Sentience lies at the core of the human experience, allowing us to experience conscious awareness, subjective experiences, and a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. But are these capacities exclusive to humans? And are future machines likely to develop these abilities as well?

Nicholas Humphrey is a theoretical psychologist based in Cambridge who is known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. He has been a lecturer in psychology at Oxford, assistant director of the Subdepartment of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge, senior research fellow at Cambridge, professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, and school professor at the London School of Economics. His latest book, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, uncovers the evolutionary history of consciousness and the nature of sentient experience in various species.

Nicholas and Greg talk about some examples of animals that are believed to possess sentience, how high levels of consciousness can exist in animals without the extra dimension of sentience being present, how phenomenal consciousness came into being, and why it's very restricted in the animal kingdom and why being sentient should not be the only criterion for protecting certain animals and plants.

They also explore that while sentience is not expected to emerge in machines naturally, there are potential benefits in our future endeavors to develop sentient artificial intelligence.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

A theory on how phenomenal consciousness came to being

19:28: Psychology is a very difficult thing to do—to understand another person with a brain-like mine. The brain is the most complicated mechanism in the universe, as has often been pointed out. Yet you and I can read other people's minds with relative ease. How do we do it? We don't do it by virtue simply of intelligence or being clever. We do it by using our own presence, our own sense of ourself as a model for what it's like to be the other person. We are introspective psychologists, and you can only understand what it's like to be someone else by putting yourself in that place if you first know what it's like to be you. So you have to have a sense of your own self in order to model the selves of other individuals.

The essential ingredient in our psychological life

17:50: For creatures like ourselves who value our individuality and count on it in our interactions with other creatures like ourselves, whom we assume to be phenomenally conscious in the same way and to have the same sense of self, this presence, this groundedness of our psychic life, is crucial to the way in which we develop our notion of what it is to be ourselves and our role in the world.

The distinction between perception and sensation

34:58: Perception is how we represent facts about the world. You know, the apple is round, the chair is heavy, or whatever it may be, the weight is heavy. The sound is the middle sea; facts about the world out there; and sensation is how we represent our interaction with the sensory stimuli in our body and how we feel about those.

Soul niche

26:41: This phenomenal consciousness and sense of self opened up a new ecological niche for human beings. I've called it the soul niche, which is that humans live in the soul niche, which is, I think, a niche centered on the idea of our individuality based on our self-consciousness. We live in that niche in just the same way that trout live in rivers or bed bugs live in beds.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:

His Work:

Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness
A history of the mind
Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness
Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness
The Inner Eye: Social Intelligence in Evolution
Soul searching: Human nature and supernatural belief
Articles on Aeon
More scholarly articles

302. Sentient Creatures & Phenomenal Consciousness feat. Nicholas Humphrey

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc