text:
Hookah

A hookah (Hindustani: (Nastaleeq), हुक़्क़ा (Devanagari) , IPA: ; also see other names),   shisha, or waterpipe is a single- or multi-stemmed instrument for heating or vaporizing and then smoking either tobacco, flavored tobacco (often muʽassel), or sometimes cannabis, hashish and opium. The smoke is passed through a water basin—often glass-based—before inhalation.

The major health risks of smoking tobacco, cannabis, opium and other drugs through a hookah include exposure to toxic chemicals, carcinogens and heavy metals that are not filtered out by the water,   alongside those related to the transmission of infectious diseases and pathogenic bacteria when hookahs are shared. Hookah and waterpipe use is a global public health concern, with high rates of use in the populations of the Middle East and North Africa as well as in young people in the United States, Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia.

The hookah or waterpipe was invented by Abul-Fath Gilani, a Persian physician of Akbar, in the Indian city of Fatehpur Sikri during Mughal India; the hookah spread from the Indian subcontinent to Persia first where the mechanism was modified to its current shape and then to the Near East. Alternatively, it could have originated in the Safavid dynasty of Persia, from where it eventually spread to the Indian subcontinent.

Despite tobacco and drug use being considered a taboo when the hookah was first conceived, its use became increasingly popular among nobility and subsequently widely accepted. Burned tobacco is increasingly being replaced by vaporizing flavored tobacco. Still the original hookah is often used in rural South Asia, which continues to use tumbak (a pure and coarse form of unflavored tobacco leaves) and smoked by burning it directly with charcoal. While this method delivers a much higher content of tobacco and nicotine, it also incurs more adverse health effects compared to vaporizing hookahs.

The word hookah is a derivative of "huqqa", a Hindustani word, of Arabic origin (derived from حُقَّة ḥuqqa, "casket, bottle, water pipe"). Outside its native region, hookah smoking has gained popularity throughout the world, especially among younger people.

Names and etymology

In the Indian subcontinent, the Hindustani word huqqa (Devanagari: हुक़्क़ा, Nastaleeq: ) is used and is the origin of the English word "hookah". The widespread use of the Indian word "hookah" in the English language is a result of the colonization in British India (1858–1947), when large numbers of expatriate Britons first sampled the water pipe. William Hickey, shortly after arriving in Calcutta, India, in 1775, wrote in his Memoirs:

 * The most highly-dressed and splendid hookah was prepared for me. I tried it, but did not like it. As after several trials I still found it disagreeable, I with much gravity requested to know whether it was indispensably necessary that I should become a smoker, which was answered with equal gravity, "Undoubtedly it is, for you might as well be out of the world as out of the fashion. Here everybody uses a hookah, and it is impossible to get on without ...[I] have frequently heard men declare they would much rather be deprived of their dinner than their hookah."

Arabic أرجيلة ('arjīlah) is the name most commonly used in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Iraq, while nargilah (נַרְגִּילָה, نارجيلة) is the name most commonly used in Israel. It derives from nārgil, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word nārikela (नारिकेल), meaning coconut, suggesting that early hookahs were hewn from coconut shells.

In Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, (на[р]гиле) or  (на[р]гила) is used to refer to the pipe, while šiša (шиша) refers to شیشه (šiše) meaning glass bottle in Persian. The pipes there often have one or two mouth pieces. The flavored tobacco, created by marinating cuts of tobacco in a multitude of flavored molasses, is placed above the water and covered by pierced foil with hot coals placed on top, and the smoke is drawn through cold water to cool and filter it. In Albania, the hookah is called "lula" or "lulava". In Romania, it is called narghilea.

"Narguile" is the common word in Spain used to refer to the pipe, although "cachimba" is also used, along with "shisha" by Moroccan immigrants in Spain. The word "narguilé" is used in Portuguese. "Narguilé" is also used in French, along with "chicha".

Arabic شيشة (šīšah), through Ottoman Turkish word شیشه (şîşe), itself a direct loanword from Persian شیشه (šīše) meaning "glass container", is the common term for the hookah in Egypt, Sudan and also other Arab world regions such as Arab Peninsula (including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, UAE, Yemen and Saudi Arabia), Algeria, Tunisia. It is used also in Morocco, Somalia and Cyprus. In Yemen, the Arabic term مداعة (madā`ah) is also used, but for pipes using pure tobacco.

In Persia, hookah is called "qalyān". Persian qalyan is included in the earliest European compendium on tobacco, the tobacologia written by Johan Neander and published in Dutch in 1622. It seems that over time water pipes acquired a Persian connotation as in eighteenth-century Egypt the most fashionable pipes were called Karim Khan after the Persian ruler of the day. This is also the name used in Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania and Belarus.

In Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, a hookah is called.

In Kashmiri, hookah is called "Jajeer".

In Maldives, hookah is called "Guduguda".

In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, hookah is called "Shisha".

In the Philippines, hookah is called "hitboo" and normally used in smoking flavored marijuana.

In Sindhi, another language of South Asia, it is called huqqo ( / हुक़्क़ो).

In Vietnam, hookah is called hookah shisha (bình shisha) and shisha is called "shisha tobacco" (thuốc shisha).

History
In the Indian city of Fatehpur Sikri, Roman Catholic missionaries of the Society of Jesus arriving from the southern part of the country introduced tobacco to the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great (1542–1605 AD). Louis Rousselet writes that the physician of Akbar, Hakim Aboul Futteh Ghilani, then invented the hookah in India. However, a quatrain of Ahlī Shirazi (d. 1535), a Persian poet, refers to the use of the ḡalyān (Falsafī, II, p. 277; Semsār, 1963, p. 15), thus dating its use at least as early as the time of the Shah Ṭahmāsp I. It seems, therefore, that Abu’l-Fath Gilani should be credited with the introduction of the ḡalyān, already in use in Persia, into India. There is, however, no evidence of the existence of the water pipe until the 1560s. Moreover, tobacco is believed to have arrived in India in the 17th century, until then cannabis was smoked in India, so that suggests another substance was probably smoked in Ahlī Shirazi's quatrain, perhaps through some other method.

Following the European introduction of tobacco to Persia and India, Hakim Abu’l-Fath Gilani, who came from Gilan, a province in the north of Persia, migrated to Hamarastan. He later became a physician in the Mughal court and raised health concerns after smoking tobacco became popular among Indian noblemen. He subsequently envisaged a system that allowed smoke to be passed through water in order to be 'purified'. Gilani introduced the ḡalyān after Asad Beg, the ambassador of Bijapur, encouraged Akbar I to take up smoking. Following popularity among noblemen, this new device for smoking soon became a status symbol for the Indian aristocracy and gentry.

