3 ms·

I disagree with this premise: "Sentience is a neuroscience question, not a machine learning one.". Sentience is a philosophical or religious question, not a neu

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.
- TuringTest 4y ago
  Thanks for that! As interested as I am in this subject, I hadn't heard of this "DescarTest" before :-)
- int_19h 4y ago
  It should be noted that Descartes is also famous for considering animals as machines, and e.g. performing vivisection on dogs on the basis that they, being machines, cannot "really" feel pain.
tantalor 4y ago
> Sentience is a religious question That would be a minority opinion. Generally our understanding of sentience is completely independent of existence of the soul. There are some exceptions though: > In Jainism many things are endowed with a soul, jīva, which is sometimes translated as 'sentience' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
- int_19h 4y ago
  When you start digging into the colloquial definition of "sentience", it very quickly falls apart, except for the part that is ascribed to soul or some equivalent thereof (basically, something that is not physical). So there's a good reason to suspect that it's really the same thing, just in different philosophical and/or religious trappings.

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.

TuringTest 4y ago
Thanks for that! As interested as I am in this subject, I hadn't heard of this "DescarTest" before :-)
int_19h 4y ago
It should be noted that Descartes is also famous for considering animals as machines, and e.g. performing vivisection on dogs on the basis that they, being machines, cannot "really" feel pain.

tantalor 4y ago

> Sentience is a religious question That would be a minority opinion. Generally our understanding of sentience is completely independent of existence of the soul. There are some exceptions though: > In Jainism many things are endowed with a soul, jīva, which is sometimes translated as 'sentience' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

int_19h 4y ago
When you start digging into the colloquial definition of "sentience", it very quickly falls apart, except for the part that is ascribed to soul or some equivalent thereof (basically, something that is not physical). So there's a good reason to suspect that it's really the same thing, just in different philosophical and/or religious trappings.