How do you know that other people are sentient?

Question

Isn't consciousness more or less a refutal of outright materialism. If our brains are just really elaborate physical systems interacting with the environment what's the point of consciousness. Is there any scientific reason to think that someone else is conscious besides the fact that you are? The only thing any of us has ever perceived directly is our own subjective reality. So it is the one thing that we can know exists with certainty. What is it made out off? Certainly not matter? So isn't matter pure conjecture?

Answer 1

not really, but i know i'm conscious and if you know you're conscious then we are both conscious. there are some people i have to wonder about though.. lol.

Answer 2

who were you talking to?  You already accept that we all are conscious, by every act you do.  

Answer 3

I'm not convinced you are particularly conscious.  Unconscious, non-sentient beings have no interest in material things.  Consciousness doesn't refute Materialism, it's a requirement of it.

I think you're being programmed by a Psychology course, and being taught that you are just a machine.  If you can't see that it's horse manure, drop the course. You will learn more from spending the time in a park watching people and squirrels than from a course that questions your own conscious existence or that of the others around you.  

Answer 4

Ummm....I think you've watched The Matrix too many times.

Answer 5

Sentience is not what you make it out to be. Sentience is the ability to sense through physical means. A blade of grass is sentient--if you play golf, you know that the blades follow the sun as it travels across the sky; flowers turn toward the sun. All life is in some way sentient.

Consciousness is the faculty in the higher life forms that recognizes what it senses. In other words, a blad of grass, or a worm for example, does not know it knows the sun is shining, but it seeks the heat anyway. It is not "conscious," but it is sentient.

Consciousness in the higher life forms takes the simplicity of what Naturalists Loren Eiseley http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=na... called "the eternal present," meaning they really have no sense of elapsed time from day to day, year to year. Ayn Rand http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?p... called it "range of the moment consciousness."

Man, on the other hand, has "sapience" added to his "sentience." Sapience is even in our name: Homo sapiens sapiens. The double use of the word means we know only have knowledge, we can add knowledge to knowledge, creating new concepts and becoming wise.

Naturalism is sometimes defined as being nothing more than the chemicals and electricals in your brain. But the definitions that give respect to Man and take us back ot our Atomistic naturalism is the definition that give us our dignity in consciousness. B.A.G. Fuller did so under "Naturalism" in the Dictionary of Philosophy by D.D. Runes. http://www.ditext.com/runes/n.html

That is the dignified definition used by the Academy I founded.