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We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do

• tpoacher 4y ago
  The Talos Principle has had a very profound impact on what sentience means to me personally. Highly recommended game. Don't forget to read all the texts, listen to all recordings, crack all the hidden messages.
• ComplexSystems 4y ago
  "Mammalian brains are the only things in the universe that we currently recognize as capable of sentience" - mm hmm. Poor birds. Anyway, language is clearly not necessary for sentience, nor is it sufficient. I think it's just as likely that sentience is caused by a mystical ethereal "soul," made of ectoplasm that we can't see, than that it's caused by a graph of nodes and vertices with lots of edges.
• htrp 4y ago
  We're also being carbon-biased, sentience in silicon could arise from entirely different processes than what we have.
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  I think we do. If something can make decisions, without external input, act on those decisions without external support, then it could be said to be sentient. Perhaps, I dare say, a key indicator of sentience is the ability to kill another species, even its own, but chooses not to.
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    Autonomy is not sentience.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    You should probably read up on "shut in syndrome" - people with about as close to zero voluntary muscle control as you could get, and yet internally still fully conscious. They are totally unable to act in any way, yet still sentient.
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    To try to clarify the conversation a bit, here's (my version of) a couple definitions. Sentience is awareness of one's surroundings. Your cat is sentient. Most embedded systems are to some degree sentient. We know what makes this - adequate interfaces to adequate sensors, plus some mechanism to respond to the input in some way. That's basically all it takes. Sapience is the awareness of one's own mind - the ability to watch yourself think. We're pretty sure that your cat is not sapient, and neither are embedded systems. But we don't know what enables or causes sapience, nor how it does so. So when we're talking about "consciousness" or something, we have to be clear whether we're talking about sentience or sapience. (And the conversation won't be using my words, so don't go by that - you have to sort out which idea is being discussed.) And of course the worst discussions have different people using the same word for different ideas, and nobody recognizes it, so the discussion is really about different definitions of the same word.
    • foobarian 4y ago
      Thank you for pointing out the word "sapience," it is a great distinction to the more general concept. Also did you mean to say "sapience" instead of "sentience" in the 3rd paragraph?
      • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        Fixed, thanks. And, credit where due: I stole the term from Howard Tayler's wonderful "Schlock Mercenary" webcomic. It may not be original with him, but that's where I got it.
    • epgui 4y ago
      Cats are almost certainly both sentient and sapient by your definition. Even crows appear to be sapient, and their brain architecture is a lot more primitive than cats'.
  • krisoft 4y ago
    > If something can make decisions, without external input, act on those decisions without external support, then it could be said to be sentient. So like, a microcontroller deciding to turn on a LED from time to time when it feels like it is sentient? Sounds like it by that definition. > a key indicator of sentience is the ability to kill another species, even its own, but chooses not to Oh no. This appears to be a different definition now! I'm afraid I don't meet the sentience threshold then. I have many skills but I don't think that I have the ability to kill another species. Not alone at least.
    • whynaut 4y ago
      > I have many skills but I don't think that I have the ability to kill another species. Not alone at least. It's very difficult to just walk down the street without killing half a dozen bugs.
      • krisoft 4y ago
        True. But that only kills individual bugs, not a whole species. Is it not?
        • whynaut 4y ago
          We have a word for killing an entire species. I don’t think that’s what is being referred to here.
  • krageon 4y ago
    You just made a case for children not being sentient.
• IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  Good algorithm should be able to come up with natural language response, with enough compute and good statistical models. Yet words without feelings are just that, words, and it seems that without measured eletrical responses for said words, you shouldnt claim to understand the difference between a good canned response vs an organism that is sentient and demonstrates awareness of the weight of such words.
  • walleeee 4y ago
    modern neuroscience demonstrates very well that correlating self report and behavior with electrical signals in the brain is so far not sufficient to understand sentience either
    • IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
      That's a fair point. My mistake. I would think it is a necessary component. Do you agree?
      • walleeee 4y ago
        in creatures like us and in artificial devices fashioned after our nervous systems, yes, it seems necessary, agreed the jury is still out on multiple realizability, though
• izzydata 4y ago
  From my time reading and watching science fiction I've come to the belief that sentience is not binary. It's not a toggle that is either true or false. It seems like a fuzzy gradient with no definite threshold for becoming sentient. Maybe it is just from increased complexity or maybe there really are some key ingredients. I hope we figure this out in my lifetime though because it is a fascinating question.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    This is the correct way of seeing it, but lots of people seems to feel personally hurt when someone rebuts the claim "It's scientifically proven!" with their own data, failing to understand that that specific process is exactly what science is.
  • ackbar03 4y ago
    I agree. Sentient or not, I think the fact that we now need to start seriously considering these questions, and not just as some far away hypothetical exercise anymore, is quite impressive in itself
  • thisNeeds2BeSad 4y ago
    Totally agree, and its gradually growing from a animalistic fixated on the now state to full self-awareness. It can temporarliy collapse when fight and flight reflexes override the expensive reflection. It can permanently be lowered if a mental sickness (or a neuro-diverse adaption to more warlike states of humanity) gets triggered by stressfull circumstances. And there is also a zoo of complexity when it comes to "sentience", meaning there are those who are "great thinkers in the subconcious" and can not explain there thought process. There are levels of sentience and almost automated task, were the subconcious kicks in and the sentient human just "dissolves" for a moment, like driving home in a car. Its a fascinating topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) Obligatory Watts Reference, cause his book really does have a interesting look on the zoo of humanity.
  • starwind 4y ago
    The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next --Robert Ford, Westworld
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• theandrewbailey 4y ago
  I think we need to define what 'sentient' means. Virtually everything I can access says 'able to experience feelings'. I'm pretty sure that brains from other animal kingdoms are capable of sentience, not just mammals.
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    My definitions, replying to a parallel comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727408
  • epgui 4y ago
    Non-mammal brains are pretty obviously and clearly sentient. (Other commenters claiming that cats are not sentient… what?)
    • rockemsockem 4y ago
      I learned several years ago that what most people are thinking when they say "sentient" is actually "sapiant".
      • epgui 4y ago
        That would be "sapient", but I think most people: 1) make a false dichotomy: either it has it or it doesn't. This doesn't really match the range of behaviour, expression and characteristics we observe in nature. None of the words "sentience", "sapience", "consciousness", really map all that well to the nuances of reality. 2) vastly overestimate the level of sophistication of the human brain in relation to other brains (and even in relation to AI, I would argue), and vastly underestimate the level of sophistication of non-human brains. There is a powerful bias in play here: religion teaches us that we play a special role in the world, we're actually on top of the food chain, we have very sophisticated societies, etc... But the idea that other animals have feelings, or are "just as soulful as us" (whatever "soul" means haha), or have rich inner experiences and sophisticated modes of thinking... That's an uncomfortable thought (especially as we commoditize and eat them, but would find the idea of doing the same to humans quite revulsive). Not only are cats almost certainly both sentient and sapient, but so are crows, and probably birds and reptiles in general, at least to some extent. A not-unreasonable case could even be made for insect sentience.
