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That argument is pretty weak, technological advances may allow people to create pretty complex beings in the near future (assuming we can't already). Sapience
by pygy_ 5y ago
That argument is pretty weak, technological advances may allow people to create pretty complex beings in the near future (assuming we can't already).
Sapience was probably defined hoping to make it a human exclusive, but recent science has eroded the idea of a qualitative singularity in humans. We are merely quantitatively different.
Even single cells can be conditioned using the Pavlovian paradigm, which is a basic form of learning.
I'd expect an entity with complex and immutable information processing ability (no writable memory) to be purely sentient.
- taneq 5y agoYeah, it wasn't meant to be an abiding definition, just a right-now thumb-suck feasibility test. "If I can code you, you're probably not a person." You're bang on the money with sapience being originally intended to be a merit badge for being human. I'm guessing your last line was just riffing on functional purity but if not, my definition of sentience (which is a superset of consciousness) includes perception of current and past self-states which means (by my definitions, at least) an immutable construct isn't sentient by itself. I guess if you always pass in a self-state-vector then the system of (construct, self-state) could be conscious?