Modern development
Instead of copper, brass and low-quality alloys, manufacturers increasingly use stainless steel and aluminium. Silicone rubber compounds are used for hookah hoses instead of leather and wire. New materials make modern hookahs more durable, eliminate odors while smoking and allow washing without risks of corrosion or bacterial decay. New technologies and modern design trends are changing the appearance of hookahs. Despite the obvious benefits of modern hookahs, because of high production cost and lack of modern equipment in traditional hookah manufacturing regions, most hookahs are still produced with older technologies.

India
The concept of hookah is thought to have originated in medieval India. Once the province of the wealthy, it was tremendously popular especially during Mughal rule. The hookah has since become less popular; however, it is once again garnering the attention of the masses, and cafés and restaurants that offer it as a consumable are popular. The use of hookahs from ancient times in India was not only a custom, but a matter of prestige. Rich and landed classes would smoke hookahs.

Tobacco is smoked in hookahs in many villages as per traditional customs. Smoking tobacco-molasses is now becoming popular among the youth in India. There are several chain clubs, bars and coffee shops in India offering a wider variety of, including non-tobacco versions. Hookah was recently banned in Bangalore. However, it can be bought or rented for personal usage or organized parties.

Koyilandy, a small fishing town on the west coast of India, once made and exported hookahs extensively. These are known as Malabar Hookhas or Koyilandy Hookahs. Today these intricate hookahs are difficult to find outside Koyilandy and are becoming difficult even to find in Koyilandy itself.

As hookah resurges in India, there have been numerous raids and bans recently on hookah smoking, especially in Gujarat.

Pakistan
Although it has been traditionally prevalent in rural areas for generations, smoking hookahs has become very popular in the cosmopolitan cities of Pakistan. One can see many cafés in Pakistan offering hookah smoking to its guests. Many households even have hookahs for smoking or decoration purposes.

In Punjab, Pakhtunkhwa, and in northern Balochistan, the topmost part on which coals are placed is called chillum.

In big cities like Karachi and Lahore, cafes and restaurants offered Hookah and charged per hour. In 2013, it was banned by the Pakistan Supreme court. The cafe owners started offering shisha to minors, which was the major reason for the ban.

Bangladesh
The hookah (হুক্কা) has been a traditional smoking instrument in Bangladesh, particularly among the old Bengali Muslim zamindar gentry. However, flavoured shisha was introduced in the early 2000s. Hookah lounges spread quite quickly between 2008 and 2011 in urban areas and became popular among young people as well as middle-aged people as a relaxation method. There have been allegations of a government crack-down on hookah bars to prevent illicit drug usage. The hookah is also an electoral symbol for a candidate used first in the 1973 Bangladeshi general election. In the biography of Mountstuart Elphinstone, it is mentioned that James Achilles Kirkpatrick had a hookah-bardar (hookah servant/preparer) during his time in the Indian subcontinent. Kirkpatrick's hookah servant is said to have robbed and cheated Kirkpatrick, making his way to England and stylising himself as the Prince of Sylhet. The man was waited upon by the Prime Minister of Great Britain William Pitt the Younger, and then dined with the Duke of York before presenting himself in front of George III.

Nepal
Hookahs (हुक़्क़ा), especially wooden ones, are popular in Nepal. Use of hookahs has been usually considered to symbolize an elite family status in Nepali history. Nowadays, the cities of Kathmandu, Pokhara and Dharan have special hookah bars. Although hookahs have started becoming popular among younger people and tourists, the overall number of hookah smokers is likely dwindling owing to the widespread availability of cheaper cigarettes.

Middle East

In the Arab world and the Middle East, people smoke waterpipes as part of their culture and traditions. Local names of waterpipe in the Middle East are, argila, čelam/čelīm, ḡalyān or ghalyan, ḥoqqa, nafas, nargile, and shisha.

Social smoking is done with a single or double hose hookah, and sometimes even triple or quadruple hose hookahs are used at parties or small get-togethers. When the smoker is finished, they either place the hose back on the table, signifying that it is available, or hand it from one user to the next, folded back on itself so that the mouthpiece is not pointing at the recipient.

Most cafés in the Middle East offer shishas. Cafés are widespread and are among the chief social gathering places in the Arab world (akin to public houses in Britain).

Gaza
In 2010 the Hamas-led Islamist government of Gaza imposed a ban on women smoking hookahs in public. A spokesman for the Interior Ministry explained that "It is inappropriate for a woman to sit cross-legged and smoke in public. It harms the image of our people." The ban was soon lifted later that year and women returned to smoking in popular venues like the cafe of Gaza's Crazy Water Park.

Iran
The exact date of the first use of ḡalyān in Iran is not known. However, the earliest known literary evidence of the hookah, anywhere, comes in a quatrain by Ahlī Shirazi (d. 1535), a Persian poet, referring to the use of the ḡalyān, thus dating its use at least as early as the time of the Shah Ṭahmāsp I. This suggests, the hookah was already in use in ancient Persia, and it made its way into India soon afterward.

Although the Safavid Shah ʿAbbās I strongly condemned tobacco use, towards the end of his reign smoking ḡalyān and čopoq had become common on every level of the society, women included. In schools, both teachers and students had ḡalyāns while lessons continued. Shah Safi of Persia (r. 1629–42) declared a complete ban on tobacco, but the income received from its use persuaded him to soon revoke the ban. The use of ḡalyāns became so widespread that a group of poor people became professional tinkers of crystal water pipes. During the time of Abbas II of Persia (r. 1642–1666), use of the water pipe had become a national addiction. The shah (king) had his own private ḡalyān servants. Evidently the position of water pipe tender (ḡalyāndār) dates from this time. Also at this time, reservoirs were made of glass, pottery, or a type of gourd. Because of the unsatisfactory quality of indigenous glass, glass reservoirs were sometimes imported from Venice. In the time of Suleiman I of Persia (r. 1694–1722), ḡalyāns became more elaborately embellished as their use increased. The wealthy owned gold and silver pipes. The masses spent more on ḡalyāns than they did on the necessities of life.

An emissary of Sultan Husayn (r. 1722–32) to the court of Louis XV of France, on his way to the royal audience at Versailles, had in his retinue an officer holding his ḡalyān, which he used while his carriage was in motion. We have no record indicating the use of ḡalyān at the court of Nader Shah, although its use seems to have continued uninterrupted. There are portraits of Karim Khan of the Zand dynasty of Iran and Fat′h-Ali Shah Qajar that depict them smoking the ḡalyān. Iranians have a special tobacco called Khansar (خانسار, presumably name of the origin city, Khvansar). The charcoals would be put on the Khansar without foil.

Saudi Arabia
In 2014, Saudi Arabia was in the process of implementing general smoking bans in public places. This included shishas. Currently, hookah remains legal in the country, with some restaurants charging customers extra fees.

