{"id":1686,"date":"2022-03-09T12:16:22","date_gmt":"2022-03-09T12:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=1686"},"modified":"2022-03-09T12:19:36","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T12:19:36","slug":"feeling-vs-moving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2022\/03\/09\/feeling-vs-moving\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeling vs. Moving"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Sentience &#8212; which means the capacity to feel *something* (anything) &#8212; can differ in <strong>quality <\/strong>(seeing red feels different from hearing a cricket), or in <strong>intensity<\/strong> (getting kicked hard feels worse than getting lightly tapped) or in <strong>duration<\/strong> (now you feel, now you don&#8217;t). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the difference between whether an organism has or lacks the <strong>capacity<\/strong> to feel <strong>anything<\/strong> <strong>at all<\/strong> , be it ever so faint or brief, is <strong>all-or-none<\/strong>, not a matter of degree along some sort of &#8220;continuum.&#8221; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and probably most or all invertebrates can feel (something, sometimes) &#8212; but not rhododendrons or <em>Rhizobium radiobacte<\/em>r or <em>Rutstroemia firma<\/em>&#8230; or any of today&#8217;s robots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is no more absolute difference than that between a sentient entity and an insentient one, even if both are living organisms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Sedatives can dim feeling, general anesthesia can temporarily turn it off, and death or brain-death can turn it off permanently, but the capacity or incapacity to feel anything at all, ever, is all-or-none.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img src=\"https:\/\/itotd.com\/files\/2018\/05\/Zeno_Dichotomy_Paradox-696x331.png\" alt=\"Zeno's Paradoxes | Interesting Thing of the Day\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sentience &#8212; which means the capacity to feel *something* (anything) &#8212; can differ in quality (seeing red feels different from hearing a cricket), or in intensity (getting kicked hard feels worse than getting lightly tapped) or in duration (now you feel, now you don&#8217;t). But the difference between whether an organism has or lacks the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2022\/03\/09\/feeling-vs-moving\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Feeling vs. Moving&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[119],"tags":[121,124,36,123,122,25,120],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1686"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1686"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1689,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1686\/revisions\/1689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}