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I'm of the view that asking whether something is sentient or not is asking the wrong question. Once you believe an entity is (or isn't) sentient, it's an unfals

I'm of the view that asking whether something is sentient or not is asking the wrong question. Once you believe an entity is (or isn't) sentient, it's an unfalsifiable belief. Thought experiments like the Turing test and the Chinese Room point to the fact that something could be "not sentient" and behave in the exact same way as something that is "sentient". What's the use of talking about sentience then, if we're unable to measure it in any way? What difference does it make if something is or isn't sentient, if it exhibits the same behavior either way?

wcoenen 4y ago
The Chinese Room argument never made sense to me. By the same reasoning, humans could be considered "not sentient" because our behavior arises from the non-sentient interactions of individual neurons in our body.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  I interpret that as a problem with the concept of "sentience" -- the closer you examine it, the more holes it has. I feel like I'm sentient, and so does mostly everybody else (I hear). But I have to take their word for it, because there's no way for them to prove it to me -- they could be like the Chinese room for all I know. Asking whether something is sentient starts looking a lot like asking if it "has a soul". It's unanswerable, and therefore, it's the wrong question to ask. Fun to discuss, sure, but I don't find it a useful way to model reality.
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  The Chinese Room argument was literally an argument against mechanism / computationalism (ie that your mind is just a really complex neural network.) So no, "by the same reasoning" humans cannot be considered non sentient. In fact the original paper is not talking about sentience at all, but intelligence (these are different things.) And the argument it isn't about declaring something sentient or non-sentient, it simply states that responding with expected outputs to a given input is not proof of sentience or intelligence. It basically says you have to use some other method to determine if something is intelligent and has "understanding." You should read up on this a lot more, it's fascinating, and you've got a very incorrect understanding of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

wcoenen 4y ago

The Chinese Room argument never made sense to me. By the same reasoning, humans could be considered "not sentient" because our behavior arises from the non-sentient interactions of individual neurons in our body.

TremendousJudge 4y ago
I interpret that as a problem with the concept of "sentience" -- the closer you examine it, the more holes it has. I feel like I'm sentient, and so does mostly everybody else (I hear). But I have to take their word for it, because there's no way for them to prove it to me -- they could be like the Chinese room for all I know. Asking whether something is sentient starts looking a lot like asking if it "has a soul". It's unanswerable, and therefore, it's the wrong question to ask. Fun to discuss, sure, but I don't find it a useful way to model reality.
kthejoker2 4y ago
The Chinese Room argument was literally an argument against mechanism / computationalism (ie that your mind is just a really complex neural network.) So no, "by the same reasoning" humans cannot be considered non sentient. In fact the original paper is not talking about sentience at all, but intelligence (these are different things.) And the argument it isn't about declaring something sentient or non-sentient, it simply states that responding with expected outputs to a given input is not proof of sentience or intelligence. It basically says you have to use some other method to determine if something is intelligent and has "understanding." You should read up on this a lot more, it's fascinating, and you've got a very incorrect understanding of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room