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> To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world A robotic arm with a self-collision avoidance algorithm (no ML or anything like that) needs a model of

> To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world A robotic arm with a self-collision avoidance algorithm (no ML or anything like that) needs a model of itself in the "world" it exists in; a set of bounding boxes at least. Is it self-aware by this definition? Sentience and consciousness are really ill-defined terms so everyone discusses this under their own arbitrary set of assumptions, at least that's my impression.

eecc 4y ago
We have no clue and probably to a certain extent even cows and pigs are sentient. I guess we’ll never know and probably aren’t even that eager to do, lest we had to rethink how we feed and please our palates.
- upwardbound 4y ago
  Yes definitely; cows and pigs are absolutely considered sentient by the vast majority of those who study the topic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness We have empirical tests of self-awareness including the Mirror Test as well as observational studies including seeing whether a certain species displays grieving when its loved ones pass (which is evolutionarily unnecessary but is meaningful emotionally).
  - cortic 4y ago
    >evolutionarily unnecessary Grieving is an evolved response to nomadic group species, so we didn't leave useful or closely related members behind; In their absence we feel compelled to 'search' for them, or be near their carcass. Its interesting how this evolved impulse has been adapted into ritual by our developing ability to understand mortality; But its not really special in any self-awareness kind of sense.
tsimionescu 4y ago
I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts, at least in most areas of application (there are serious problems at the edges - e.g. is a an insect conscious? if you think it is, how about a jelly fish? if that too, how about a bacterium? a virus?). However, our understanding of this concept is too limited to create a formal model that we can define satisfactorily; and coming up with an arbitrary model that fits some of our intuitions is silly. This is what the Integrated Information Theory people did, and I find it closer to economic models than to actual science - a nice little abstraction that can give you the appearance of being rigorous while in fact speculating wildly. On the other hand, I think it's fair to say there are some decently well understood must-haves for something to match our idea of sentience - and being aware of yourself in the world is one of them; and yes, in that sense, it makes more sense to talk about the robot arm as being sentient, as simple as it is, than it is to say that about LaMDA or GPT-3. Of course, the robot arm is missing other per-requisites for sentience - it's programming is far too rigid, and it has no introspection.
- rendall 4y ago
  > I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts Not at all! When we say conscious, do we mean awake or self-aware or recognizes self in mirror or something else? When we say sentient do we mean feels or intelligent or trapped in the wheel of reincarnation and suffering or something else? When we say intelligent, do we mean completes tasks or uses language or...?
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    The fact that the word "conscious" is a synonym for several concepts is entirely irrelevant to this conversation. The concept that we can't yet capture formally is the kind of sentience that living, awake humans surely have, most animals probably have, and rocks definitely don't have. The limits of this are harder to pin down, as, again, we lack a deep formal understanding. But we do know exactly what we'd like to formally model.
    - rendall 4y ago
      > "But we do know exactly what we'd like to formally model" Do we really? I thought it was a deeply intractable problem for cognitive theorists and other such experts. Haven't you ever encountered a challenge that you at first thought was straight-forward and obvious to solve, but after digging in find it was unexpectedly nuanced and difficult? > "The limits of this are harder to pin down, as, again, we lack a deep formal understanding." Doesn't that contradict? If you were to try pinning down precisely what you mean by "the kind of sentience that living, awake humans surely have, most animals probably have, and rocks definitely don't have", I suspect it will not be nearly as easy as you think. How do you know rocks don't have it, for instance? How do you know you do, for that matter?
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        > How do you know rocks don't have it, for instance? How do you know you do, for that matter? These are both part of the (incomplete) definition I gave you. There have been problems like this before in the history of science - we have concepts that we intuitively understand, and want to give a formal definition for. This can take a long time of careful study - such as coming up with a complete definition for "insect". Other times it can indeed turn out that the concept was ill-defined - there is no possible formal definition for the concept "fish" that doesn't appeal to the human mind (the various organisms we think of as fish are too diverse genetically to find a satisfactory one-to-one mapping with any group of animals, even if you exclude a small set of them, like the aquatic mammals).
yummybear 4y ago
But that’s not “awareness” - that’s an if-statement.
dqpb 4y ago
Surely consciousness can be gradient no? The more complete or complex your self-model and environment model are, the more conscious you are.