Syria

Although perceived to be an important cultural feature of Syria (see Smoking in Syria), narghile had declined in popularity during most of the twentieth century and was used mostly by older men. Similar to other Middle Eastern countries, its use increased dramatically during the 1990s, particularly among youth and young adults. As of 2004, prior to the Syrian civil war, 17% of 18- to 29-year-olds, 10% of 30- to 45-year-olds, and 6% of 46- to 65-year-olds reported using narghile, and use was higher in men than women. More recent data is not available.

Turkey and the Balkans
Nargile became part of Turkish and Balkan culture from the 17th century. Back then, it became prominent in society and was used as a status symbol. Nargile was such an important Turkish custom that it even sparked a diplomatic crisis between France and the Ottoman Empire. Western Turkey is noted for its traditional pottery production where potters make earthenware objects, including nargile bowls.

Southeast Asia
In Southeast Asia, the hookah, where it is predominantly called shisha, was particularly used within the Arab and Indian communities.

Hookah was virtually unknown in Southeast Asia before the latter 20th century, yet the popularity among contemporary younger people is now vastly growing. Southeast Asia's most cosmopolitan cities, Makati, Bangkok, Singapore (now banned), Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, now have various bars and clubs that offer hookahs to patrons.

Although hookah use has been common for hundreds of years and enjoyed by people of all ages, it has recently started to become a youth pastime in Asia. Hookahs are most popular with college students, and young adults, who may be underage and thus unable to purchase cigarettes.

Kenya
The hookah is called shisha in Kenya. They are officially banned in the country. Despite this, many clubs still continue to defy the law and hookah smoking goes on in urban areas.

South Africa
In South Africa, hookah, colloquially known as a hubbly bubbly or an okka pipe, is popular among the Cape Malay and Indian populations, wherein it is smoked as a social pastime. However, hookah is seeing increasing popularity with South Africans, especially the youth. Bars that additionally provide hookahs are becoming more prominent, although smoking is normally done at home or in public spaces such as beaches and picnic sites.

In South Africa, the terminology of the various hookah components also differ from other countries. The clay "head/bowl" is known as a "clay pot". The hoses are called "pipes" and the air release valve is known as a "clutch".

The windcover (which is considered optional for outside use) is known as an "As-jas", which directly translates from Afrikaans to English as an "ash-jacket". Also, making/preparing the "clay pot" is commonly referred to as "racking the hubbly".

Some scientists point to the marijuana pipe as an African origin of hookah.

United States and Canada

During the 1960s and 1970s, hookahs were a popular tool for the consumption of various derivations of tobacco, among other things. At parties or small gatherings the hookah hose was passed around with users partaking as they saw fit. Typically, though, open flames were used instead of burning coals.

Today, hookahs are readily available for sale at smoke shops and some gas stations across the United States, along with a variety of tobacco brands and accessories. In addition to private hookah smoking, hookah lounges or bars have opened in cities across the country.

Recently, certain cities, counties, and states have implemented indoor smoking bans. In some jurisdictions, hookah businesses can be exempted from the policies through special permits. Some permits, however, have requirements such as the business earning a certain minimum percentage of their revenue from alcohol or tobacco.

In cities with indoor smoking bans, hookah bars have been forced to close or switch to tobacco-free mixtures. In many cities, though, hookah lounges have been growing in popularity. From the year 2000 to 2004, over 200 new hookah cafés opened for business, most of them targeted at young adults and located near college campuses or cities with large Middle-Eastern communities. This activity continues to gain popularity within the post-secondary student demographic. Hookah use among high school students declined from 9.4% to 3.4% from 2014 to 2019 while cigarette smoking decreased from 9.2% to 5.8% during this same time period, according to the US CDC. According to a 2018 study, 1.1% of students with some college but no degree, an associate degree or an undergraduate degree reported waterpipe or pipe tobacco product use either every day or some days. As of November 2017, at least 2,082 college or university campuses in the U.S. have adopted 100% smokefree campus policies that attempt to eliminate smoking in indoor and outdoor areas across the entire campus, including residences.

In the United States, the prevalence of hookah use has been noted in a 2019 article to be increasing, particularly among certain states with larger populations of Arab Americans. The use of hookah is more common in urban areas compared to rural areas, and this trend is influenced by factors like availability in public spaces such as cafés and restaurants, as well as cultural and social influences.

Operation
The jar at the bottom of the hookah is filled with water sufficient to submerge a few centimeters (an inch or two) of the body tube, which is sealed tightly to it. Deeper water will only increase the inhalation force needed to use it. Tobacco or tobacco-free molasses are placed inside the bowl at the top of the hookah. Often the bowl is covered with perforated tin foil or a metal screen and coal placed on top. The foil or screen separates the coal and the tobacco, with the foil and the tobacco reaching maximum temperatures of 450 and 130 degrees Celsius (850 °F and 270 °F) respectively. These temperatures are too low to sustain combustion and considerably lower than the 900 degrees Celsius (1700 °F) found in cigarettes. A larger fraction of the smoke condensates of the hookah are produced by simple distillation rather than by pyrolysis and combustion, and as a result, would tend to carry considerably less of the pyrosynthesized compounds found in cigarette smoke.

As a result of suction through the hose, a vacuum is created in the headspace of the water bowl sufficient to overcome the small static head of the water above the inlet pipe, causing the smoke to bubble into the bowl. At the same time, air is drawn over and heated by the coals. It then passes through the tobacco mixture where due to hot air convection and thermal conduction from the coal, the mainstream aerosol is produced. The vapor is passed down through the body tube that extends into the water in the jar. It bubbles up through the water, losing heat, and fills the top part of the jar, to which the hose is attached. When a user inhales from the hose, smoke passes into the lungs, and the change in pressure in the jar pulls more air through the charcoal, continuing the process. Vapour that has collected in the bowl above the waterline may be exhausted through a purge valve, if present. This one-way valve is opened by the positive pressure created from gently blowing into the hose.

Exposure to toxic chemicals
Tobacco smoke contains toxic chemicals, including carcinogens (chemicals that cause cancer). Water does not filter out many of these chemicals. The toxic chemicals come from the burning of the charcoal, tobacco, and flavorings. These chemicals can lead to cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and other health problems. The toxic chemicals include tobacco-specific nitrosamines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs; e.g., benzo[a]pyrene and anthracene), volatile aldehydes (e.g. formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein), benzene, nitric oxide, heavy metals (arsenic, chromium, lead), and carbon monoxide (CO). Hookah smoking also increases the amount of carbon monoxide (CO) in a person's body to eight times their normal level. Compared to smoking one cigarette, a single hookah session exposes users to more carbon monoxide and PAHs, similar levels of nicotine, and lower levels of tobacco-specific nitrosamines. By inhaling these chemicals, hookah smokers are at increased risk of many of the same health problems as cigarette smokers. An average hookah smoking session smokers inhale 100–200 times more smoke inhaled smoking a single cigarette.

