The 4 Stages of Human Sentience: What If We Are Not There Yet?

Old Bill in the image above is a character in Westworld. HBO's Westworld is a series about hosts (semi-sentient robots) that by continuously recalling memories start to question their tragic existence, and thus come closer to sentience.

Old Bill offers my favorite line in the series, "Drink to the Lady With The White Shoes". This context amidst his plight reminds me of the nature of humankind: drinking to what we cannot have while we do not know it ends bad and so we give it our love but not our obsession as we let go: unaware we cannot try harder next time.

"Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience)." Merriam Webster Dictionary. There are other definitions, but we need not bore ourselves with them. I will present mine.

I argue de facto definitions of sentience fail to accept the possibility that we are not, or not all of us are, sentient human beings.

I argue that sentience requires four phases of progression within the human mind. While no living human today has made it to the fourth phase, I propose that not all humans make it to the second or third phase: explaining why we find ourselves talking in circles to some humans but not others... just what, what if, not all humans are as sentient as others... and what if we, myself included, are not yet sentient totally.

The Stages of Sentience: Chart And Concepts Conceived By Kevin Kane

The fact that my mind lives in loops as does yours and the rest of the species, I am inclined to believe we are not too different from the hosts in Westworld, whose awareness is blocked by the loops of purpose their minds are fixated on. What if that is us today?

I can go into to further detail, and expand on the above four phases of sentience. However, I believe the above graphic that I made today is a powerful enough concept to stop here for now: until we let that sink in at least for a bit before proceeding.

Sincerely, Kevin Kane