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> Being sentient as an experience is completely different to appearing to show sentient behaviour. You can make a model of sentience that's as complicated as yo
by deciplex 11y ago
> Being sentient as an experience is completely different to appearing to show sentient behaviour. You can make a model of sentience that's as complicated as you can invent, and you'll still have no idea whether or not a modelled sentience is having a sentient experience of the universe around it, or whether it's faking its responses mechanically.
If you make a brain that is physically identical to an extant human brain (let's say, your brain) then the only way you can claim that brain isn't sentient is if you claim that the original brain is also not sentient.
I mean, what do you think is going on in your head that doesn't count as "faking responses mechanically"?
- maxander 11y agoThat method gives an answer for one possible simulation- the experimenter's own brain. But it doesn't seem to suggest a means of determining what other simulations do or don't sustain sentience, so its far from a total solution. When people suggest that science has things pretty much figured out by now, this sort of thing is one of the (many) counterexamples that I offer.
- deciplex 11y agoIt seems to me that if you follow TheOtherHobbes logic to its conclusion, you arrive at the proposition "sentience is a supernatural phenomenon" which is an absurdity. The problem is that we have trouble agreeing on what sentience even is, so of course we can't agree how to measure it. But to suggest that sentience lies outside the natural world doesn't really answer any questions, either.