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 p

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.