Sentience

Gilbert Ryle and Wallace Matson argue that man is not a machine, but a higher mammal. Matson argues that sentience is not just reception of information, but sizing up, which makes possible free action in the positive sense of action. This title is part of UC Press' Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press' mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact.

Format: Hardback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 13 May 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

Gilbert Ryle has argued that man should not be reduced to a machine by being denied the ability to be a ghost in a machine. He may, after all, be a type of animal, specifically a higher mammal. The dangerous leap to the hypothesis that he is a man has yet to be taken. Wallace Matson has taken the risk. Even though he finds no valid objection to the conception of mind as nothing more than the functioning of the nervous system, he argues that no existing or imagined machine models the nature of that function. Sentience is not just the reception of information, but what he calls sizing up - picking out of a situation those features that are more important, perceiving the whole that they compose, relating to this while to the creature's interest, and deciding what to do about it. Matson demonstrates how sizing up makes possible free action in the positive sense of action to which conscious deliberation makes a difference.

This title is part of UC Press' Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press' mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Weight: 363g
Dimension: 203 x 133 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520358447