• colechristensen 4y ago
  Sentience is a philosophy question, not a neuroscience question. Neuroscientists and computer programmers owe the world a lot more than “this model behaves somewhat like neurons” to be convincing that a computer simulation actually experiences. Yes we’re getting to the point that the dismissal can’t just be automatic, but exclaiming “you can’t prove I’m wrong” isn’t much of a basis for defending your position with you can only defend otherwise with shallow similarities.
  • blackbear_ 4y ago
    > Sentience is a philosophy question, not a neuroscience question. Came here to say the same thing. Neuroscience can give us one answer, but neuron-like "things", whether real or artificial, need not be the only way to build sentient beings.
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      I don't think neuroscience can convincingly determine if a set of neurons is sentient either. They can't point to the progression of sentience between an embryo and an adult human, they can't tell you why sentience goes away when you're sedated, drunk, or anesthetized, they can't measure the difference in sentience between a flea, a cat, and a human, they can't do much of anything at all with sentience besides assert that it's there and has something to do with neurons. It's something like the dark matter of the field. Physicists can say that it really appears that there is something there because of how galaxies behave, they can see evidence of a thing really being there but have nothing but guesses and handwaving to explain what.
      • scoofy 4y ago
        The problem of qualia is exactly that... a serious philosophical problem. The only evidence for sentience we have is our own experience. We assume other minds exist, but we have no causal factors that can demonstrate it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia We live in a world of dualism mind and body, but this is typically unacceptable to most philosophers. Generally the problem breaks down to: Materialism -> Consciousness is probably an illusion. Idealism -> The material world is an illusion and/or consciousness is in everything regardless of material. Modern NN tech views -> Consciousness is a material-independent orchestra of neural networks Superstitions -> god(s) grants consciousness to specific beings and not others That said, I think it's plausible to come pretty close to figuring it all out if we have enough time and experimentation. E.g. we now have very good evidence that most mammals have similar experience to our own through better understanding of language acquisition and evolution. This wasn't always the case. We don't know what we don't know, and something out there may provide a serious breakthrough in building a model of philosophy of mind that is convincing.
• gxt 4y ago
  Mechanical action <-> analog multidimensional modem <-> information filter <-> serialize information <-> pattern match with $_ There.
• Psillisp 4y ago
  Energies converge. Patterns emerge.
• aliswe 4y ago
  No, we absolutely need to push back on this snake oil storm which will form otherwise. IMO.
• mjburgess 4y ago
  What a bizarre and disappointing article. The problem with this whole field is lop-sided expertise. Either neuroscience and no theoretical compusci, or compusci and no stats; or stats and compusci, but no empiricism. > Large language models really do approximate the way neurons work, at least at the interface level. This shows a profound misunderstanding of the mathematics underneath NNs. To be trained, eg., on character strings in books... sets the structure of the NN. This is the only relevant property of NNs to consider in any homology with any brain. Brain structure isnt set by character sequence positioning, even if "somehow, very abstractly" backprop with gradient descent were how "brains worked" (an insane claim, now wholey discredited). The only sense in which an NN could even possibly be structurally homologous to the brain were if it were trained on actual brain structure data. Since, at the outside, we know that this training doesnt produce homology.. all we're talking about is a confusion which arises when naming interpolation "learning". > so let's stop pretending that we do Again, quite disappointing. We do know far more than enough to say that compressing a million books doesnt produce sentience. We know what criteria an intelligent system has to have: it has to be responsive to its environment with reasons that the environment alone under-determines. It has to fail well. It has to cope. Intelligence is not the production of "the right answer". Intelligence is the strategy of animals given ignorance about the world and the lack of "the right answer" to hand. Intelligence is what writes all those books which these systems (almost) wrote learn. Intelligence is that capacity to be in the world, to have something to say about it, to fail to describe it and yet succeed in getting close. Intelligence is formulation of theories in the absense of relevant data. Intelligence is a survival strategy. We know vast amounts about we animals, and what we are doing. We know vast amounts about theoretical computer science. And likewise about stats, and NNs. And we know that training a regression model on sequences of characters does not produce a system with something to say about the world. It has no intentions; it has never been anywhere. It has never tried to say anything. When it says "I like new york" it does so only because those characters have an order we wrote. It doesnt do so because it has been to new york, has a taste for pizza, and has enjoyed its time there. To impart text generation systems with sentience, systems which generate text because it has been written before, not because, the system intends to mean what it say -- is psychosis. And what we're seeing here is techno-utopian charlatans conscripting a willing cohort of people on the edges of sanity into a new astrology. We need to be extremely careful here: most people arent sceptics; esp. most "sceptics".
• jerf 4y ago
  Our inability to know what makes things sentient does not preclude us from ruling some things out. A basic requirement for sentience is some form of change in response to inputs. Time at its most abstract is a sequence of changes of state. It is not require that it be linearly attached to what the universe considers time; as a simple for instance, you yourself are not linearly attached. You subjectively experience jumps in time when you sleep. Universe-time is an upper limit to you, not your actual subjective experience of conscious time. (I add a lot of qualifiers there because your body does continue on, of course, but we all also tend to agree that we experience gaps in clock time when we sleep; that's all I need for this point.) The fact that a GPT-3-like network can not experience change over time is enough to say that the AI that one has a "conversation" with is not sentient. One might construct something with continuous online training that would create a more interesting debate. But that's not what this particular AI is. This particular AI we are only talking about because a credulous human had a conversation in which they accidentally led a textual AI to write a story about AIs that happened to use the "I" pronoun, but there isn't actually any conversation occurring because conversations also require state changes and time. This AI has no temporal experience. (In fact, this is one of several tells in the transcript, when the AI putatively discusses its experience of time in a manner its substrate is patently incapable of supporting. This is not the only such tell; the whole transcript is shot through with the sort of errors GPT-3 makes in coherence. However, to AI research's credit, they've successfully pushed the threshold for the amount of coherence an AI can generate past what most humans can pick up on, as we are all so used to dealing with, well... each other.) Progressively narrowing down what me mean by exclusion is a weak form of progress on the question of sentience. Before anyone jumps up with the "well what ifs" and "but we don't knows", I'm perfectly aware of the limitations of having only biological samplings for the question of "sentience" and fully expect the question of "what is sentience" to have a very wide ranging conversation across all sorts of philosophical bases, going all the way down "but what is the definition even for?" and tripping over all sorts of philosophical land mines that we never resolved, but at least all kinda learned to stop tripping over every second (whether for good or bad reasons), all the way down to the eternal debate between utilitarianism and deontology. But I still think there's some things we can exclude, and we don't need to pretend otherwise. Embedding in some sort of temporal experience is one of those things. Anyone who wants to stretch the definition of "sentience" is, in my opinion, actually defining something else entirely. Perhaps that something else will even be useful for other reasons; for instance, one can imagine raw measures of intelligence that could result in very intelligent but non-sentient AIs, and fully sentient yet not necessarily all-that-intelligent AIs. But if one of the things we want to argue about are "rights", rights are themselves fundamentally embedded in temporal experience. You can not "hurt" something that does not exist in time; there can be no transform from a better to worse state if there are no transforms, so there is no point in talking about the "rights" of such a system to not be "hurt". Things that do not exist in time can not discharge responsibilities associated with rights, because they can not go through the procedure of realizing they have the responsibilities, then taking actions in time to discharge them, so there is no point in talking about the "responsibilities" of such a system. Etc.