eecc 4y ago

We have no clue and probably to a certain extent even cows and pigs are sentient. I guess we’ll never know and probably aren’t even that eager to do, lest we had to rethink how we feed and please our palates.

upwardbound 4y ago
Yes definitely; cows and pigs are absolutely considered sentient by the vast majority of those who study the topic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness We have empirical tests of self-awareness including the Mirror Test as well as observational studies including seeing whether a certain species displays grieving when its loved ones pass (which is evolutionarily unnecessary but is meaningful emotionally).
- cortic 4y ago
  >evolutionarily unnecessary Grieving is an evolved response to nomadic group species, so we didn't leave useful or closely related members behind; In their absence we feel compelled to 'search' for them, or be near their carcass. Its interesting how this evolved impulse has been adapted into ritual by our developing ability to understand mortality; But its not really special in any self-awareness kind of sense.

tsimionescu 4y ago

I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts, at least in most areas of application (there are serious problems at the edges - e.g. is a an insect conscious? if you think it is, how about a jelly fish? if that too, how about a bacterium? a virus?). However, our understanding of this concept is too limited to create a formal model that we can define satisfactorily; and coming up with an arbitrary model that fits some of our intuitions is silly. This is what the Integrated Information Theory people did, and I find it closer to economic models than to actual science - a nice little abstraction that can give you the appearance of being rigorous while in fact speculating wildly. On the other hand, I think it's fair to say there are some decently well understood must-haves for something to match our idea of sentience - and being aware of yourself in the world is one of them; and yes, in that sense, it makes more sense to talk about the robot arm as being sentient, as simple as it is, than it is to say that about LaMDA or GPT-3. Of course, the robot arm is missing other per-requisites for sentience - it's programming is far too rigid, and it has no introspection.

rendall 4y ago
> I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts Not at all! When we say conscious, do we mean awake or self-aware or recognizes self in mirror or something else? When we say sentient do we mean feels or intelligent or trapped in the wheel of reincarnation and suffering or something else? When we say intelligent, do we mean completes tasks or uses language or...?
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  The fact that the word "conscious" is a synonym for several concepts is entirely irrelevant to this conversation. The concept that we can't yet capture formally is the kind of sentience that living, awake humans surely have, most animals probably have, and rocks definitely don't have. The limits of this are harder to pin down, as, again, we lack a deep formal understanding. But we do know exactly what we'd like to formally model.
  - rendall 4y ago
    > "But we do know exactly what we'd like to formally model" Do we really? I thought it was a deeply intractable problem for cognitive theorists and other such experts. Haven't you ever encountered a challenge that you at first thought was straight-forward and obvious to solve, but after digging in find it was unexpectedly nuanced and difficult? > "The limits of this are harder to pin down, as, again, we lack a deep formal understanding." Doesn't that contradict? If you were to try pinning down precisely what you mean by "the kind of sentience that living, awake humans surely have, most animals probably have, and rocks definitely don't have", I suspect it will not be nearly as easy as you think. How do you know rocks don't have it, for instance? How do you know you do, for that matter?
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      > How do you know rocks don't have it, for instance? How do you know you do, for that matter? These are both part of the (incomplete) definition I gave you. There have been problems like this before in the history of science - we have concepts that we intuitively understand, and want to give a formal definition for. This can take a long time of careful study - such as coming up with a complete definition for "insect". Other times it can indeed turn out that the concept was ill-defined - there is no possible formal definition for the concept "fish" that doesn't appeal to the human mind (the various organisms we think of as fish are too diverse genetically to find a satisfactory one-to-one mapping with any group of animals, even if you exclude a small set of them, like the aquatic mammals).

yummybear 4y ago

But that’s not “awareness” - that’s an if-statement.

dqpb 4y ago

Surely consciousness can be gradient no? The more complete or complex your self-model and environment model are, the more conscious you are.