Is being warm-blooded necessary for sentience?

Great Debates
1

Someone has postulated (I don’t recall who) that for that wonderful pocket of negative entropy to exist between your ears, there has to be a balancing positive entropy somewhere close by. Therefore, in order to be sentient, a creature has to be warm-blooded, like mammals or avians.

By sentience, I mean intelligence (problem-solving ability) and awareness (more than a basic response instinct to stimuli); a concept of self and non-self.

If this is true, could we use it as a measuring stick for detirmining of other species (on planet and off) are truly sentient like humans?

2

That sounds like BS to me.
Where is this highly entropic region located in humans ? Do we become unitelligent if it is removed ?

The argument is possibly a mangling of Prigonine’s work on irreversible thermodynamics and Shannon’s information theory ? All sorts of interesting things happen when you have a system that’s a long way from equilibrium, but there’s nothing really special about having high entropy and low entropy regions located within a single creature. Things can get complex anytime you’ve got an energy gradient that a creature can exploit.

3

And something doesn’t have to be hot to be in a state that is far from equilibrium, either.

4

I think problem-solving has something to do with free hands or extremities as biotility (a neologism). If lizard-beings can free an extemity or two, then will their brains expand within their diet to allow extra room to problem solve? Without evidence to the contrary, I assume so.

What about de-problem solving, or the solving or avoidance of the problems our problems present without blindly following religious programming or technological progress? Could this mean, by my reasoning, that we need to learn to de-utilitize our extremities and by extension brain? Does deliberate leisure afford us survival from our self-made problems? If so, we need to find more names for this modality other than slackerdom (which is too broad and maybe anti-educational). If I am not mistaken, an ancient Greek word may describe this condition as phronesis, or prudent good taste.

5

This endless discussion of where the dividing line is between animals is one that makes little sense to me. The original point seemed to be the question “How can we prove
Man is superior to beasts” and thus a special creation in God’s image and not a beast. The facts have come out that we are indeed all beasts, and the animal kingdom is a bush, not a ladder, with a vast array of intermediate variations. They aren’t even “branches”, but less distinct separations.
Sentience will fall into that category. Each relative of any animal has variations on the theme, but no clear breaks are evident.

6

Is being warm-blooded necessary for sentience?

I dunno, let me ask my robot…

7

**Squink wrote:

Where is this highly entropic region located in humans ? Do we become unitelligent if it is removed ?**

The highly entropic region is the body itself, specifically a warm-blooded body carrying the brain. Consider the amount of heat-energy that a warm-blooded creature creates as compared to a cold-blooded creature like a reptile or fish. Also, “removing” the body wouldn’t reduce intelligence, but it’s a necessity for sentience to evolve in the first place, to counter the negative entropy of the highly ordered mind/brain.

Things can get complex anytime you’ve got an energy gradient that a creature can exploit.

That’s the point; is that energy gradient necessary to develop sentience?

**Brian Bunnyhurt wrote:

I think problem-solving has something to do with free hands or extremities as biotility (a neologism).**

I was thinking more of problem solving as conceptualizing. For example; a lizard walking along feels hungry. It spies a morsel of food in a tree. But it does nothing about it, rather it looks for something immediately available rather than make a plan to get THAT morsel of food. Rather than using tools, it conceptualizes a solution to its problem (feeding itself) and acts on that plan. Tools are handy to solve the problem, but not a necessity.

**Pink wrote:

This endless discussion of where the dividing line is between animals is one that makes little sense to me. The
original point seemed to be the question “How can we prove Man is superior to beasts” and thus a special creation in God’s image and not a beast.**

Oh, I fully agree; Man has no special place in the “Great Hierarchy” of animals, except that he does have sentience. I would also point out that whales, dolphins, elephants and great apes also display these traits. If they’re as sentient as humans, that’s for another thread. Also note; they’re all warm-blooded creatures. As far as I know, no cold-blooded creature has ever shown these traits. So, is there a link between sentience and cold/warm-blooded-ness?

**spoke- wrote:

I dunno, let me ask my robot…**

So, how did your robot answer? :smiley:

8

Brian Bunnyhurt wrote:

Hence, evidence to the contrary:

Allosaurus and Tyrranosaurus Rex. Both were bipedal. Both had their hands and arms free to do any number of tasks. Both had dinosaur-sized peabrains.

9

I don’t know to what extent T-rex could problem-solve, but I thought that the new theory was that dinosaurs were warm blooded, related to birds, faster and jerkier than previously imagined.

*Freyr,

I would agree that problem solving has alot to do with conceptions, but I can’t conceive of non-conceptualizing (it sounds like a pun but it isn’t). Anyhow, I was implying that two hands that work stuff, like make shelters (a warm blooded thing) and make tools and sign language were forced to develop structural parameters that led to language or constructs that they passed along in tradition, like most animals do.

…

I don’t know how we are defining problem-solving, but animals such as coyotes are very good at it. Self-aware? I don’t know, but that is question that needs to be put to humans as well.

10

Well, except the brain is pretty hot too. Maybe I just don’t understand your OP, though. Why is the rest of the body entropic, and why does the fact that the brain is highly ordered mean that there needs to be a highly entropic area of the body. Also, there are cold blooded animals that show evidence of problem solving and learning. Squid and octopii, for example, seem to be able to manipulate their environment to accomplish goals. There was a study where an octopus was given a closed screw jar, inside of which was a piece of food. The octopus managed to get the jar off, and, the octopus’ perfomance improved with time…it seemed to learn how to open jars. Warm bloodedness might help sentience, though, because it means the animal can be constantly active, which means the brain can always fully function. Also, being warm blooded means that small changes in body temperature can be really dangerous, so the warm blooded animal spends more of its time looking for protection from exposure…that might lead it to develop more intellegence.

11

wouldn’t warmer blooded creatures then be more sentient?? cats have a high body temperature tham humans, are they more sentient?? are you [or anyone else] more sentient when feverish??

12

Brian Bunnyhurt wrote:

True, but I was responding to your hypothesis that free extremities were necessary for problem-solving, not warm-bloodedness. T-Rex is an example of a creature with free arms that has a small, and probably not terribly problem-solving-oriented, brain. Another counterexample would be crows and pigeons, who do a lot of problem-solving with their beaks (crows have been known to wield simple tools in their beaks) – last I heard, a beak didn’t qualify as an extremity.