The globe stayed blue while he named himself and stated his professional
background. There was a brief flicker of red while he was listing his
publication--that paper, entirely the work of one of his students, which
he had published under his own name. He had forgotten about that, but his
conscience hadn't.
"Dr. Mallin," the oldest of the three judges, who sat in the middle,
began, "what, in your professional opinion, is the difference between
sapient and nonsapient mentation?"
"The ability to think consciously," he stated. The globe stayed blue.
"Do you mean that nonsapient animals aren't conscious, or do you mean they
don't think?"
"Well, neither. Any life form with a central nervous system has some
consciousness--awareness of existence and of its surroundings. And
anything having a brain thinks, to use the term at its loosest. What I
meant was that only the sapient mind thinks and knows that it is
thinking."
He was perfectly safe so far. He talked about sensory stimuli and
responses, and about conditioned reflexes. He went back to the first
century Pre-Atomic, and Pavlov and Korzybski and Freud. The globe never
flickered.
"The nonsapient animal is conscious only of what is immediately present to
the senses and responds automatically. It will perceive something and make
a single statement about it--this is good to eat, this sensation is
unpleasant, this is a sex-gratification object, this is dangerous. The
sapient mind, on the other hand, is conscious of thinking about these
sense stimuli, and makes descriptive statements about them, and then makes
statements about those statements, in a connected chain. I have a
structural differential at my seat; if somebody will bring it to me--"
"Well, never mind now, Dr. Mallin. When you're off the stand and the
discussion begins you can show what you mean. We just want your opinion in
general terms, now."
"Well, the sapient mind can generalize. To the nonsapient animal, every
experience is either totally novel or identical with some remembered
experience. A rabbit will flee from one dog because to the rabbit mind it
is identical with another dog that has chased it. A bird will be attracted
to an apple, and each apple will be a unique red thing to peck at. The
sapient being will say, 'These red objects are apples; as a class, they
are edible and flavorsome.' He sets up a class under the general label of
apples. This, in turn, leads to the formation of abstract ideas--redness,
flavor, et cetera--conceived of apart from any specific physical object,
and to the ordering of abstractions--'fruit' as distinguished from apples,
'food' as distinguished from fruit."
The globe was still placidly blue. The three judges waited, and he
continued:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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