{"id":116526,"date":"2025-08-12T14:06:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T18:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/?post_type=ftm_article&p=116526"},"modified":"2025-08-12T14:06:37","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T18:06:37","slug":"sentience-superintelligence","status":"publish","type":"ftm_article","link":"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/artificial-intelligence\/sentience-superintelligence","title":{"rendered":"If we want artificial \u201csuperintelligence,\u201d it may need to feel pain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article was reprinted with permission of\u00a0Big Think<\/a>, where it was\u00a0originally published<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sign up for the Mini Philosophy newsletter<\/a>, a place to pause and reflect on life\u2019s bigger questions, with Big Think\u2019s Jonny Thomson.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists love a good classification system. It\u2019s important to give things labels and it\u2019s fun to step back and look at your beautiful taxonomic tables. Given that Aristotle is considered one of the first scientists, it\u2019ll come as no surprise that he was just as fond of diving the world into categories. He divided animals into \u201cthose with blood\u201d and \u201cthose without.\u201d Some were \u201clives on land\u201d and others \u201clives on sea.\u201d But one of the most famous Aristotelian categories was his division of the soul. It\u2019s a division that has defined the Western conception of all living things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aristotle argued there were three types of souls \u2014 each building on the last. First, is the vegetative soul: the basic, automatic functions of growth and nutrition. Your pot plants have this soul. Second, is the sensitive soul, which involves perception and awareness. Your dog has this. Finally, there is the rational soul \u2014 with intelligence, consciousness, and imagination. You have this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given that Aristotle was writing so long ago, it\u2019s remarkable how little has changed in how we understand life. The big difference, however, is how widely these categories will stretch. To make sense of vegetative and sensitive souls, Big Think spoke to Jonathan Birch about his new book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI<\/em>. Not only does Birch believe we give too little credit to non-human animals, but he argues that the dawn of AI might be a unique moment in our planet\u2019s history \u2014 the birth of a new type of soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three layers of consciousness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Today, few scientists would use Aristotle\u2019s language, and many would balk at the use of \u201csoul\u201d in an empirical setting. Birch noted that the modern discourse around living things goes back to \u201ca philosopher called Herbert Feigl, writing in the 1950s, who said there are these three layers of consciousness. There’s sentience, then sapience, and then selfhood.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sentience, Birch said, is \u201cimmediate raw experiences of the present moment \u2014 your senses, your bodily sensations, your emotions, here and now.\u201d For example, when a mouse is repulsed by a noxious smell, that\u2019s evidence of sentience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sapience is more sophisticated. “It\u2019s a kind of overlay on the top,” Birch said. “It’s our ability to reflect on our experiences for something \u2014 not just to hurt, but for us to have a thought of that hurt and say something like \u2018that was the worst pain I’ve ever had in my life.\u2019\u201d When Buddhists claim \u201cpain is inevitable and suffering is optional,\u201d they\u2019re talking about sapience. Sapience is the mind\u2019s reflection on what sentience provides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, there is selfhood, which Birch described as “our awareness of ourselves as beings with a past and a future. And this is a really sophisticated capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Birch\u2019s book is all about sentience, and he argues that we should adopt a far broader understanding of what he called \u201csentience candidates.\u201d Birch believes that \u201cthe class of sentience candidates is very wide indeed. It’s not just all vertebrate animals but also octopuses, crabs, lobsters, shrimps, insects. They’re all sentience candidates because there’s empirical evidence of a serious kind that points to a realistic possibility that they are feeling things and it would then be irresponsible to ignore when we’re making decisions that affect these animals.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The artificial leapfrog<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Sentience interests philosophers for two key reasons. The first, as Birch\u2019s book considers, is the ethical question: If certain species can feel pain, that has implications on how we should treat them. Second, sentience is interesting because of what Birch calls the \u201coverlay.\u201d It\u2019s commonly thought that the higher consciousness we see in Homo sapiens<\/em> is built upon other, nested forms of consciousness: Our rationality depends on sapience, which depends on sentience. The evolutionary story is one of development, and our brain is literally built in a way that tells that story<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now we have artificial intelligence, and it\u2019s “artificial” in such a way that it jumps all those evolutionary hurdles and demonstrates some kind of “intelligence.” Here, Birch suggests that \u201cit\u2019s entirely possible that in AI we will see this huge decoupling where we have very high levels of intelligence that might even surpass the human level without any underlying sentience at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s here that Birch suggests something curious and quite possibly the stuff of dark science fiction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt might be that to get superhuman intelligence, you do need some level of sentience. We can’t rule that out either; it’s entirely possible. Some people argue that that kind of real<\/em> intelligence requires sentience and that sentience requires embodiment. Now, there is a view in philosophy, called computational functionalism, that [argues] sentience, sapience, and selfhood could just be the computations they perform rather than the body they\u2019re situated in. And if that view is correct, then it’s entirely possible that by recreating the computations the brain performs in AI systems, we also thereby recreate the sentience as well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Birch is saying three things here. First, it\u2019s reasonable to suggest that \u201csuperintelligence\u201d requires sentience. Second, we could potentially recreate sentience in AI with certain computations. Therefore, if we want AI to reach \u201csuperintelligence\u201d we would need it to be sentient. We would need AI to feel things. ChatGPT needs to know pain. Gemini needs to experience euphoria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that underlies Birch\u2019s book and our conversation is that intelligence is not some deus ex machina<\/em> dropped from the sky. It is not some curious alien artifact uncovered in a long, lost tomb. It\u2019s nested within an unfathomably long evolutionary chain. It\u2019s the latest word in a long sentence. But the question Birch raises is: Where does AI fit in the book of evolved intelligence?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019d love to hear from you! If you have a comment about this article or if you have a tip for a future Freethink story, please email us at\u00a0tips@freethink.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Philosopher Jonathan Birch argues that sentience might be essential to \u201chigher\u201d forms of intelligence, including truly intelligent AI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":116528,"template":"","ftm_taxonomy_fields":[46],"ftm_taxonomy_challenges":[],"ftm_taxonomy_statuses":[36],"ftm_taxonomy_hidden_tags":[],"class_list":["post-116526","ftm_article","type-ftm_article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ftm_taxonomy_fields-ai","ftm_taxonomy_statuses-featured"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nIf we want artificial \u201csuperintelligence,\u201d it may need to feel pain<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Philosopher Jonathan Birch argues that sentience might be essential to \u201chigher\u201d forms of intelligence, including truly intelligent AI.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/artificial-intelligence\/sentience-superintelligence\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"If we want artificial \u201csuperintelligence,\u201d it may need to feel pain\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Philosopher Jonathan Birch argues that sentience might be essential to \u201chigher\u201d forms of intelligence, including truly intelligent AI.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/artificial-intelligence\/sentience-superintelligence\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Freethink\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-08-12T18:06:37+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/sentience-superintelligence-thumb.jpg?resize=1200,630\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"630\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Could AI develop true intelligence without sentience? 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