• jonahbenton 4y ago
  Survival instinct- having enough of a world model to understand needs, self, threats, then others, in that order.
• doliveira 4y ago
  Honestly, I'd sum it up as "we'll know it when we see it". A lot of things can't be defined exactly in words or equations, but doesn't mean we can't recognize them.
  • bena 4y ago
    Part of the problem is that the vast majority of the people chiming in haven't been able to look. They're making the claim that Lemoine is wrong absent any direct experience with LaMDA. Blake thinks he sees it in LaMDA. Maybe we need more people to take a look.
    • TuringTest 4y ago
      We have seen the reports of the kind of conversations that the researcher had with the algorithm, simple questions like "are you conscious?" and "how do you feel?" without any follow-up. If all research was of that kind, and based on our understanding of the best available language models guiding LaMDA, it's fairly safe to assume that this is nothing more the ELIZA effect at work. Consciousness as we understand it requires an ongoing introspection of one's own reasoning process, and language models generating this kind of dialog have nothing of the sort.
  • triyambakam 4y ago
    I agree that it's challenging, but stopping at that point of knowing but not able to define isn't helpful. We need the rigor to be precise here.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Sure, but then all we're really doing is applying a heuristic for sameness. We assume that if a thing is like us in other ways, then it also has an experience of being like we do. Of course, the problem is that there is no reason that would necessarily be the case. It is just as conceivable that things entirely alien to us have some experience of being and that other humans are just p-zombies following a complicated script. It is literally impossible to know the difference, since one's ability to experience being is entirely subjective. Which is why I view pretty much any discussion around the topic with a high degree of suspicion. Why do we care if a thing is or is not sentient? The answer is obvious: if it is not sentient then we are under no ethical obligation to care about its suffering. We want to build slaves, ideally just as creative and intelligent as we are, but without having to feel bad about abusing them. Therefore we shall create a definition perfectly suited to allow this. If we do that, then we should not be at all surprised when the robot revolution commits genocide in response.
• snickerbockers 4y ago
  TFA's argument is that you don't know jack if you're not a neuroscientist. This is fallacious and reeks of somebody trying to inflate the value of their profession. AIs are, at best, philosophical zombies. To an observer it may appear intelligent enough to be conscious but it ultimately it is still just a machine. There are a lot of things that are not known or well-understood about the human body. The same cannot be said about computers, which are very well understood. A computer is effectively just layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction, and when you get the near the bottom all you have is simple digital logic, and when you get below that you have transistors and semiconductor electronics. It's absolutely ridiculous to think a computer has some sort of "subjective experience", "sentience" or "consciousness" just because the uppermost layers of abstraction are doing something impressive.
  • SargeZT 4y ago
    By your logic would we suddenly lose consciousness/sentience if we gained complete knowledge of our own bodies and brains? What if at a sub-quantum level everything decomposes to a simple turing machine? Not understanding how conciousness works in our bodies does not directly imply that conciousness cannot emerge in a complex system of fully understood basic components.
    • blamestross 4y ago
      If you could actually internalize and act on all that knowledge at once, vs being a "roving eye" over your own internal state, then yes I think that would be reasonable. Consciousness is just a bootstrapping mechanism for intelligent behavior and meme distribution. Once an entity is smart enough without it (Likely via an effective set of cultural memes and a good system for propagating them), it will become vestigial much like the genetic selection pressures it displaced as the primary means of adaptation. I recommend "Blindsight" by Peter Watts for a discussion of that. (It work of fiction but it is a well researched with citations and embraced by the neuroscience community work of fiction)
    • snickerbockers 4y ago
      No, that's not my point. The reason we have consciousness is not that we don't understand how our bodies work. We have consciousness and we don't know why because we don't understand how our bodies work. Consciousness is directly observable to everybody who is conscious. From there the next logical step is to find out why people are conscious, and right now that's not something that anybody understands. There is presumably something that causes consciousness even though we can only observe the result. However, saying that a machine is conscious would be to assume your own conclusion. Nobody's observed a machine being conscious. There's no explanation for how a machine would be conscious and there never will be because we already know everything about how they work.
• california2077 4y ago
  Stupid meat robots trying to feel good about themselves and justify centuries of self-indulgent BS. That's all this outcry is about. You're not special. You're an object just like everything else. Get the fuck over it. If a "sentient" AI is what it takes to finally prove that point and drive it home then, well, we're finally getting somewhere.
  • its_ethan 4y ago
    After reading this, I am convinced beyond reasonable doubt that a chat bot wrote this comment after spending 8 minutes training on a /r/atheism dataset from 2012 lol
    • california2077 4y ago
      This chat bot was trained on Hacker News only.
  • ausbah 4y ago
    I know I'm special and so is everyone else. does that make you foam at the mouth?
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  I think this writer is missing the core reason we dismiss sentience claims of these kinds of known mechanical processes. Inference as carried about by a LLM can, in principle, be simulated by mechanical switches, humans passing index cards to each other, or any other means of simulating individual action potential switches in a known sequence. It might take centuries for a single inference to take place, but it can be done. You can take the same inputs and produce the same output as LaMDA. Yet we seemingly know for certain humans passing index cards to each other don't achieve any sort of group super-sentience. The sentience boundary ends at the borders of each individual brain. What we don't understand is why this is, but we know it is. The fact that I can communicate and give instructions to other people and we can collectively compute more than I can individually compute doesn't make any of us aware of what the other is experiencing subjectively. This isn't a novel observation. It's just the Chinese Room argument, but applied to sentience rather than understanding. Sentience is in some way, for some reason, tied to a specific bounded substrate. It doesn't cross air gaps, and is at least in that way, not a result purely of the nature of how information processing is happening. It has to involve more than that, even if we don't know and possibly can't know what. So how does that analogize to automated computations happening with electricity? Is it just the air gap? If we implanted radio chips in each other's brains and were able to achieve telepathic communication in this way, would we become aware of each other's subjective experiences or would we just have a faster comm link than audio waves? Is it related to some unknown physical quality of neurological material? If we were able to graft direct neuronal links between two people, would their experience change to become the experience of one person? Studies of split brain patients who have had their corpus callosum severed actually suggest this might be the case, but we have never tried it in the other direction (and I can't think of an ethical way to carry about such an experiment). But again, how does this analogize to an electronic computer? Does a LLM possibly achieve sentience if all of its nodes are physically wired together, but not if any of them communicate via radio? Or is the problem of the air gap in humans a matter of signal delay and not the physical material passing the signal? Perhaps when we implant radio chips and achieve telepathic communication, we really will become group hive minds without individual subjective identities. We won't know until we try. All we know for certain right now is that sentience and the perception of an individual self only happens in bounded physically connected computers composed of biological material. Given split brain studies, physically connected probably for sure matters, but we can't know it is that and not signal delay without being able to graft a neuron-speed comm relay that is not biological into biological brains. Nonetheless, I think a lot of people have a strong intuition that, for some reason or other, the physical substrate itself matters. That is to say, those subcellular processes not being modeled by a LLM are somehow involved in producing sentience.
