James asked:

What do you suspect is the origin of and advantage of sentience?

P.S. Please do not say this is a loaded question in that I am implying there is a direction
consciousness must take. I'm just interested in your ideas.

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The caveat in your question makes it relatively easy to answer. In fact, virtually any text on darwinian
evolution would give you an adequate rundown, although the details might vary from one to another.
Thus: the origin lies in the acquisition of nerves and the subsequent organisation of these (initially
single-function) devices into faculties of perception. In advanced creatures such as mammals, these
systems (nervous systems) continued to evolve into segregated modules devoted to the evaluation of
perception; and finally in humans, this evaluative faculty progressed yet further by the development of
what we call a 'mind'.

William James argued that the primary function of this last-named faculty is the handling of surprise.
That's as good an encapsulation as any; and we certainly do not knowmuch more than this about the
supposed advantage of sentience. It does invite the counter-question, however, why and for what
evolutionary purpose we write poetry and music, why we solve crossword puzzles and aim our
telescopes at the stars, why we laugh and why we believe in God (or refuse to).

Not much philosophy here, then; although in saying this, I do not deny that potentially there is a great
deal of scope for philosophising. Just playing on the quasi-mechanical aspects of this evolutionary
pattern says nothing about the meaningone might wish to discover (i.e. is there a teleological drive
behind it?). Nowadays it is out of fashion because of the methodological stance required by science,
which has the greatest influence on our thinking to even consider aspects of biological developments
that do not fall into the category of weighable, measurable, determinable phenomena. The recent rise
of e.g. fractal geometry is beginning to leave question marks all over this scientifically ascertainable
knowledge, but it will take at least another generation before it seeps into general consciousness that
the binary categorisations of which we have been so fond over centuries of speculation are severely
limited. Until we are in a position to positively recognise in (for example) 'free will' a fundamental
criterion of everything that lives, we will miss out on many if not most of the relevant features of
sentience and its development.

Interimistically, therefore, let me reply that the framing of your question, for all its plausibility, is
trapped in that same materialistic mindset which seeks to solve human problems by recourse to
measurable characteristics. But you will not get an answer to such a question from anyone that is
going to ultimatelysatisfy your thirst. Knowledge is ineluctably of two kinds, viz. episteme and
cognition. Science knows next to nothing of the latter. But a comprehensive answer demands nothing
less than a fully formed idea of what cognition is. Many philosophers, from Plato onwards, have
proposed their answers as problems,and this in turns demands from us, if we are to retain a
philosophical aspect on it, to acknowledge that the pursuits of science are a means towards the
acquisition of knowledge that might aid us in a greater understandingof the origins and advantages of
sentience. But it is nothing more than tomfoolery to maintain that epistemic knowledge is all the
knowledge we can have. So for the time being, the idea of 'Dasein' (Heidegger) and the entailments
of that concept exposed in his book Being and Timeare the best answer we can give.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney