I bear witness to so much pain and suffering, often caused by the application of cognitive biases and logical fallacies to produce illogical arguments and subjectivity. Are the sources of these illusions physiological in nature? Human beings appear to be subject to limited sensory input (false perception) and are predisposed to rationalization as a defense mechanism for the ego.
I choose the phrase “appear to be” carefully because application of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle suggests that we can not claim to know anything absolutely. Our understanding of nature is always being redeveloped. Perhaps my application of these principles to make an argument is itself a logical fallacy, but I digress.
I suspect that artificial sentience could be designed to avoid logical entrapment. I have recently been introduced to the logarithmic sentience measure known as SQ. From Wikipedia:
The sentience quotient (SQ) of an individual is a measure of the efficiency of an individual brain, not its relative intelligence, and is defined as:
where I is the information processing rate (bits/s) and M is the mass of the brain (kg). The lower limit of SQ is approximately −70, while the upper (quantum) limit is about 50.
At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our “communication” with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?
— Robert A. Freitas Jr
Despite our neurons having a relatively high information processing efficiency, this appears to only benefit humans subconsciously. The conscious mind can process only about 50 bits per second; the average entropy of an English word is 11.82 bits. This means we only consciously process about 4 words a second on average. Despite this seemingly miserable figure, observe how much has been created by mankind! Indeed, what magnificence would a sentience capable of consciously thinking just ten times as quickly as us be capable of? Also consider that such a sentience might be transferred from host to host and retain all of its collective knowledge indefinitely; mortality is a condition our technology is not yet capable of overcoming.
Lowly Ocean 