What happens when one removes sentience from a sentient species?
Our society has led us to believe that optimization is the key. Consumption, creeps along in parallel. We have heard about the potential effects of social media, we have heard every generation say “there’s always some big overdramatized situation that ends up being fine”. However, I believe we are about to see that the following observation is undeniably requiring awareness. I implore you to research what I am about to discuss, find out for yourself. Develop your own opinions. THINK.
On that note, let us proceed.
I spent this year working with a team from the Colombian Amazon, helping build the market infrastructure for biodiversity. A team who has primarily existed away from technology.
At some point I realized I was watching something I didn’t have words for yet.
The community members who decided to work on the business side, had never used a MacBook. Within a few months, they were navigating complex databases; understanding not just how to use them, but what they were for, and why it mattered. They asked relevant questions. They retained things. They built on what they learned.
I kept waiting for the moment the growth would slow down, as I had seen before in other people, but… it never did.
Then I’d get on a call with someone at a major global institution (someone who had been using similar databases for years) and try to explain the same concepts. And I’d watch it not land. Not because they weren’t intelligent. They clearly were, or had been. But something wasn’t connecting. The concept of what the tool was for just wasn’t registering. The process wasn’t sticking. And the questions… the questions were the thing that got me. They weren’t asking the right ones (yes, yes I know. There’s no such thing as a wrong question, and there isn’t – to an extent). It wasn’t that they didn’t care, but because something in the ability to engage with the problem had gone foggy.
The ability to ask the right question is a big part of understanding anything. And they had once been able to.
~~~
I’ve been trying to understand what I was actually looking at.
My best guess is this: conscious engagement. The ability to be present with what you’re hearing, to actually process it rather than let it pass through. To stay in the room with a hard thing long enough for it to mean something.
The communities I worked with had that. Their relationship with information wasn’t passive. They weren’t scrolling, skimming, half-listening while managing seventeen other inputs. When something was in front of them, they were with it. Fully. And their minds, less cluttered by the incessant noise of optimized content and overly-distributed attention, had room to hold new things.
The institutional professionals had lost something I’m not sure they even knew was gone. It wasn’t their intelligence. It was their presence. Their ability to engage with what was in front of them, with sentience. Somewhere along the way, the information environment they live in has slowly taken that from them .
Reflect on the meaning of sentience. We are considered sentient beings, what happens when we remove sentience?
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Now, I want to clarify. I don’t think this is about technology being bad. I think it’s about what happens when we stop choosing what we let in.
There’s a massive difference between using a tool and being used by one. Between consuming information and being consumed by it. The communities I worked with were learning fast because they were still in control of their own attention. The institutional professionals were struggling because, in some important way, they weren’t anymore.
And here’s what scared me: nobody in those meetings seemed to notice. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a crisis anyone could jump up on a desk and point to. It was just a slow, sneaky erosion of something that used to be there, and they were all experiencing it.
~~~
I think we have something to learn from people whose minds haven’t been handed over yet.
Not in a romanticized way. No “return to nature” or any of that. But in the practical sense that presence is a resource for our minds, that it can be depleted, and the people who still have it in entirety are doing something we’ve stopped doing.
They’re choosing what they engage with. They’re staying with challenging concepts long enough to understand them. They’re asking the right questions because they’re actually present in the room.
So, the question I keep coming back to is a simple one: when did we stop doing that? And more importantly… can we get it back?
Because I think the stakes are higher than most people realize.
The gap I watched open up between those two rooms wasn’t the ability to comprehend databases. It was an implication of who is able to digest and understand the world they’re living in. I theorize that many of the people in positions that shape the world are losing ground and don’t know it yet.
And so, as I said at the very beginning, I will leave you with this one word. Do with it what you will.
THINK.
Jess
Poking Points for the Brain:
Recent Rate of deterioration
Evolution
Global Power Shift (to who/what)
Removing Sentience in a Sentient Species
Jessica Cole 