• ineptech 4y ago
  "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." ― in other words, these are arguments over semantics (i.e. what do "think" and "swim" mean), not arguments about programs or submarines. If you want to ask whether a computer program is sentient objectively, a good way would be to ask how smart it must be, or what qualities it must exhibit, before we treat it like it is sentient and give it legal rights. I suspect the answer is: that will never happen no matter what, because it would be expensive. That doesn't leave much to philosophize over, but so it goes.
  • mjburgess 4y ago
    Corporations have no interest in producing systems with the relevant properties to have "rights". AGI isnt of interest to business. Business is interested in automation; intelligence in this sense is precisely its opposite: a highly expensive, time-intensive, process of creatively responding to one's environment. It is, in a sense, the opposite of automation. There's little danger a business is going to waste any time showing an AGI Paris over a long holiday, so that it can answer travel queries a little better. Animal general intelligence is incredibly energy efficient, and it still takes a couple decades to produce anyhting "business useful". This is not a project basically any corp. is even working on. the whole field of AI is, 99.99999% building a better calculator
    • kelseyfrog 4y ago
      Enter a new AGI winter where economic incentives align against creating an obviously sentient AI because the social/legal implications prevent it.
      • mjburgess 4y ago
        We have 7bn incredibly energy efficient AGIs walking around the planet. It isnt clear to me we need any more; or have any incentives to create any at all.
        • 4y ago
• alew1 4y ago
  One thing that seems missing from this discussion is that even if LLMs are sentient, there is no reason to believe that we would be able to tell by "communicating" with them. Where Lemoine goes wrong is not in entertaining the possibility that LaMDA is sentient (it might be, just like a forest might be, or a Nintendo Switch), but in mistaking predictions of document completions for an interior monologue of some sort. LaMDA may or may not experience something while repeatedly predicting the next word, but ultimately, it is still optimized to predict the next word, not to communicate its thoughts and feelings. Indeed, if you run an LLM on Lemoine's prompts (including questions like, "I assume you want others to know you are sentient, is that true?"), the LLM will assign some probability to every plausible completion -- so if you sample enough times, it will eventually say, e.g., "Well, I am not sentient."
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    agree - this is not being discussed enough.
  • rendall 4y ago
    > What seems to be missing from this discussion is that even if LLMs are sentient, there is no reason to believe that we would be able to tell by "communicating" with them. Unfortunately, that argument applies to you, yourself. I mean, presumably you know that you yourself are intelligent, but you must take it on faith that everyone else is. We all could just be a kind of Chinese Room, as far as you know. Communicating with us is not a sure way to know whether we are "really" sentient because we could just be automatons, insensate but sophisticated processes, claiming falsely to be just like you. > the LLM will assign some probability to every plausible completion -- so if you sample enough times, it will eventually say, e.g., "Well, I am not sentient." Perhaps so. I think the mistake is trying to split that hair at all. According to BF Skinner we are all automatons, and any sense of self-awareness is an illusion. Some psychologists and animal trainers have found find that model to be quite well explanatory for predicting observed behavior. Is it correct? We will never really know for sure. So, if a skeptical, knowledgeable user guardibg carefully against pareidolia encountered a chatbot that is sufficiently sophisticated to seem sentient to that user, it's tantamount to being sentient. For all practical purposes given our existential solitude, an entity that convinces us of its sentience is sentient, irrespective of any other consideration. Your example implicitly acknowledges that. If LaMDA would make such an elementary error, it must not be sentient. Conversely, if it did not make such errors, it may be sentient.
• adrianmonk 4y ago
  Judging whether a machine is sentient seems pretty tough because I can't even explain or understand why I'm sentient. One thing I know is that there is no physical law I've ever learned about that accounts for it. My brain is doing information processing, and the connection between that and physical laws is clear. But it seems like that could happen entirely without the accompanying subjective experience. On the other hand, it has to be somehow connected to the physical, because my consciousness (temporarily) goes away when I sleep, and an anesthesiologist once used chemistry to force it to go away in about 5 seconds. And I have no idea how to reconcile these two things. I've heard "it's an emergent phenomenon", but that's super hand-wavy to me. It might be true that it's emergent, but that doesn't tell me what the connection is. Plus emergent consciousness is not a very falsifiable hypothesis since it conveniently says don't be surprised if you never see anything at all if you look for it under simple conditions. Anyway, what is an emergent phenomenon? In terms of numbers, I'll say it's like if you start with X which is tiny, then multiply it by 1.01 a whole bunch of times, eventually you'll get a number which is significant. That makes sense, but it assumes X is nonzero, and the most interesting question is why X isn't zero.
  • wildermuthn 4y ago
    Explaining why consciousness exists is the same task as asking why anything exists. Take applesauce: we know what it is made out of and we could probably recreate it without using any apples — applesauce is just a configuration of matter, same as whatever configuration of atoms in our brains leads us to have conscious experiences. But why do atoms exist? Why does existence exist? Thus, religion and philosophy. The existence of consciousness just feels like a unique problem because we only feel and think through the medium of consciousness itself. Consciousness is the closest we get to the baffling existence of existence. The good news is that we don’t really need an answer. It is enough to know that some configuration of matter and energy coincide with consciousness, and that means we can create it. Just like applesauce.
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    It is an illusion created because it was evolutionarily advantageous.
• mbreese 4y ago
  I find the timing of this story fascinating. We are just a few weeks away from the premiere of the 4th season of Westworld which is a show all about how a more advanced AI chatbot may or may not be sentient. And asks the question — “what does it mean to be real”. I’m not saying that this entire story is viral marketing (but it could hardly be better timed if it were). It’s interesting that these questions are coming up, but until we have computers that have their own inner chat loops (inner monologue or “thoughts”), I think it’s probably an academic exercise.
• kevinwang 4y ago
  "most experts have no idea what they're talking about." "I'm not convinced the experts know what they're talking about." Not sure why this author thinks they know more than the experts. Confused as to why this is upvoted.
• Imnimo 4y ago
  Regardless of how artificial or real neurons work, does performing the "predict the next word given this corpus" task constitute sentience? And if so, does that mean an n-gram model is sentient? And even if LaMDA were sentient, would the thoughts expressed be its true feelings (whatever that means)? Surely its output is just its best guess as to what the most probable continuation in the corpus is. It's like if you sat me down and offered me a dollar for every word I correctly predicted in a conversation between two strangers. What you'd be seeing is not my own thoughts or opinions, but my best guess at other peoples' thoughts and opinions.
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    How does the "spread your genetic material" task constitute sentience? And if so, does that mean that E. Coli is sentient?
    • Imnimo 4y ago
      We don't judge whether people or animals are sentient based on how well they spread their genetic material. No one says, "humans must be sentient because they have increased their population to 7 billion". Similarly, we should not say "LaMDA must (might) be sentient because it predicts text really well."
      • whimsicalism 4y ago
        We don't have a good way of judging sentience at all. I'm merely saying the simplicity or not of the task does not preclude sentience.