Exposure to pathogens that cause infectious diseases
When people share a hookah, there is a risk of spreading infectious diseases such as oral herpes, tuberculosis, hepatitis, influenza, and H. pylori. Using personal disposable mouthpieces may reduce this risk, but does not eliminate it.

Addiction to and dependence on hookah
Hookah smokers inhale nicotine, which is an addictive chemical. A typical hookah smoking session delivers 1.7 times the nicotine dose of one cigarette and the nicotine absorption rate in daily waterpipe users is equivalent to smoking 10 cigarettes per day. Many hookah smokers, especially frequent users, have urges to smoke and show other withdrawal symptoms after not smoking for some time, and it can be difficult to quit. People who become addicted to hookah may be more likely to smoke alone. Hookah smokers who are addicted may find it easier to quit if they have help from a quit-smoking counseling program.

Short-term health effects
Carbon monoxide (CO) in hookah smoke binds to hemoglobin in the blood to form carboxyhemoglobin, which reduces the amount of oxygen that can be transported to organs including the brain. There are several case reports in the medical literature of hookah smokers needing treatment in hospital emergency rooms for symptoms of CO poisoning including headache, nausea, lethargy, and fainting. This is sometimes called "hookah sickness". Hookah smoking can damage the cardiovascular system in several ways. Its use elevates heart rate and blood pressure. It also impairs baroreflex control (which helps to control blood pressure) and cardiac autonomic functioning (which has many purposes, including control of heart rate) Hookah use also acutely harms vascular functioning, increases inflammation, and harms lung function and reduces the ability to exercise.

Long-term health effects
Current evidence indicates hookah causes numerous health problems. Hookah smoking is associated with increased risk of several cancers (lung, esophageal, and gastric), pulmonary diseases (impaired pulmonary function, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema), coronary artery disease, periodontal disease, obstetrical and perinatal problems (low birth weight and pulmonary problems at birth), larynx and voice changes, and osteoporosis. Many of the studies to date have methodological limitations, such as not measuring hookah use in a standardized way. Larger, longitudinal studies are needed to learn more about the long-term health effects of hookah use and of exposure to hookah smoke. Oral health is also affected, notably dental and periodontal status

Effects of secondhand exposure to hookah smoke
Secondhand smoke from hookahs contains significant amounts of carbon monoxide, aldehydes, PAHs, ultrafine particles, and respirable particulate matter (particles small enough to enter the lungs). Studies have found that concentrations of particulate matter in the air of hookah bars were in the unhealthy to hazardous range according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards. The air in hookah bars also contains significant amounts of toxic chemicals, including aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nicotine, and trace metals. The concentrations in the air of all these toxic substances are greater than for cigarettes (for the same number of smokers per hour). During a typical one-hour hookah session, a user expels into the air 2-10 times the amount of cancer-causing chemicals and other harmful chemicals compared to a cigarette smoker. No studies have examined the long-term health effects of exposure to secondhand hookah smoke, but short term effects may include experience respiratory symptoms such as wheezing, nasal congestion, and chronic cough.

title: Hookah


text:
Roger MacBride

Roger Lea MacBride (August 6, 1929 – March 5, 1995) was an American lawyer, political figure, and writer. After working as a lawyer early in his career, he inherited the estate of Laura Ingalls Wilder. He wrote several books in her Little House on the Prairie series and initiated the development of its television adaptation.

In politics, MacBride served a single term as a Republican member of the Vermont House of Representatives in the 1960s. When serving as a Republican presidential elector in Virginia in 1972, he defected from his pledged vote and became a faithless elector, casting a vote for the Libertarian Party's inaugural ticket of John Hospers for president and Tonie Nathan for vice president. Four years later, the party nominated him as their presidential candidate.

Background
MacBride was born in 1929 in New Rochelle, New York, the son of Elise Fairfax (Lea) and William Burt MacBride, an editor. He called himself "the adopted grandson" of a family friend, writer and libertarian political theorist Rose Wilder Lane, whom he met when he was 14 years of age. Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, noted author of the Little House series of books, designated MacBride as her "political disciple," executor, and sole heir.

MacBride was a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

Law career
MacBride worked for White & Case, a law firm on Wall Street, for several years before opening a small practice in Vermont. By the mid-1970s, MacBride had relocated to Virginia and was no longer practicing law full time.

Writing and television producing career
MacBride was designated by Rose Wilder Lane as her heir. He gained control of her literary estate on her death in 1968. In 1971 he published The First Four Years. In 1974 he edited and published Laura Ingalls Wilder's letters to her husband Almanzo as West From Home. He approved the creation of the television series in the 1970s. He was the credited author of a fictionalized series on the life of Rose Wilder Lane. He was author of record for three additional Little House books and launched the Rocky Ridge Years series of children's novels, describing Lane's Ozark childhood. He published two books on constitutional law, The American Electoral College and Treaties versus the Constitution, and authored a Libertarian Party manifesto: A New Dawn for America: The Libertarian Challenge.

In the 1970s, MacBride co-created the television series Little House on the Prairie and served as a co-producer for the show.

Vermont politics
MacBride was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives in 1962 and served one term. While in the state legislature he proposed the abolition of the state college system.

Running as a Goldwater Republican, he made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican Party nomination for Governor of Vermont in 1964.

1972 electoral vote
MacBride was the treasurer of the Republican Party of Virginia in 1972 and one of the party's electors when Richard Nixon won the popular vote for his second term as president of the United States. MacBride, however, as a "faithless elector," voted for the nominees of the Libertarian Party: presidential candidate John Hospers and vice-presidential candidate Tonie Nathan. In doing so, MacBride made Nathan the first woman in U.S. history to receive an Electoral College vote. Political pundit David Boaz later commented in Liberty magazine that MacBride was "faithless to Nixon and Agnew, anyway, but faithful to the constitutional principles Rose Wilder Lane had instilled in him."

1976 presidential campaign
After casting his electoral vote in 1972, MacBride gained favor within the fledgling Libertarian Party, which had been founded the previous year. As the Libertarian presidential nominee in 1976, he achieved ballot access in 32 states, campaigning on a platform of support for a free market system, a return to the gold standard, the abolition of the Federal Reserve, an end to corporate welfare, the abolition of the FCC, a foreign policy of non-interventionism, and the abolition of victimless crimes. MacBride and his running mate David Bergland received 172,553 (0.2%) popular votes but no electoral votes. His best performance was in Alaska, where he received 6,785 votes, or nearly 5.5%.

Republican Liberty Caucus
MacBride rejoined the Republican Party in the 1980s and helped establish the Republican Liberty Caucus, a group promoting libertarian principles within the Republican Party. He chaired this group from 1992 until his death in 1995.

Personal life and death
MacBride married Susan Ford. They then adopted a baby whom they named Abigail MacBride.

