I don’t think anybody would argue that some people have different levels of intelligence, intellect, knowledge, wisdom, etc, but what about sentience?
Is it possible that some people are more ‘self-aware’ (NB I don’t mean being ‘self conscious’ or insecure) - do some people have an ‘inner life’ of greater depth or quality than others (I mean purely as a function of mental activity, not ‘quality of life’) - I suppose what I’m asking is “Are some people more alive than others?”
Certainly some people are more introspective than others. And peoples’ spectra of emotions vary tremendously.
One immediate difficulty I foresee with this type of analysis will be, how do you compare the specialist with the polymath.
For me, sentience is a yes or no question. Just part of the meaning of the word.
In an obvious way, some people are much more self-aware than others. I’ve known people who never questioned any dogma they were handed, any rule their mother gave them, any metaphysical truth they’d picked up along the way, any first impression they had. I’ve known other people who were intensely curious about themselves, other people, their world, and their general existence, and their pursuit of more knowledge and experiences definitely made for someone who was much more “self-aware”.
Whether or not that prima facie case for differing levels of self-awareness has any metaphysical or ontological significance, I can’t say.
Yeah, I’d have to agree with what hansel said. However, I don’t think that sentience is a boolean property; I think that various species have differing degrees of sentience. If there is variation among humans, it’s very small.
My suspicion is that it’s more than possible, it’s simply the way things are. It’s the kind of thing that’s possibly impossible to test, but I think a thought experiment bears it out:
Have you (generic) ever had varying levels of self-awareness? Or have you always had one constant level of engagement with your existence?
If the answers are, respectively, no-and-yes, that brings things to a crashing halt. Personally, though, mine run yes, no. The level of my conscious awareness has varied just today: from this morning a couple minutes after my alarm went off and I staggered into the bathroom; to the extremely pleasant walk to work; to the mild post-lunch drowsiness; to right now–especially since the thread challenged me to reflect upon reflection. That’s just variation within one individual.
The physical construction of the brain impacts consciousness. Altering it will alter the mode of it, from chemical levels slewing about, to more extreme effects of lesions from strokes or other trauma. The construction of one person’s brain varies from that of the next–thus producing the differences in intellect, knowledge, talents, what-have-you. So it simply makes intuitive sense to me that the consciousness that brains also produce will vary as well, with about the same degree of variation as any of the other mental qualities of a person, between different people–and that variation being about as correlated with other qualities as any of the other ones are. (That last bit is pretty important, I think, if only to keep perspective on the kinds of folks who think high IQ scores translate to being-better-people.)
Two words: Wildest Bill 
Seriously, I suspect that there are those who take Socrates seriously and those who say, “Huh?” and everything in between.
Gosh, I nearly missed this thread. What a great question, Mange!
On first blush, I see what I perceive as a direct relation between depth of sentience and the capacity for empathy. Lots of stuff to think about here. It’s hard to know where to start. I’ve never thought about this in the terms you’re asking it, so this is an opinion in development. But I’ll start here: it would seem to me, by this reckoning, that Jesus, as a man, was more sentient than am I. It is fascinating to ponder whether there is a dual sentience — that is, a real sentience of the Spirit versus an imaginary sentience of the Brain.
Hmmm. Good stuff, Mange. I hope this debate can develop. Lots to learn here.
Oh, and let me ask this, maybe to get the debate going. Poly, do you differentiate between an intellectual knowledge of Socrates and a sentience of what he taught?
This rings true in the light of what little I have read about the psychological profiles of some serial killers; in some cases, they seem to have been ‘acting out a script’ rather than thinking the situation through, although in these cases, maybe the lack of empathy was a mere effect. Hmmm.
As far as being ‘more alive’ would go, I’m not sure if self-awareness is the issue. Everyone has a concept of themselves and their history and it’s partly that that makes them a person and not just a body.
In my opinion though, getting deeper into sentience means looking further out of it in a way. You can be more alive by looking at life in general, its origin, function and fate, rather than focusing only on your own life.
Think how much more fascinating life is when you start considering the ‘greater things’ that affect and rule all of us instead of just your own little personal world…