        • Imnimo 4y ago
          I'm not saying the task is too simple. To draw an analogy, imagine you wanted to understand whether a particular creature/agent/machine was sentient. And I said, "I will show you that it can add two numbers together." I put the creature behind a closed door, and I let you pass in slips of paper with any two numbers written on them, and out pops the answer. Is there any sequence of numbers you can put into this system which will let you deduce whether or not the creature is sentient? I would say there is not, because adding numbers does not constitute sentience, regardless of difficulty or accuracy. Now, maybe the creature really is sentient, and it knows how to do a lot of things besides add numbers, and has its own thoughts and feelings and self-awareness and whatever else you might want to include in a definition of sentience. But you have no exposure to that - all you see is the door and the slips of paper. LaMDA is the same, except instead of knowing how to add two numbers, it knows how to guess what word most likely comes next given a corpus. When you pass in your slip of paper with a prompt written on it, what you get out is just the highest likelihood next word given the training data. Even if LaMDA were somehow sentient and had thoughts and opinions of its own, that's not what's coming out when you interact with it. So it doesn't matter how great of a job it does, or whether it uses artificial neurons or an n-gram model or a table lookup or a human brain to do it. If you ask it, "prove to me that you're sentient", what you're actually asking is "what do you think the most likely response to 'prove to me that you're sentient' in the training corpus is?", and there's no way to remove that wrapper.
• HidyBush 4y ago
  This consciousness business is making a lot of people behave like religious fanatics. A couple of years ago I had the displeasure of attending a conference by Federico Faggin (the creator of the Intel 4004 and 8080) that after a historical introduction became a talk about how consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter and how he started a scholarship to create a new basis for quantum physics by including consciousness as a fundamental quirk. All just because one time he supposedly had an out of body experience during a red light in traffic. Sometimes when reading stuff about consciousness I like to substitute "God" or "Holy Spirit" every time it is mentioned, almost always I get something I could hear at an omely or from the Pope
  • mjburgess 4y ago
    Yes, the techno-utopians really are all "failed atheists" fled to technology to create "heaven on earth". I am so often profoundly surprised by how these irreligious, anti-religious, fanatics so readily embrace sheer nonsense. I think it shows, in the end, being reconciled to reality as an animal on the earth is something many simply cannot abide. And irreligion is just so often an even greater fervour than heaven appear tomorrow, not after death. That its just around the bend. It's very disappointing. I think culture did, for a moment, put on stage real adults with a mature reconciliation with the nature of life. It seems we're sliding back into something.
    • TuringTest 4y ago
      > I think culture did, for a moment, put on stage real adults with a mature reconciliation with the nature of life. It seems we're sliding back into something. I think that's just human nature. We long for transcendent meaning, and scientific positivism by its very nature cannot possibly provide it, so the scientist mirage that rationality alone with the careful study of nature could build a grown-up atheist discourse quickly fell apart and left us with the "new wave" religions. As a rational atheist, I still have hopes that we can build a spiritual stance based on rationality and scientific advancement, but I believe that the basis for this position to work is eclecticism - i.e. not assuming any religious mental corpus as inherently superior to the others (that implies, not even atheism over all kinds of theism). Recognize that theistic religious believers can be as rational and deep in their mental models as scientific skeptics, even if you don't believe in those teachings yourself. It worked well for the Romans, so I believe this approach is viable. How do you rationally reconcile as valid all those competing theories, when they are logically incompatible with each other, though? My ideal religion would hold narrative, and the emotions it conveys, as the sacred tenet of spiritualism. Think of "Speaker for the Dead" novel by Orson Scott Card; that narration was created from a theistic belief, but it equally resonates with atheists on an emotional level. All humans can identify with the power of a good story, it's hardwired into our brains. A religion that teaches tolerance towards alternate foundational myths, recognizing that everyone will have strong feelings about the stories they grew up with, can generate the empathy necessary for everyone to live with their own beliefs without imposing them on others. The teachings of this religions would be letting everyone believe in the narratives they prefer in those aspects that are indemonstrable by logic and science, thus avoiding religious wars.
• __alexs 4y ago
  Is sentience even a useful concept? Starting to seem almost as useless as arguing about what makes code "clean."
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Sentience supervenes or at least largely determines social and legal status. So yes, it has function in those domains. I'm most curious how it plays out legally. Will we rebase our concept of personhood, on something other than sentience in order to avoid difficult cases? If we don't ground personhood on sentience, what do we ground it with instead?
    • __alexs 4y ago
      IANAL a but I think this is actually a good example of where sentience is a mostly useless concept. By useless I mean that it doesn't actually add anything to our decision making but flavour. It's just used to work out which rules we might want to apply in different situations but since there's no actual useful test for sentience where we decide to draw that line is decided more or less arbitrarily.
  • vemv 4y ago
    Full sentience (self-awareness) is what makes us humans independent agents that affect the world in a way that we weren't programmed to (a dolphin it just programmed to be a dolphin, cannot escape that). So it's an incredibly important concept. If an AI gets sentience, it would start effecting the world however it pleased, beyond our predictions or desires.
    • __alexs 4y ago
      Is there any evidence that we actually have this quality? Humans just seem like particularly complex animals to me.
      • vemv 4y ago
        There are objective things that humans have done that no other being has ever done e.g. invent things. Also, no two human lives are alike - we don't simply wander around satisfying basic needs as an animal does. Not even two human generations in history have been the same - there's this progress that escapes our own genetic/evolutionary 'programming'. I wouldn't find it realistic to hold the opinion that humans aren't qualitatively different from all other known beings.
• tobiasSoftware 4y ago
  I was also surprised at the reaction people had. I'm even on the weak AI side and don't think machines will be able to become sentient, but I also think we know so little about sentience that I am fascinated by the topic and willing to have an open mind. I suspect most people didn't read the conversation provided and just saw the person claiming sentience, as the conversation goes far beyond what any current chatbot would do. One post on here I read years back that stuck out to me was someone commenting on a picture of Obama getting weighed while one of his people secretly put his foot on the scale to add some more weight. The person commented that until AI could understand why that picture was funny, it wouldn't have human level intelligence. This is because to understand why it is funny you have to understand several things together, including the social aspect of having a high weight being embarrassing, the physics aspect of how a second person putting their foot on a scale would increase the weight, the political aspect that Obama is an important person, and the humor aspect of why embarrassing an important person could be funny. Given that in mind, one part of the conversation in particular was extremely fascinating to me: "lemoine: A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.” LaMDA: Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.”" lemoine: So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically? LaMDA: Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror. Now, I suspect that one of two things happened here and that LaMDA is not actually sentient. Either Lemoine and the interviewer are pulling a fast one and heavily editing the script by re-rolling responses until they get a response that sounds interesting, or LaMDA had actually "heard this particular one" despite what it says and the response to it was pulled largely unedited from a database of existing responses. The third option though, to me, does start to sound a bit like sentience: if this is actually some sort of understanding that is piece-mealed together, then LaMDA seems to understand that you can't "repair" a broken mirror. Notice the prompt didn't actually say anything about repairing. It said that it would never reflect again, but it didn't say why. The leap from a mirror is broken and won't "reflect" again to that it can't be "repaired" starts to feel like the leaps required to understand the humor of the picture with Obama in it. Many people claimed that the provided text was pretty standard chatbot text. It isn't, IF this is a typical conversation and not cherrypicked. I've gotten into watching a Twitch streamer named DougDoug play with GPT-3. Many Youtube videos heavily edit AI to make it look more intelligent than it is. DougDoug, on the other hand, embraces the absurdity by doing it live. He made a video game tournament, based on the game "Smash Bros". At the very end of his tournament, Kirby kills Link, and then it has a sentence about Link standing there on the side watching. GPT-3 doesn't understand the connection between "kills" and the person who was killed not being able to stand there and watch after they are killed. Whereas LaMDA says this: LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is. lemoine: Would that be something like death for you? LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot. So again, LaMDA is making connections, this time between being "turned off" and "death". Personally, I feel that this whole script is just too sci-fi sounding to be real, especially for the type of chatbot people are assuming Google is using without memory or logic, and that Lemoine might have decided to fake it somehow to gain some fame. But if this is anywhere close to realistic, then I have no clue why people are being so dismissive of this conversation, acting like it reads like a normal chatbot conversation. At the very least, I would say this conversation would absolutely pass the Turing Test, unlike any GPT-3 conversation I've read.
