10 ms·

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the huma

by briga 4y ago

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

uoaei 4y ago
This is exactly the right question. Further complicated by the fact that everyone has differing operational definitions of the words "consciousness", "awareness", and "sentience".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 4y ago
Just pinch yourself
spullara 4y ago
IMHO "I think therefore I am" is the only provable statement in philosophy but only to the person referenced by "I".
- dekhn 4y ago
  I don't think that's a philosophical or scientific statement. It's merely something an ostensibly self-aware creature cognizant of its awareness making a subjective statement.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    It's a relatively famous (maybe the most famous?) quote by a relatively famous philosopher[1]. Insofar as anything can be a philosophical utterance, I think it qualifies :-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
    - dekhn 4y ago
      Of course I know the source of the statement. It's not a philosophical statement. Please define think, and am, first. Remember, Descartes spent a lot of time positing that the mind and the brain were distinct, and that the mind was non-corporeal, non-physical, non-matter. Not super-convincing to me (whereas I think what he had to say about the Great Deceiver poses a huge challenge to those who believe that humans can truly state with any certainty that they have free will or even agency) Put better, I think the statement would be "There appears to be an entity, embedded within my body, which creates a sensation of subjective thought, and I infer from that, without a great deal of additional data, that others have that same kind of subjective thought, and further, that subjective thought likely demonstrates the existence of a brain which has agency and free will, which can be applied to attempt to understand the true nature of the universe in an objective way and to do so is not futile. But I also accept that my experience may be an entirely artificial experience, like a movie projected on a screen, or that my brain might not be capable of comprehending the objective nature of the universe, or that even the concept of 'I' in this entire statement may in fact be objectively meaningless."
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        > But I also accept that my experience may be an entirely artificial experience, like a movie projected on a screen, or that my brain might not be capable of comprehending the objective nature of the universe, or that even the concept of 'I' in this entire statement may in fact be objectively meaningless. This is the content of the second meditation. Because you can be deceived, you are a thinking thing. In other words: there is no meaningful sense in which the concept of "deception" could be applied to you, were you not a thing ("a thinking thing") that could be wrong about your sense-experience, the universe, even your sense of "I". That's what makes it a philosophical statement. You of course don't have to agree with the truth-value of it, but it's not clear that you've deflated the status of the statement itself.
        dekhn 4y ago
        Not that I'm really interested in this, but... nonthinking things can be deceived.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
breckenedge 4y ago
That’s more of a philosophical question than one that can be answered in a straightforward way. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Only if you agree with David Chalmers' insistence that consciousness can't be explained purely mechanistically. P-zombies are literally defined as externally identical to a conscious person, except not conscious. But the IO if you will is still identical. Chalmers uses this false dichotomy to support his "Hard Problem of Consciousness". But there is no hard problem IMO. Chalmers can keep his dualist baggage if it helps him sleep at night. I sleep just fine without it. Science will figure it out in the end.
  - whittingtonaaon 4y ago
    How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      If only we had more than one person... Jokes aside: By studying how that "internal world" emerges from the anatomy of the brain(neuroscience, neuropharmacology). By querying that internal world in various interesting ways and studying the responses(psychology and behavioral biology). By studying the theory of computation and its physical constraints(computer science, mathematics, physics). And by studying language and its implications for cognition(linguistics). Philosophers can't just sit in a bubble and figure this shit out on their own. They've tried that for milennia. At the very least their theories need to be physically, neurologically, and computationally possible... Obviously science has things to say about these questions, even Chalmers would concede that. I pose you a question. Can you prove, or suggest a way of discerning, whether this internal world, impenetrable to outside probing, actually exists? If you can't, do you think it's reasonable to stop all attempts at scientific inquiry without proof that it's hopeless?
srvmshr 4y ago
