I don't believe that LaMDA is sentient. But I'm surprised at the strength of the assertions in the article. As far as I know we don't know how sentience arises

I don't believe that LaMDA is sentient. But I'm surprised at the strength of the assertions in the article. As far as I know we don't know how sentience arises/emerges/whatever in animals (such as humans) that we consider sentient, and we don't even have a satisfactory definition of what sentience is. I don't consider "To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world" to be a useful definition: define "aware", define "yourself", define "the world", etc. Stating confidently that a software construct isn't sentient because it is "just word sequence modelling" or just "parametric functions in higher dimensions" is attacking the implementation, when we don't know how sentience is implemented in humans or corvids or cetaceans or whatever. I believe that I'm a sentient human. But if someone asks me "how're you doing?" then, depending on who they are and the circumstances, I may respond with some canned phrase like "I'm good thanks, haw are you?". I've learned from my corpus of previous interactions that they don't want to hear my deepest hopes or darkest fears. Am I just pattern matching? How much sentience do I need to complete a pull request? Am I just pattern matching symbols on the screen against a learned corpus of predicates about the subject of the PR? I suspect that if and when the neurobiological basis of human sentience is figured out, it may turn out to be far less impressive than we think - and probably it will be (largely?) an illusion caused by our biological brains and their evolution, rather than something existential. As with consciousness and free will and god, I suspect that the subjective experience of sentience in humans is a trick of the brain. But that "trick" still has to be implemented somehow in brain-meat, and for sentience I suspect its going to be pattern matching rather than some god-algorithm. So who is to say that that parametric functions and linear regression can't produce something that has equivalent subjective experiences, including the experience of itself being sentient?