without fire.

Watts might use the bee argument at me. Individual bees have an instinct to spit out wax while turning in a circle. Since they’re all doing the same thing, these circles get squashed into hexagons, which are ideal for maximum space with minimum structure. In short, the individual bees have no idea why they do what they do, but it works.

But fire is different. The instinct of every land animal (except man) is to avoid fire. Fire kills. So, to master the use of fire, somebody (actually, probably a lot of somebodies with burnt fingers) had to make a conscious decision to override their instinct. Not only that, they had to do so with a plan. The ape-man who said “fire pretty, me want” and grabbed it died. The ape-man who had a vision of fire as a useful tool (sometimes) succeeded. Consciousness, then, gives humans the ability to make long-term plans. You don’t build a spaceship without the ability to do long-term planning.

To answer the question posed in the header, if you want to create high tech, you need sentience.