Not to pick on you — your article is cool, you’re obviously highly intelligent, but just one thing: I was with you up until the elephant at the zoo is “neither sovereign or sentient” part. Okay, it’s not sovereign (based on your def. of sovereign), but it is most certainly sentient! Even you yourself said, “…its sentience,” so you know it’s sentient! Something cannot be non-sentient now, and then later decided to be sentient. And I don’t think it’s correct to use the logic that something is, “only sentient if it can declare its sentience … in a human-understandable way,” because sentience is a humanly constructed english word. That’s like saying the word “tree” is an english language construct used by humans, so therefore a “tree” isn’t really a “tree” to other trees, just to humans. If you have time, would you mind clarifying your position (or correcting me?).
I totally agree with the “sentience is awareneness, not necessarily self-awareness” part. Heck, just watching some people walk around town is proof of a lack of self-awareness heh heh. Whether we agree or disagree whether an elephant is “aware” (and thus sentient) or not, it would have been neat to see your article sidestep into whether a computer with highly developed artificial intelligence is sentient or not (a machine can certainly make a declaration of sentience, can’t it?).
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