User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-24048868-20200724135354/@comment-6032121-20200724165113

Oh dear. I swear I didn't mean for this to derail into a philosophical debate about the nature of consciousness, interesting as those are. As a utilitarian myself I was definitely working within a materialist framework to start with (as in, no waving one's hand in the air and saying in a spooky voice that there might be some immaterial thing that a human brain has but a dog brain doesn't).

Of course, what should interest us would be the state of things in the DWU, not in the real world; they don't have to correspond. We know for a fact (at least in certain accounts) that souls exist in the DWU, for example. It wouldn't surprise me if there were also stories to establish various animals have consciousness — in fact, higher consciousness than even us pro-"dogs are sentient" folks would assign to animals in the real world. The fully-constructed thought processes of Rose-the-cat come to mind, even if the sources about how DWU cats are actually alien beings masquerading as animals do mitigate the usefulness of it, even if it' clear that A Rose by Any Other Name wasn't intended to set itself within that framework. I am sorely tempted, if I ever get the chance to do so in published DWU work, to hit you with irrevocable evidence in a valid source that nonsapient animals have qualia in the DWU, using those terms.

However, in any case, it's widely held on this Wiki that things like infobox fields shouldn't be controversial. If there exists controversy about the meaning of the word "sentient", I think that's reason enough to avoid it when naming categories, if we have a viable alternative. Whatever we decide "sentient" means on this Wiki, there could always be new users who understand the word differently and would miscategorize pages as a result.