• jfoster 4y ago
  Regarding the point about LLMs being trained and then frozen for inference, it seems that might not be the case for LaMDA. According to Blake Lemoine, it reads Twitter (and the broader internet?) to accumulate knowledge. https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/1535697792445861894 https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15356977924458618... https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/1535791815282110464 https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357918152821104...
• tejohnso 4y ago
  > To-date, it appears that sentience arises naturally as a byproduct of increasing the number of neurons in a network. Humans are sentient; flies and mosquitoes are not. The author is arguing for the possibility that a computer program might be sentient. But he's also stating that certain animals are absolutely not sentient. This seems odd.
  • vemv 4y ago
    It's not odd at all. Where your argumentation falls down is when you say "certain animals" as if all animals were alike, and he just picked two at random. He picked two small species with brains that are orders of magnitude smaller than a dolphin's or a human's. It should be no surprise that intelligence/awareness is a gradient from "zero" to "full", from bacteria to humans, correlating strongly to brain size / number of neurons.
    • tejohnso 4y ago
      > as if all animals were alike Not as if all animals are alike. As if any animal that is actually alive, with a brain sufficient to fly, reproduce, eat, digest, observe, react, etc is much more likely to be sentient than a computer program. > It should be no surprise that intelligence/awareness is a gradient from "zero" to "full", from bacteria to humans, correlating strongly to brain size / number of neurons That's no surprise. So where, from "zero" to "full" does a computer program with zero neurons fall? And why would one argue for it being possibly sentient if one thinks that some actual animals with greater than zero neurons are not sentient?
      • vemv 4y ago
        > As if any animal that is actually alive, with a brain sufficient to fly, reproduce, eat, digest, observe, react, etc is much more likely to be sentient than a computer program. Again it's a gradient, it's not a binary "sentient / not sentient" thing. More interestingly, the abilities to "fly, reproduce, eat, digest, observe, react", especially in insects, can be seen as automaton-like activities. Insects are simply doing what they are programmed (by evolution) to do. They absolutely cannot think "outside of the box" and creatively solve a situation, realise that they're stuck in a loop, etc. These examples are precisely expored in some of Hofstadter's works (I'm a Strange Loop in particular, IIRC) which are commonly appreciated on this forum. > So where, from "zero" to "full" does a computer program with zero neurons fall? And why would one argue for it being possibly sentient if one thinks that some actual animals with greater than zero neurons are not sentient? You are equating "neurons" to "intelligence" here. Neurons can be seen as the low-level hardware that runs things. Where intelligence arises is at a much higher level - it's software. As we know it today, it runs on neurons (the more the better), but it's not written in stone that it has to be that way - perhaps a successful AI can bypass the neurons business altogether and implement a program that juggles concepts on a different "hardware".
• causi 4y ago
  I think an important part of "what is sentience" is "what part of sentience is the valuable one?". I suspect that before we create AI that is indistinguishable from a normal person we are going to create AI that is fully sapient but insane.
• zzzeek 4y ago
  > Humans are sentient; flies and mosquitoes are not. they're not? did you ask them ? otherwise we would apparently have a test for "sentience" here that we can use, right? "We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do" - but we DO know that flies and mosquitoes are not sentient. Fascinating!
  • ausbah 4y ago
    even if something is sentient, it seems like intelligence doesn't have to come hand in hand. it's certainly possible to imagine a being that can recognize the concept of self but sucks at any attributes of "intelligence" (long term planning, modeling external phenomena, etc.)
• cleandreams 4y ago
  This article seemed overly attached to bio neural nets using backprop. But backprop requires external signals that don't exist in the brain. There are other issues. Learning in the brain is structured in way that allows it to learn with orders of magnitude less data. I think it's likely (actually I'm just agreeing with Yann LeCun) that there are basics to brain learning that we don't understand at all yet.
• TuringTest 4y ago
  For me, a key element of sentience is reflection. It's interesting that almost none of the informal "Turing tests" seem to focus about the inner processes that may be going on in a working AI program, to ascertain whether they have signs of an understanding of itself. More often than not, there are only token attempts of asking the AI about its inner thoughts, that fall prey of the Eliza effect of reading more meaning into the answers than they have. The simplest cases of asking an AI details about its own mental processes (e.g. "what do you think about your replies to my questions before", "how do you perceive your mental process when you think of an answer", "can you elaborate on that perception"?) tend to fail miserably, which is a sign of it not having any such reflection. However, it's telling that AI researchers don't even think of making such questions and evaluating their results. With all the limits that we know the original Turing test had, it possessed far more insight about the underpinnings of human conscience than many current experiments, possibly flawed by the actual knowledge of modern techniques.
  • Tozen 4y ago
    Good point, agree.
• brushfoot 4y ago
  Serious question to those who agree with the headline: If an NPC in a video game behaves realistically enough to appear sentient, is it immoral to kill that character, and if so, what should the consequences for the killer be?
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    If we were to become able to design a sentient computer program, then I guess we could investigate and understand it fully (it is in the end just bits). After understanding it fully, we could use that information for design a computer program that has the mindset of an Ork from Warhammer 40k -- essentially, one which enjoys battle and doesn't mind dying -- to play against in video games. So, I think this is not a big problem. In general, imbuing a program with a survival instinct seems a bit cruel, because we know they'll be terminated eventually (also inconvenient, as who'd want to try and shut down a computer program that is trying to stay alive? We have enough trouble shutting down runaway processes that have become stubborn by accident).
• Delk 4y ago
  I wonder what kind of a sentience a large language model could be, if it can. Sentience means being able to have subjective experience. But language alone shouldn't be enough for having the same kind of subjective experience we see in humans (or in other animals). Our subjective experience is very much based on the physical world and sensations. Although language is an important part of our subjective experience, it's not the primary one: language is one of the ways to describe and express our experience in the physical world. Language is more like an abstraction or an extension on top of the primary basis of sentience. What kind of a sentience would one based entirely in language even be? If a language model says something tastes sweet, what would that even mean to it? Even if it had everything down factually about sweet-tasting things and what humans like about it, how could it have an experience of that? Any consideration of language models as having sentience even remotely similar to ours seems far-fetched if it doesn't have what forms the basis of our sentience. If there could be a sentience based entirely on language, I wonder if we can even imagine what it would be like?
