Yeah, 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

Yeah, 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?