MacBride died of heart failure at his home in Miami Beach, Florida, on March 5, 1995, at the age of 65. He willed his estate, including the rights to the Little House franchise, to his daughter. In 1999, this was challenged by the public library system of Wright County, Missouri, containing the Laura Ingalls Wilder Library in Wilder's hometown of Mansfield; they contended that her will gave her daughter ownership of the literary estate for her lifetime only, and that all rights should have reverted to the library after Rose Wilder Lane's death in 1968. The estate was estimated to be worth around $100 million at the time. In 2001, a settlement was reached in which the Wright County library system was paid $875,000, but control of the estate remained with the MacBride family.

In an obituary for MacBride, David Boaz wrote: "In some ways he was the last living link to the best of the Old Right, the rugged-individualist, anti-New Deal, anti-interventionist spirit of Rep. Howard Buffett, Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, Isabel Paterson, and Lane."

Partial bibliography

 * Series on the early life of Rose Wilder
 * Little House on Rocky Ridge (1993)
 * Little Farm in the Ozarks (1994)
 * In the Land of the Big Red Apple (1995)
 * On the Other Side of the Hill (1995)
 * Little Town in the Ozarks (1996)
 * New Dawn on Rocky Ridge (1997)
 * On the Banks of the Bayou (1998)
 * Bachelor Girl (1999)
 * A New Dawn for America: the Libertarian Challenge

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Roger MacBride


text:
Talk:Babylonian law

Vestal Virgins
The article states that "Vestal virgins were not supposed to have children, yet they could marry and often did. The Code contemplated that such a wife would give a husband a maid, as above."

But "Vestal virgins" were a Roman custom, and not a Babylonian one! So clearly there is some sort of mistake in this instance.

Joe Gatt 09:14, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

 * I suppose the author of this phrase meant to say temple priestess, temple prostitutes, or women of equal or similar positions. I will change that.Gw2005 (talk) 00:30, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Updates
Update-eb
 * (in particular, the bibiliography ends at 1903)

What are law murts? And is this material original? -- Zoe

 * hammurabi's laws, all 282 of them! (unsigned comment by ) on Jan 24 2006

 * This material is not original, but a copy of the public domain Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. That's acceptable in Wikipedia, although updates are welcome. David Brooks 19:57, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

 * Its not original, but it might be linked to other earlier sources of Babylonian law such as the Letter of Nanse and the form of Contracts in the ANE discussed by Kenneth Kitchen who uses passages from the Pentateuch, sharia law and Egyptian Law Hotep Rktect 20:34, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Changelings?
 * This page mentions a law refering to "changelings". I believe the original law by Hammurabi (Law 194?) referred to a wet-nurse switching a dead child for someone else's live (and human) baby without the knowledge of the parents.  I'm not sure where the reference to changelings came in, but I don't think it's appropriate and I don't think the changeling myth was even in existence at the time of the law's creation.  Does anybody know more about this? Susangibba (talk) 23:10, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

The spelling of the three social classes
I'm not sure what the current consensus is for spelling the three social classes, so I just went by number of google book hits. If anyone knows differently, please explain here and update the article.

 * amelu (vs. amilu, awilu, awelu)
 * mushkenu (i.e. muškenu) (vs. mushkinu)
 * ardu (vs. wardu)

IansAwesomePizza (talk) 21:49, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Babylonian law. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080509192326/http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/hammurabi.htm to http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/hammurabi.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 11:37, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

title: Talk:Babylonian law


text:
Talk:Roget's Thesaurus

Page title
Does anyone object to moving this to Roget's Thesaurus? -- Zoe [09:17, January 12, 2003 (UTC)]

I've never heard of "Roget's" being used as a synonym for Thesaurus, rather than a specific thesaurus. Similarly, I've never heard "Webster's" used instead of dictionary. I suspect both are Americanisms. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.217.21.194 (talk) 01:25, April 26, 2007 (UTC)

 * I agree. I'm from the UK, and neither of those words are in use as generics. (And no, we don't call dictionaries "Oxfords" as generics, either!) I'm changing the text to specify the US, but leaving the "citation needed" tag in. Loganberry (Talk) 17:02, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Regarding Para:
Roget's schema of classes and their subdivisions is based on the philosophical work of Leibniz (see Leibniz — Symbolic thought), itself following a long tradition of epistemological work starting with Aristotle. Some of Aristotle's Categories are included in Roget's first class "abstract relations"…

I submit the folowing sources: Jamshydf (talk) 07:33, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

SOURCE: Roget's Thesaurus of English words and phrases, New edition prepared by Susan M Lloyd, Longman, 1985

Preface to the 1982 edition, page vii:

"Roget arranged his far more extensive material into a comprehensive framework with a clearly visible structure … In this, he was following in the steps of seventeenth-century philosophers such as Leibniz, who had attempted the classification of concepts as a preliminary to inventing a Universal Language … had to create a hierarchy of concepts … "

Page xxi (Introduction to the original edition of 1852 written by Peter Mark Roget):

"In constructing the following system of classification of the ideas which are expressible by language … thus establishing six primary Classes or Categories… The further subdivisions and minuter details will be best understood from … the Tabular Synopsis of Categories prefixed to the Work [ie Roget's Thesaurus] …"

Jamshydf (talk) 07:33, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

SOURCE: The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, Thomas Mautner, second edition, Penguin Books, 2005

Category, page 100:

"The term was introduced by Aristotle … Kant used the term for the twelve forms … by which the intellect structures all experiences."

Jamshydf (talk) 07:33, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

OED
I can't find any reference stating that "OED" is used as a general term for dictionaries in the US or elsewhere, that seems a very weird assertion. Given no citation I've removed that reference.Gymnophoria (talk) 17:56, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Roget's Thesaurus. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20150121120555/http://poets.notredame.ac.jp/Roget/contents.html to http://poets.notredame.ac.jp/Roget/contents.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers. —cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 12:51, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Major changes to the categories listing
In the Colonies, Roget's International is considered the "official" Roget's. Up through the 4th edition, it maintained Mark Roget's "Classical" selection and organization of categories. With the 5th edition, it switched to what might be considered a more obvious relation to "the real world". This threw some people into a tizzy, claiming that the work was ruined (even though it still contained the same word lists and indexing). This needs to be discussed. WilliamSommerwerck (talk) 12:09, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Created in 1805?
"...a widely used English-language thesaurus, created in 1805 by Peter Mark Roget..." Is to create the right word in this circumstances? Maybe PMR started collecting words in 1805. Is this already creating? --Delabarquera (talk) 12:28, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

title: Talk:Roget's Thesaurus


text:
Transhuman

Transhuman, or trans-human, is the concept of an intermediary form between human and posthuman. In other words, a transhuman is a being that resembles a human in most respects but who has powers and abilities beyond those of standard humans. These abilities might include improved intelligence, awareness, strength, or durability. Transhumans appear in science-fiction, sometimes as cyborgs or genetically-enhanced humans.