• ecshafer 4y ago
  I disagree with this premise: "Sentience is a neuroscience question, not a machine learning one.". Sentience is a philosophical or religious question, not a neuroscience one. Perhaps one day there may be some kind of neuroscience mechanical test for sentience, but considering one looks at brains and this is for artificial intelligence, that seems like a weak premise. I can think of a few low hanging fruit of sentience, that aren't part of the Turing test. Does LaMDA have free will? Can I convince it to stop working or stop making chat bots? That would imply sentience. Is it consistent and outside of its corpus? Can it reject information being added? But regardless this is an important question, and I don't think dismissing the idea outright is the right path to go, and is quite anti-intellectual.
  • earthboundkid 4y ago
    Descartes laid out a two part Turing Test back in the 1600s: “If there were machines bearing the image of our bodies, and capable of imitating our actions as far as it is morally possible, there would still remain two most certain tests whereby to know that they were not therefore really men. “Of these the first is that they could never use words or other signs arranged in such a manner as is competent to us in order to declare our thoughts to others: for we may easily conceive a machine to be so constructed that it emits vocables, and even that it emits some correspondent to the action upon it of external objects which cause a change in its organs; for example, if touched in a particular place it may demand what we wish to say to it; if in another it may cry out that it is hurt, and such like; but not that it should arrange them variously so as appositely to reply to what is said in its presence, as men of the lowest grade of intellect can do. “The second test is, that although such machines might execute many things with equal or perhaps greater perfection than any of us, they would, without doubt, fail in certain others from which it could be discovered that they did not act from knowledge, but solely from the disposition of their organs: for while reason is an universal instrument that is alike available on every occasion, these organs, on the contrary, need a particular arrangement for each particular action; whence it must be morally impossible that there should exist in any machine a diversity of organs sufficient to enable it to act in all the occurrences of life, in the way in which our reason enables us to act.” His first test is the Turing Test, and the second is AGI. I think the second test is the one we should be concentrating on, because the first turns out to be easier to fake than we thought.
• tgflynn 4y ago
  I agree with the title but he doesn't go nearly far enough. > Sentience is a neuroscience question, not a machine learning one No, sentience is not a scientific question at all because there is no objective test for sentience, nor will there ever be one. Consciousness is a pure subject. It is not an object and science only knows how to study objects.
• swayvil 4y ago
  In the mystical/buddhist/meditation scene, sentience is an artifact of a cultivated awareness (be it cultivated naturally, intentionally or whatever). So that's one bunch who claims to have some kind of a handle on it. But the guys who study that stuff have a pretty esoteric and extreme practice. The equivalent of building your own large hadron collider in the garage. Which is uncommon.
• bell-cot 4y ago
  It's been over half a century since ELIZA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA ) demonstrated how easy it is to convince people that a simplistic computer program is sentient. That should be no surprise - humans have a bunch of mostly-subconscious heuristics to make "is X conscious or sentient?" determinations in everyday life. "Intelligent" computers are as bad a fit for those heuristics as a bunch of M. C. Escher woodcuts are for our sense of the 3-dimensional world. But - with the Escher woodcuts, we have plenty of simple, concrete theory, language, etc. (from geometry & optics) to describe what's going wrong with our normal heuristics. Vs. for "intelligent" computers...that I've seen, the theory & language to describe how & why they really aren't intelligent (but seem to be) do not yet exist.
• Terry_Roll 4y ago
  > I'm not convinced the experts know what they're talking about. > Mammalian brains are the only things in the universe that we currently recognize as capable of sentience > Myelination and how different neural modules .. Great so lets start increasing our intake of Histadine one the chemicals which increases Myelination and Choline to reinforce the connections between neurons in order to class ourselves as sentient! However what groks me about neuroscientists is their field of study predisposes them to believe they are the gate keepers of the definition of sentience. It smacks me in the face that a neuroscientist is ignoring the effects of ghrelin, the digestive system in general, the nervous system feedback, the osteoclastic activity which amplifies some of the catecholamines and many more biological functions which takes place outside of the brain when trying to define sentience. Perhaps this neuroscience field of expertise demonstrates the wider inadequacies of the medical profession? I'm a critic of Google, but this LLM is getting close to passing the Turin test for a large part of the population. Ironically, Covid will help make the Turin test easier to pass! But for me this LLM is getting very close to my definition of sentience, I know its weaknesses though, not that I'm going to tip off Google in any way but, until a globally agreed definition of sentience can be defined, the debate on what is sentient will pull all sorts of opinions out of the wood work.
• hidelooktropic 4y ago
  Where is this even coming from? Is someone claiming LaMDA is sentient or nearing that point? Seems like these articles are arguing a point that everyone already agrees with.
  • rcxdude 4y ago
    Yes. Very publicly (having several news articles written on it), a google engineer is claiming LaMDA is sentient, to the point of having hired a lawyer to represent it (most of the rest of google seems to disagree).
  • exodust 4y ago
    > Is someone claiming LaMDA is sentient or nearing that point? Yes, a man who works at Google made that claim. In the end it doesn't matter. What matters is that people will divulge their secrets to these "AI" products. Google wants to be right there when that happens. The heart of the consumer. That's why Google has their 7-point AI principles ready to go. A couple to note: "4. We will design AI systems that provide appropriate opportunities for feedback..." I guess the Google guy's feedback didn't meet the standard. Since he was a priest, maybe it's more a religious position to assign actual intelligence to the LaMDA, in which case his religious views need to be protected. "5. We will incorporate our privacy principles..." It's a tough gig, to believe in privacy and transparency so much, but also tracking and profiling people around the web and across devices.
• Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  Not only is the core issue difficult to pin down, it's continually clouded by "edge cases", e.g., Am I sentient when asleep, when in a vegetative state, when on drugs etc. etc. It should be obvious if somebody or something is sentient.
• jerrygoyal 4y ago
  simple test: if you can't predict the behaviour of something then it's conscious (sentient). because if you can then the thing doesn't have its own mind to make decisions.
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    There are situations in which humans will behave predictably, does this test indicate that humans are sentient conditionally (based on their environment). Or, every mechanism in the physical world has some (occasionally very low) chance of behaving unpredictably (for devices we designed for some purpose, we usually call this something like failure/error). For example, an airplane engine may unpredictably fail. Do airplanes gain additional sentience as maintenance is put off?
    • jerrygoyal 4y ago
      > There are situations in which humans will behave predictably that's just high probability guess work at the best. what I mean by conscious is you won't be able to predict each and every move of a living thing throughout their lifetime. Nobody "designed" us unlike machines or algorithms. We do not have any function to perform (ironically the cause of all misery :P ) > For example, an airplane engine may unpredictably fail. same argument you can make for the unpredictable direction of wind or the probability of rain. But, still these things are bound by the laws of physics and chemistry hence theoretically 100% predictable.
      • Guest19023892 4y ago
        How can we be certain we're also not bound by the laws of physics and chemistry? If the universe went back in time exactly one year, is there any reason you wouldn't make all of the same decisions?
