With how much certainty can one define something as alive and sentient,or inanimate and non-sentient?

Question

From what I can tell, it seems that the qualifiers for something to be considered living are based on biological criteria, with the limits of observation, being entirely based on spatial order of magnitude,a subject of observation presents itself to be governing it's own motion and behavior with it's environment, and has the implied purpose of reproducing others of it's likeness. So the first part of my question regarding is something alive or dead, is how do we as what we have self declared to be living things, consider our determination of being alive or dead when observing something surrounding us to be an empirically certain conclusion?

If you want suggest well, our definition is trivial and simply for reference sake, doesn't that exclude our observations that are based on experiments we do, that are limited by our senses?

And with regard to the sentience of a subject of observation, we would consider a spider that writes messages on it's web for and equally magical talking pig to read to both be sentient, yet how do we cast the judgement that an ordinary every day spider making a web to be devoid of sentience?

The demonstrated ability in applied mathematics of the average arachnid is exceeding superior to the demonstrated ability of such a thing by the average human being, so we may as well throw out first order logic or any mathematical basis to declare something to be sentient, otherwise, everything we don't consciously decide has to be excluded as evidence of sentience, like my my motivations for deciding to write this question in the first place for example.

Let me combine both parts of the question into one example, suppose you, as a self declared living sentient being, have an indefinite life time, and are observing an inanimate lead box.

How do you know that you will not at some point in the future, be deprived of the capacity to observe this box?

And if you concede that this is impossible for you to know, then you must concede that at a time after which you cease observing the box,it is just as likely as it is to remain the way you had observed, to unfold and awaken something much like yourself, capable of observation and supposed free will.

Answer 1

You appear to be looking for definitive analytic criteria. This is not available, as spelled out in the answers to this prior closely related question: Philosophy and the question 'When is a robot considered alive and thinking?'

As the answers all note, there IS no agreed explicit criteria for either life, or sentience.

This is symptomatic of the general issue of how to do empiricism, and the ongoing effort by the analytic tradition in philosophy to fit empiricism into an analytic framework. Kant, in The Critique of Pure Reason, spelled out how our universe is contingent, and CANNOT be characterized analytically. The disentanglement of empiricism from analytics has slowly been progressing further since.

A major step was when mathematics was shown not to be analytically "necessary", when non Euclidean geometries were discovered, and then worse, when our universe was shown to be non-Euclidean. Math is now considered to be an infinite set of potential systems, and part of empiricism is to determine if one of them seems to fit an aspect of our universe. Note "seems" is key here -- we never can be certain whether a math fits our universe or not.

Popper's approach to science emphasizes this embrace of uncertainty, and that all of science is tentative. Note that in Popper's model of science, which is to do a) exploration of a subject area, b) then directed exploration to study interesting features, c) development of speculations that one then explores further, d) hypotheses that one then tests, then revise based on testing, and e) theory development and testing -- definitions are one of the LAST things we end up with, basically only when hypotheses are solid enough to begin turning into theories. Analyticity needs definitions to be nailed down, and science does not get close to there until the end of step d.

Quantifying science confidence has been an ongoing goal even of Popperian science, but one with a very unsuccessful history. Popper was challenged in his assumption that science is gradually getting better insights about the world by Kuhn, and Popper proposed a method to measure this "versimilitude". His standard, and ANY standard for versimilitude, were shown to be analytically invalid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisimilitude.

Popper's falsification was also challenged, and is best refinement is Lakatos' model of Research Programmes. https://1library.net/article/lakatos-conception-research-programs-lenoir-thesis.yr64rwjy While Lakatos' thinking is seen as a "better" (IE more verisimilitude -- LOL) match to scientific practice than either Popper or Kuhn, Lakatos then faced a challenge of characterizing when a Programme is Regressive vs. Progressive. He proposed a method of measuring this, but his methodology faced the same fate of being analytically invalid in some limiting cases as Popper's measure of Verisimilitude.

A similar fate has been encountered in scientific measures of statistical confidence. Critics of frequentist statistical methodologies point out that statistics uses a lot of "judgement" criteria that cannot be justified analytically. Bayesian statistics seeks to correct the subjective "judgement" aspect of frequentist statistics, BUT both the "prior" probabilities, and the applicability of the new data in changing degree of confidence involve judgement calls in Bayesian statistics as well.

A general principle one can draw from the history of repeated failures of analytics to characterize empiricism analytically, is that empiricism is NOT an analytically justifiable activity -- it is instead justified pragmatically. And pragmatism ultimately references subjective judgement, rather than reason, as the foundation for truth.

So can we spell out a set of standards and degrees of confidence whether something is living, or sentient? Yes, we can. BUT -- those standards themselves are not justified analytically, but as pragmatic judgements. And for both life and sentience, we don't have anything close to an expert consensus to even reference pragmatically.