History of hypotheses
In his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri coined the word "trasumanar" meaning "to transcend human nature, to pass beyond human nature" in the first canto of Paradiso.

The use of the term "transhuman" goes back to French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote in his 1949 book The Future of Mankind.

"Liberty: that is to say, the chance offered to every man (by removing obstacles and placing the appropriate means at his disposal) of 'trans-humanizing' himself by developing his potentialities to the fullest extent."

And in a 1951 unpublished revision of the same book:

"In consequence one is the less disposed to reject as unscientific the idea that the critical point of planetary Reflection, the fruit of socialization, far from being a mere spark in the darkness, represents our passage, by Translation or dematerialization, to another sphere of the Universe: not an ending of the ultra-human but its accession to some sort of trans-humanity at the ultimate heart of things."

In 1957 book New Bottles for New Wine, English evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley wrote:

"The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. "I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny."

One of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of the Human" at The New School of New York City in the 1960s, used "transhuman" as shorthand for "transitional human". Calling transhumans the "earliest manifestation of new evolutionary beings", FM argued that signs of transhumans included physical and mental augmentations including prostheses, reconstructive surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilisation), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values.

FM-2030 used the concept of transhuman as an evolutionary transition, outside the confines of academia, in his contributing final chapter to the 1972 anthology Woman, Year 2000. In the same year, American cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger contributed to conceptualization of "transhumanity" in his book Man into Superman. In 1982, American Natasha Vita-More authored a statement titled Transhumanist Arts Statement and outlined what she perceived as an emerging transhuman culture.

Jacques Attali, writing in 2006, envisaged transhumans as an altruistic vanguard of the later 21st century:

Vanguard players (I shall call them transhumans) will run (they are already running) relational enterprises in which profit will be no more than a hindrance, not a final goal. Each of these transhumans will be altruistic, a citizen of the planet, at once nomadic and sedentary, his neighbor's equal in rights and obligations, hospitable and respectful of the world. Together, transhumans will give birth to planetary institutions and change the course of industrial enterprises.

In March 2007, American physicist Gregory Cochran and paleoanthropologist John Hawks published a study, alongside other recent research on which it builds, which amounts to a radical reappraisal of traditional views, which tended to assume that humans have reached an evolutionary endpoint. Physical anthropologist Jeffrey McKee argued the new findings of accelerated evolution bear out predictions he made in a 2000 book The Riddled Chain. Based on computer models, he argued that evolution should speed up as a population grows because population growth creates more opportunities for new mutations; and the expanded population occupies new environmental niches, which would drive evolution in new directions. Whatever the implications of the recent findings, McKee concludes that they highlight a ubiquitous point about evolution: "every species is a transitional species".

Transhumans in fiction
Examples of transhuman entities in fiction exist within many popular video games. For example, the Bioshock media franchise depicts individuals receiving doses of a substance called ADAM, harvested from a fictional type of sea slugs, able to give the user fantastical powers through genetic engineering. Thus, previously standard humans can gain the ability to summon ice, wield lightning, turn invisible, and commit other seeming miracles due to their enhancement.

A 2014 article from Ars Technica speculated that mutating clumps of mobile genetic elements known as "transposons" could possibly be used as a semi-parasitic tool to raise people to a higher status in terms of their abilities, making at least part of the game's scenario theoretically plausible. Similar commentary later occurred from gamers with the advent of CRISPR gene editing.

Transhumans also have played a major role in the Star Trek media franchise. For example, in "Space Seed", the twenty-second episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series that initially aired on February 16, 1967, a charismatic and physically intimidating genius called Khan Noonien Singh attempts to take control of the Enterprise operated by the show's protagonists. The selectively bred individual had advanced beyond simple human status and nearly succeeds. The starship's crew opt to exile the leader and his league of similar beings to a habitable but isolated alien planet instead of assigning a true punishment per se, a ruling which he accepts without protest. Played by Ricardo Montalbán, Khan returns in the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which broadly serves as a sequel to the episode. References to "Space Seed" appear in episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Enterprise, and the 2013 film Star Trek Into Darkness as well.

title: Transhuman


text:
Sleeper ship

A sleeper ship is a hypothetical type of crewed spacecraft, or starship in which most or all of the crew spend the journey in some form of hibernation or suspended animation. The only known technology that allows long-term suspended animation of humans is the freezing of early-stage human embryos through embryo cryopreservation, which is behind the concept of embryo space colonization.

Description
The most common role of sleeper ships in fiction is for interstellar or intergalactic travel, usually at sub-light speed. Travel times for such journeys could reach into the hundreds or thousands of years, making some form of life extension, such as suspended animation, necessary for the original crew to live to see their destination. Suspended animation is also required on ships that cannot be used as generation ships.

Freezing the astronauts would probably involve whole-body vitrification and would, most likely, be frozen at 145 kelvins to reduce the risk of fracturing.

Suspended animation can also be useful to reduce the consumption of life support system resources by crew members who are not needed during the trip, or by an author as a plot device, and for this reason, sleeper ships sometimes also make an appearance in the context of purely interplanetary travel.

Examples in fiction
There are numerous examples of sleeper ships in science fiction literature and films. Some of the best-known examples are:

 * "Far Centaurus", published in Destination: Universe! by AE van Vogt
 * The interplanetary sleeper ship USSC Discovery One is one of the main subjects of the whole Space Odyssey franchise. As it is told in 2001: A Space Odyssey, six crew members are on the spacecraft: Commander "Dave" Bowman and Frank Poole were de-hibernated before the others; Victor Kaminsky, Jack Kimball and Charles Hunter were killed by the sixth member: the psychopathic artificial intelligence HAL 9000.
 * Pandorum
 * The TV series Lost in Space used a sleeper ship, the Jupiter II, intended to hold the crew for the five-and-a-half-year journey to Alpha Centauri. Dr. Smith, a saboteur and accidental stowaway, is forced to revive the crew to save the ship from meteors.
 * The film Lost in Space in which the suspended animation system fails, bringing the crew of Jupiter 2 out of sleep prematurely.
 * Nostromo – The sleeper/cargo ship in the film Alien.
 * Sulaco – The sleeper/war ship in the film Aliens.
 * The Hunter-Gratzner in the film Pitch Black transports a number of its passengers in cryostasis.
 * Planet of the Apes
 * Avatar
 * Stargate SG-1 – A ship is found with its crew in cryostasis.
 * Stargate Universe – The crew of the Destiny enter stasis in order to sleep during a potentially millennia-long trip.
 * Prometheus
 * SS Botany Bay, a sleeper ship from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Space Seed" (it is also mentioned in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek Into Darkness), transporting a crew including Khan Noonien Singh. One (Star Trek: Voyager) illustrates a similar technique.
 * Called a "sail-ship" by Cordwainer Smith in Think Blue, Count Two
 * Cargo
 * New Mayflower and Ark from Frederik Pohl's novel The World at the End of Time
 * After Earth
 * Homeworld
 * Freelancer – Five sleeper ships built by the Alliance: the Bretonia, the Rheinland, the Hispania, the Kusari and the Liberty. Of these five, all but the Hispania go on to found different star systems, each named after them: the Hispania can be found in the game as an abandoned derelict, the descendants of its passengers having become the "Outcast" and "Corsair" pirate factions.
 * The space station-starship hybrid Endurance from Interstellar is used by NASA astronauts to travel through a wormhole to another galaxy in order to find a new planet for humanity or bomb the planet with human embryos.
 * Event Horizon – The vessel Lewis and Clark is dispatched to find what happened to the ship Event Horizon. The Crew is put in hibernation.
 * In the official trailer of the video game Civilization: Beyond Earth, a sleeper ship was seen sending humans from Earth to an alien planet.
 * Mass Effect Andromeda – Representatives of the human race, in addition to that of other Milky Way Galaxy races, travel to the Andromeda Galaxy aboard a series of arks, with the aim of colonizing a series of new homeworlds. The travel time is only 600 years due to the discovery of a form of faster-than-light travel that cuts down the time to traverse the 2.5 million light years between galaxies (by comparison, it is mentioned in the game that a cargo vessel, also sent in the direction of Andromeda, will not arrive for more than two million years.)
 * Halo
 * Hyperion, a novel by Dan Simmons. The Seed Ships are a type of slower than light travel that put the passengers into a fugue-like state for the length of the trip.
 * Heaven's Vault
 * Passengers – It features the sleeper ship Avalon. The suspended animation system, which keeps 5,000 passengers in hibernation on board the Avalon during its 120-year trip to the planet Homestead II, fails as a result of asteroid collisions causing a mechanical engineer to be awoken prematurely.
 * Don't Look Up – The US president and some of her inner circle escape an extinction event where a large comet hits the Earth.

title: Sleeper ship


text:
Sentience

Sentience is the simplest or most primitive form of cognition, consisting of a conscious awareness of stimuli without association or interpretation. The word was first coined by philosophers in the 1630s for the concept of an ability to feel, derived from Latin sentiens (feeling), to distinguish it from the ability to think (reason).

In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations. In different Asian religions, the word "sentience" has been used to translate a variety of concepts. In science fiction, the word "sentience" is sometimes used interchangeably with "sapience", "self-awareness", or "consciousness".

Some writers differentiate between the mere ability to perceive sensations, such as light or pain, and the ability to perceive emotions, such as fear or grief. The subjective awareness of experiences by a conscious individual are known as qualia in Western philosophy.

Sentience in philosophy
In philosophy, different authors draw different distinctions between consciousness and sentience. According to Antonio Damasio, sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly and collectively describes sentience plus further features of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). These further features of consciousness may not be necessary for sentience, which is the capacity to feel sensations and emotions.

Consciousness
According to Thomas Nagel in his paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", consciousness can refer to the ability of any entity to have subjective perceptual experiences, or as some philosophers refer to them, "qualia"—in other words, the ability to have states that it feels like something to be in. Some philosophers, notably Colin McGinn, believe that the physical process causing consciousness to happen will never be understood, a position known as "new mysterianism". They do not deny that most other aspects of consciousness are subject to scientific investigation but they argue that qualia will never be explained. Other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia is not a meaningful concept.

Regarding animal consciousness, the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, publicly proclaimed on 7 July 2012 at Cambridge University, states that many non-human animals possess the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states, and can exhibit intentional behaviors. The declaration notes that all vertebrates (including fish and reptiles) have this neurological substrate for consciousness, and that there is strong evidence that many invertebrates also have it.

Phenomenal vs. affective consciousness
David Chalmers argues that sentience is sometimes used as shorthand for phenomenal consciousness, the capacity to have any subjective experience at all, but sometimes refers to the narrower concept of affective consciousness, the capacity to experience subjective states that have affective valence (i.e., a positive or negative character), such as pain and pleasure.

Sentience quotient
The sentience quotient concept was introduced by Robert A. Freitas Jr. in the late 1970s. It defines sentience as the relationship between the information processing rate of each individual processing unit (neuron), the weight/size of a single unit, and the total number of processing units (expressed as mass). It was proposed as a measure for the sentience of all living beings and computers from a single neuron up to a hypothetical being at the theoretical computational limit of the entire universe. On a logarithmic scale it runs from −70 up to +50.

Eastern religions
Eastern religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism recognise non-humans as sentient beings. The term sentient beings is translated from various Sanskrit terms (jantu, bahu jana, jagat, sattva) and "conventionally refers to the mass of living things subject to illusion, suffering, and rebirth (Saṃsāra)". It is related to the concept of ahimsa, non-violence toward other beings. In some forms of Buddhism, plants, stones and other inanimate objects are considered to be 'sentient'. In Jainism many things are endowed with a soul, jīva, which is sometimes translated as 'sentience'. Some things are without a soul, ajīva, such as a chair or spoon. There are different rankings of jīva based on the number of senses it has. Water, for example, is a sentient being of the first order, as it is considered to possess only one sense, that of touch.

Sentience in Buddhism is the state of having senses. In Buddhism, there are six senses, the sixth being the subjective experience of the mind. Sentience is simply awareness prior to the arising of Skandha. Thus, an animal qualifies as a sentient being. According to Buddhism, sentient beings made of pure consciousness are possible. In Mahayana Buddhism, which includes Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, the concept is related to the Bodhisattva, an enlightened being devoted to the liberation of others. The first vow of a Bodhisattva states, "Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to free them."

Animal welfare, rights, and sentience
Sentience has been a central concept in the animal rights movement, tracing back to the well-known writing of Jeremy Bentham in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"

Richard D. Ryder defines sentientism broadly as the position according to which an entity has moral status if and only if it is sentient. In David Chalmer's more specific terminology, Bentham is a narrow sentientist, since his criterion for moral status is not only the ability to experience any phenomenal consciousness at all, but specifically the ability to experience conscious states with negative affective valence (i.e. suffering). Animal welfare and rights advocates often invoke similar capacities. For example, the documentary Earthlings argues that while animals do not have all the desires and ability to comprehend as do humans, they do share the desires for food and water, shelter and companionship, freedom of movement and avoidance of pain.

Animal-welfare advocates typically argue that any sentient being is entitled, at a minimum, to protection from unnecessary suffering, though animal-rights advocates may differ on what rights (e.g., the right to life) may be entailed by simple sentience. Sentiocentrism describes the theory that sentient individuals are the center of moral concern.

Gary Francione also bases his abolitionist theory of animal rights, which differs significantly from Singer's, on sentience. He asserts that, "All sentient beings, humans or nonhuman, have one right: the basic right not to be treated as the property of others."

