Michael Cassady 12 August 2024

What life is, or is like, express false dilemmas born of grammatical confusion. Once you import an homunculus to stand impossibly outside sentience, you create a "gap" between brain and mind (the same explanatory separation between Descartes' I think and his thought). We are acquainted with the fact of sentience in being sentient: you have yours and I have mine, and I make a point of never being without it; but sentience is pre-reflective and is individual, not a kind; sentience is what distinguishes what it means to be alive. Sentience is electro-chemical, not material: meaning it consists of stimulated electro-chemical states born of influences from circumstantial conditions in the contingent experiential environment. Metaphorically speaking, as a life-force, sentience gives form, gives sense, to environmental material content. The "disjunctive" understanding of perception currently of interest to philosophers like M.G.F Martin is a step away from sense-data, representationalism and intentionalism. i.e., free of the third person interference of an imported homunculus. I'm not waiting to be alive, or sentient until an explanation is found for what is already working just fine.