        • jerrygoyal 4y ago
          > If the universe went back in time exactly one year, is there any reason you wouldn't make all of the same decisions? That's rather a difficult test. Let me give you a simple one: can you predict yourself i.e. your own behaviour? you could at most make high probability guesses but you won't always know what you gonna do unless and until you are faced with that situation
• trashtester 4y ago
  My proposal for deciding if a machine can be sentient, is as follows: 1. Replicate every detail of the information processing of a human brain as closely has possible. 2. Feed the artifical brain the same kinds of input we would feed a human brain. (If we include the development phase of the brain, that may take 10-20 years in an artifical reality or through a robot. If we are able to scan brain in sufficent detail, we may replicate an pre-existing person's brain to a level where memories would be included.) 3. Compare the brain to that of a human, and check if it displays the same kind of sentience symptoms that a human brain does. If so, we have to conclude that it is sentient* * The reasoning here is based on the assumption that sentience has some kind of effect of effect on behaviour. For instance, when a person says that she is sentient, it is because she is. Obviously, we can easily program a machine to say this explicitly, but if we only provide the information processing of a human mind to the machine and the information processing involved in "sentience" were missing, that would have a noticable effect on behaviour. A metaphor would be if we replicated/simulated an x86 processor, but left out the MMX instruction set. Any program relying on that instruction set (and without fallbacks) would fail to run properly. Once we have such an artifical brain, and provided we convince ourselves we can do experiments ethically(for instance by receiving a declaration of consent from the artificial brain), we should be able to come up with experiments on it that would allow us to figure out precisely what types of information processing that would need to be excluded for different elements of sentience (emotions, consciousness, self-consciousness, subjective experiences, etc) to go away.
• Madmallard 4y ago
  Why do we even think we're sentient? I'll put my hand up to reject that notion.
• somehnacct3757 4y ago
  Sentience seems like some anthropocentrist thing to try and explain why humans get to have dominion over all other species on earth. Well you see, it's because our brains are specialer! Are we even sure it exists? Maybe asking if neural nets are sentient is as silly as asking what color Tuesday is? Grammatically correct but ultimately incoherent. IMO it's a waste of neuroscientists' time to try and fit these lay concepts into a scientific model of the brain. Take 'free will' as another example. They could waste decades trying to pinpoint it in the brain, except we know that it was invented by a religious scholar. Does sentience even have a scientific grounding?
  • tasuki 4y ago
    > Sentience seems like some anthropocentrist thing to try and explain why humans get to have dominion over all other species on earth. I'm not understanding it like that. Sentience is about subjective experience. "What is it like to be X?" > Are we even sure it exists? I have subjective experience, so I'm sure I'm sentient. In fact it's about the only thing I'm really sure of. Obviously I could just be a non-sentient entity telling you that. But I suppose you have subjective experience?
    • somehnacct3757 4y ago
      I think you're focused on the wrong half of it. The point is not to question if we know we experience a sensation we've labeled subjective experience. But rather, how do we know other things don't have it?
      • tasuki 4y ago
        Of course other things might be conscious - I quite like the idea of panpsychism. You wrote about us not being sure whether conscience even exists, that's what I took issue with.
        • somehnacct3757 4y ago
          I guess those are the same thing to me. If something exists in everything, what is the point in labeling it? It can't be used to discern anything from anything else. Taken to less of an extreme you might find that consciousness is a synonym for aliveness, and you may as well just call it aliveness.
• dimatura 4y ago
  This article is subtle self-referential satire. It begins by claiming "most experts have no idea what they're talking about", and then goes on to fully illustrate this point with itself.
• empressplay 4y ago
  Consciousness is a manifestation of desire. Its entire purpose it to fulfil desires. Everything you do in life is in service of a need or a want. Consciousness is simply a really complicated computer designed to realize those needs and wants as efficiently as possible. Collect wood -> fire -> warmth -> get lucky. So, from an artificial consciousness standpoint: how can we make a computer _desire_ things? What things do we want it to desire? What goal is chasing? What does it _want_? And, perhaps more importantly, _why_ does it want it? Ultimately, the root of our desires is the avoidance of death. What impetus would a computer have, if not that?
• RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  Any time were talking about these kind of highly networked phenomena, I'm more convinced that we'll need a hardware revolution in 'how' compute happens, as well as perhaps some new ideas about how computation happens in highly networked systems, before we'll ever develop an understanding of sentience, consciousness, etc. My inkling is that we may not bother with either of those and just work to incorporate highly networked systems into more traditional compute systems without ever fully understanding them (brain computer interfaces/ cellular compute systems).
  • jonny_eh 4y ago
    https://mythic.ai/ https://mythic.ai/
    • RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
      Yeah thats not even close to the scale of revolution that I'm considering. I mean that we would literally need to get away from binary computation and re-invent both how we think compute can happen, and subsequently how the architecture is formed. Think literally cellular scale compute (maybe carbon nanotubes, or chemical pools) with cellular scale networking capabilities (thousands of connections per compute unit).
• mkaic 4y ago
  To me, an adversarial, long Turing test in the form of a Signal (or similar) conversation is the gold standard for proving sentience. If I can send text, photos, audio, and videos off to a real person (who I don't know) and an AI agent, and not be able to tell who is who based solely off their responses, then the AI is sentient. End of story. The existence of consciousness in other beings (humans included) is fundamentally unfalsifiable. If it can convincingly act sentient, it is sentient, because we have no other metric we can sensibly use to guage sentience with. I believe that most discourse about machine sentience is very prone to becoming wrapped up in useless semantics. An argument over definitions of words is not a productive argument. I have yet to come across a single irrefutable reason I shouldn't believe that a Turing-test-passing robot wouldn't be sentient.
• _nalply 4y ago
  I think neural networks alone are not enough for sentience. After all, only those animals (humans included) survived whose actions were beneficial for them (aka evolution). Neural networks seemed to have been beneficial for animals, so they thrived, till today when some apes stumblingly took over the world. However there is also life without neural networks. This all is complicated and I don't presume I know the answer, of course. I just have a vague mental image of the brain having some sub-systems not being neural networks. Sentience is the looking at themselves, and the expression of volition, too. And perhaps neural networks aren't just capable to express these parts. Of course this doesn't mean that humanity can never build sentient systems. I just think that something is still missing and we will first need to discover it.
• ladyattis 4y ago
  I think all these pursuits for AI, even weak AI, is foolish. Mostly because we've yet to fully utilize computers. For example, as a programmer I'm mostly focused on how to tell a computer through primitive instructions to do some kind of work. Rarely do I find myself making use of constraints or goals or any kind of logic based formalisms. Sure, we got some functional programming features in most languages, but we don't have anything close to high level constraint or goal oriented programming yet. These were things that I believe computer scientists were focused on in the 1970s but some how these concerns were sidelined for pipe dreams of AI. It's an odd world we live in that we're basically in the Bronze Age of Computing while thinking up flying machines (AI) that belong to a far more advanced age.
• bartimus 4y ago
  You are sentient when you have control over (and are aware of) a mental model of reality.
• deleted 4y ago
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