Sentience and the World: How would it be different?

[Urmydinner]

Sentience- the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences.


If an organism is sentient then by default is capable of suffering which under our current beliefs (post-enlightenment) enables one to certain rights such as unreasonable suffering. (While it is a hotly debated topic on whether some modern animals are sentient or not, let's just assume for the sake of the question that they are not able to feel emotional pain on a human level.) *It is also worth nothing that physical pain and emotional pain is something that is completely different when determining sentience. It is the emotional pain that ultimately determines it.

Picture a world of life forms that are fully functioning and fully capable of feeling emotional pain. They also possess a competitive intellect close to man kind. Since we all need energy to live and survive, would it just become how the animal kingdom is currently? A "survival of the fittest?" Would we be deadlocked in years of wars with other beings until one became dominant? Is it only that we are the dominate species that we form these principles which we consider "proper?"



-Not looking for anything much here, I just wanted to pose a question I thought interesting.

[Frazzle.d]

Opposable thumbs.

There'd also be a lot of things up in the air. Animals can't normally speak as such. Whales and other certain mammals and even birds have been known to communicate with each other, and other animals are known to stick together in their own families or clans for mutual protection, such as meerkats - who knows if anyone could tell the difference between animals as they are now and sentient animals? And above all, it's not as though any carnivores are going to be able to stop their need to feed and survive. It'd probably end up something like the Lion King - the apex predator is the ruling hierachy, and all the other animal tribes must respect that order. Some animals may feed the lions, but the lions will someday die and feed the grass, which feeds the grazers... a circle of life - a kind of faith and reasoning to understand the world around them.

[Grinderofl]

Survival of the fittest. We'll be having a war with them. Or well, 'most' of us will.

Reason why?

We can't even coexist with each other without having to fight and discriminate and what not. We won't be able to handle another race of "creatures" that are intelligent. This is, what I believe, the number 1 reason why noone from outer space has yet made contact.