Andrew Linzey, a British theologian, considers that Christianity should regard sentient animals according to their intrinsic worth, rather than their utility to humans.

In 1997 the concept of animal sentience was written into the basic law of the European Union. The legally binding protocol annexed to the Treaty of Amsterdam recognises that animals are "sentient beings", and requires the EU and its member states to "pay full regards to the welfare requirements of animals".

Indicators of sentience
Nociception is the process by which the nervous system detects and responds to potentially harmful stimuli, leading to the sensation of pain. It involves specialized receptors called nociceptors that sense damage or threat and send signals to the brain. Nociception is widespread among animals, even among insects.

The presence of nociception indicates an organism's ability to detect harmful stimuli. A further question is whether the way these noxious stimuli are processed within the brain leads to a subjective experience of pain. To address that, researchers often look for behavioral cues. For example, "if a dog with an injured paw whimpers, licks the wound, limps, lowers pressure on the paw while walking, learns to avoid the place where the injury happened and seeks out analgesics when offered, we have reasonable grounds to assume that the dog is indeed experiencing something unpleasant." Avoiding painful stimuli unless the reward is significant can also provide evidence that pain avoidance is not merely an unconscious reflex (similarly to how humans "can choose to press a hot door handle to escape a burning building").

Sentient animals
Animals such as pigs, chickens, and fish are typically recognized as sentient. There is more uncertainty regarding insects, and findings on certain insect species may not be applicable to others.

Historically, fish were not considered sentient, and their behaviors were often viewed as "reflexes or complex, unconscious species-typical responses" to their environment. Their dissimilarity with humans, including the absence of a direct equivalent of the neocortex in their brain, was used as an argument against sentience. Jennifer Jacquet suggests that the belief that fish do not feel pain originated in response to a 1980s policy aimed at banning catch and release. The range of animals regarded by scientists as sentient or conscious has progressively widened, now including animals such as fish, lobsters and octopus.

Digital sentience
Digital sentience (or artificial sentience) means the sentience of artificial intelligences. The question of whether artificial intelligences can be sentient is controversial.

The AI research community does not consider sentience (that is, the "ability to feel sensations") as an important research goal, unless it can be shown that consciously "feeling" a sensation can make a machine more intelligent than just receiving input from sensors and processing it as information. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig wrote in 2021: "We are interested in programs that behave intelligently. Individual aspects of consciousness—awareness, self-awareness, attention—can be programmed and can be part of an intelligent machine. The additional project making a machine conscious in exactly the way humans are is not one that we are equipped to take on." Indeed, leading AI textbooks do not mention "sentience" at all.

Digital sentience is of considerable interest to the philosophy of mind. Functionalist philosophers consider that sentience is about "causal roles" played by mental states, which involve information processing. In this view, the physical substrate of this information processing does not need to be biological, so there is no theoretical barrier to the possibility of sentient machines. According to type physicalism however, the physical constitution is important; and depending on the types of physical systems required for sentience, it may or may not be possible for certain types of machines (such as electronic computing devices) to be sentient.

The discussion on the topic of alleged sentience of artificial intelligence has been reignited in 2022 by the claims made about Google's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) artificial intelligence system that it is "sentient" and had a "soul". LaMDA is an artificial intelligence system that creates chatbots—AI robots designed to communicate with humans—by gathering vast amounts of text from the internet and using algorithms to respond to queries in the most fluid and natural way possible. The transcripts of conversations between scientists and LaMDA reveal that the AI system excels at this, providing answers to challenging topics about the nature of emotions, generating Aesop-style fables on cue, and even describing its alleged fears.

In 2022, philosopher David Chalmers made a speech on whether large language models (LLMs) can be conscious, encouraging more research on the subject. He said that it is very plausible that the training of AI models can cause a world model to emerge in them. He personally estimated the chances that the most advanced LLMs are conscious to be less than 10% in 2022 and more than 20% in 2032, reaching around 50% if it attains "virtual perception, language, action, unified agents" exceeding the cognition level of a fish. He stated that "If you see conscious A.I. coming somewhere down the line, then that's going to raise a whole new important group of extremely snarly ethical challenges with, you know, the potential for new forms of injustice".

Nick Bostrom considers that while LaMDA is probably not sentient, being very sure of it would require understanding how consciousness works, having access to unpublished information about LaMDA's architecture, and finding how to apply the philosophical theory to the machine. He also said about LLMs that "it's not doing them justice to say they're simply regurgitating text", noting that they "exhibit glimpses of creativity, insight and understanding that are quite impressive and may show the rudiments of reasoning". He thinks that "sentience is a matter of degree".

title: Sentience


text:
Frank Schmalleger

Frank Schmalleger (born 1947) is an American criminologist, academic, and author. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

Early life and education
Schmalleger was born in 1947. He received his master's degree in 1970 and a doctorate in sociology with a specialization in criminology in 1974, from the Ohio State University. While pursuing graduate studies at the Ohio State University, Schmalleger joined the U.S. Army Reserve Officer Training Program (ROTC) and was recognized as a Distinguished Military Cadet upon graduation. He also holds a BBA degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Schmalleger is married to Ellen "Willow" Szirandi Schmalleger.

Career
Schmalleger served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and continued his service in the U.S. Army Reserves until his discharge in 1979, attaining the rank of Captain.

Schmalleger's academic career began in 1970 when he worked as a teaching associate in the Department of Sociology at the Ohio State University from 1970 until 1973.

From 1973 to 1975, Schmalleger worked as an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Welfare at Ohio Dominican College in Columbus, Ohio.

In 1975, Schmalleger joined the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP) as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice, specializing in criminal justice. He became an associate professor in 1978 and professor in 1987, after receiving tenure in 1981. Schmalleger chaired the department from 1978 to 1994.

Schmalleger also taught courses as an adjunct professor at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he contributed to the development of the university's graduate program in security administration and loss prevention, and taught courses for over a decade. Later, he also taught in the New School for Social Research's online graduate program, contributing to the establishment of early electronic classrooms for distance learning through computer telecommunications.

Schmalleger was the founding editor and executive editor of the journal Criminal Justice Studies from 1985 to 1990. He also reviewed books for The Journal of Psychiatry & Law.

Schmalleger retired from teaching in 1994. After his retirement, he founded the Justice Research Association, where he serves as director.

Schmalleger has authored dozens of books on criminology and criminal justice, including Criminal Justice Today (Pearson); Criminal Justice: A Brief Introduction (Pearson); Criminology Today (Pearson); Constitutional Law Today (Cognella); and Corrections in the 21st Century (McGraw-Hill). An early book, The Social Basis of Criminal Justice, was reviewed in 2006 in the Justice Quarterly. His introductory texts have been dubbed "The Gold Standard" among criminal justice texts by his publisher, Pearson Publishing.

Schmalleger is also an active "ham" radio operator, holding the call sign K3UND.

title: Frank Schmalleger