Energy As The Essence of Sentience

[Gwaithmir]

The principle is simple.  If you adopt an unorthodox definition of something, or some concept, that difference from common usage when applied to other things may have unintended consequences.

I'll give a made-up example.  A person recently suggested that his view was that God is everywhere, that the universe is like God's body, and we are like a toe or a finger.  That leads to the question of whether all the parts of God are sentient.  If so, then that would seem to imply, by the analogy, that toes and fingers are sentient, which they are not.  At minimum, that points to a limitation of the analogy which needs elaboration through other means.  However, one can't really back pedal and say that the toes and fingers of God are not sentient, even though he is, as that would imply that God is composed of parts, which has consequences and ramifications which show up in other areas of theological import.  The long and short is, there is no free lunch.  Words and language are a system of interdependent meanings.  When you adjust one off here in the corner, that doesn't just affect that one corner, it has ramifications for the whole system.

According to what I'm saying, its that even the Rock that has been sitting silently on a hill somewhere for thousands of years never saying a word or moving from its spot is 'sentient' not with a brain, but with the mind of God. Not at all unlike Animism. Also as far as toes and fingers go, they bend don't they? Those little tiny 'sentient' cells in them work to do that right? To function as a whole... there's a lot of work that goes into moving your toes and fingers created by a colony of 100 trillion cells that make up our body. Your sentience is just amplified from their own, and they themselves just have an amplified awareness from the energy within them.

Yeah, and I'm King Isildur.