Question for Paranormal Investigators...

Originally posted by fastbob72

This might seem like a stupid question but what's the difference between intelligent life and sentient.What would you define as auto-animate intelligent life ??

A dog is intelligent, and can learn. That said, it can't place itself (self awareness) within an ongoing causal trajectory (such as its own life as the whole and distinct event that it is). Intelligent life is a life form that possesses a brain. Auto-animate life is a life form that moves of its own volition. Bacteria is an auto-animate life form, even if it's not intelligent. It's the brain - managing the interpretation of and response to incoming external stimuli - that distinguishes a life form as being intelligent. Sentience is very different, and not simply a difference of degree of intelligence.

Neuroscientists have discovered that there is a observable difference in how a human brain - even one that is clearly on an equal intelligence level with, say, a chimpanzee - processes external information. Areas of the brain that both have, but that the human brain uses differently, regardless of the intelligence level. Human brains are fundamentally different than all other observed mammalian brains, and while I have my own theories concerning why, it is this fundamental difference that determines whether a being is human or nonhuman.

To that point, if an intelligent paranormal manifestation is capable of communication, emotional response, reason, rumination, a sense of self that is relative to a past or established event trajectory, as well as relative to a relationship that that trajectory shares with a present trajectory that involves another sentient being, then that manifestation is clearly sentient, and therefore human.

Keep in mind that the human race has refused to acknowledge competing members as human beings throughout our history. Blacks, Armenians, Jews, people from New Jersey - the list goes on and on. What happens is that a "sensitive" or "mediumistic" person will not sense a visceral connection to a human being that did not go through its corporeal development stage here on planet Earth, and that lack of identity connection will cause that person to consider that post-corporeal human being as nonhuman, since most Earth folks only believe that Earth produces human beings. That's a pretty natural assumption, given the kind of cultural influences that most of us grew up with.

Then, there are the possibilities of previous versions of sentient human beings from this planet that were not brought into existence by Homo Sapiens brains. Given the obvious mysteries scattered around the planet associated with lost civilizations and impossible engineering feats evident in archaeological sites where such feats shouldn't be, it'd be tough to insist that we know everything about our own planet's history. So, the truth is that we can't possibly know if we're the only form of human being that exists or has ever existed. All those "inhuman spirits" might just be insulted human beings that have no patience for our insistence that only we are human.