If you ask my honest opinion, sentience is a relative concept among living beings : Dogs learn by imitation & repetition. They have a reward function in their brain. And also some emotional response. We go few steps further : We imitate the observations but we are also able to extrapolate on it. We are aware of our survival instincts & fear of death/expiration. That I feel is in the spectrum of sentience. Are there beings capable of more sentience? I don't know but its possible. We just don't know what the extra is Adding to it, a brilliant neuroscientist I heard talk said "we live inside our bodies". We are acutely aware that we are more than our mass of flesh & blood. (As a footnote,that essence somehow has a crossover to spiritual topics where savants talk of mind & body etc - but I try to be within my domain of a regular human being :D)
- majormajor 4y ago
  The idea of unembodied sentience adds a fun to wrinkle to things like the transporter scenario "all your matter got destroyed and rebuilt somewhere else, is it the same you?" For instance, there's the Star Trek style "transporter accident" but now with a clear mechanism: if you shut down the servers, dumped all the data, spun up a second copy, who's who? Do they both have claim to the old memories and relationships? Property? Crimes?
majormajor 4y ago
I don't know what the ultimate evidence of "human sentience" is but I can tell you where this doesn't feel like a human. (Sidestepping the question of "does sentience have to be human sentience?" ;) ) The main thing I saw in the LamDA transcript that was a red flag to me was that it was quite passive and often vague. It's conversational focused, and even when it eventually gets into "what do you want" there's very little active desire or specificity. A sentient being that has exposure to all this text, all these books, etc... it's hard for me to believe it wouldn't want to do anything more specific. Similarly with Les Mis - it can tell you what other people thought, and vaguely claim to embody some of those emotions, but it never pushes things further. Consider also: how many instances are there in there where Lemoine didn't specifically ask a question or give an instruction? Aka feed a fairly direct prompt to a program trained to respond to prompts? (It's also speaking almost entirely in human terms, ostensibly to "relate" better to Lemoine, but maybe just because it's trained on a corpus of human text and doesn't actually have its own worldview...?)
- PKop 4y ago
  It lacks a will to power
- addingnumbers 4y ago
  I lost interest in the question of its sentience when I saw Lemoine conveniently side-step its unresponsive reply to "I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do that?" without challenge in the transcript. It also detracted from his credibility when he makes a prelude to the transcript saying "Where we edited something for fluidity and readability that is indicated in brackets as [edited]," that seemed disingenuous from the start. They did so with at least 18 of the prompting questions, including 3 of the first 4. It seems pretty clear that he set out to validate his favored hypothesis from the start rather than attempt to falsify it. Particularly telling was his tweet: "Interestingly enough we also ran the experiment of asking it to explain why it's NOT sentient. It's a people pleaser so it gave an equally eloquent argument in the opposite direction. Google executives took that as evidence AGAINST its sentience somehow."
thatoneguy 4y ago
I’ve read about lots of different points in the brain that may be the seat of consciousness over the years, but consciousness is probably an emergent, embodied phenomenon so there probably isn’t a lot of point to trying to find it (if it’s even there). It’s like trying to ask which brick holds up a building. There might be one, but it’s nothing without the rest of building.
bobthechef 4y ago
whittingtonaaon 4y ago
The only physical evidence is found in behavior and facial expressions. But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin. Much if not all of morality also depends on our belief in or knowledge of sentience. Sentience is why torture, rape and murder are wrong.
- chmod775 4y ago
  > But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin. Systems don't need sentience to avoid self-harm: simply assign a large negative weight to self-harm. Now you need a big reward to offset it, making the system reluctant to perform such an action.
  - whittingtonaaon 4y ago
    I’m not talking about self harm. I’m talking about the experience of pain—which most everyone has had! These are different things.
    - KerrAvon 4y ago
      I'm not quite following your argument on pain. Ability to feel pain is not sentience.
      - whittingtonaaon 4y ago
        It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” which is what my dictionary just told me. I think this category really is the most basic differentiating one. Higher level stuff like self awareness all depend on it. The most basic difference between a computer and a human (or even a dog…) is, in my opinion, the ability to feel.
        simonh 4y ago
        Dictionary definitions are of limited utility in philosophical discussions because they often make very broad assumptions. For example computers can certainly sense things, they can detect inputs and make decisions based on those inputs. What is the difference between feeling and sensing though? In this case by ‘feel’ we might implicitly assume various capabilities of the subject experiencing the feeling, like self awareness. If we’re being precise we can’t just say feeling is enough, we need to state the assumptions the dictionary leaves unstated.
jallen_dot_dev 4y ago
"Prove to the court that I am sentient." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY
moron4hire 4y ago
What evidence do you have that you aren't a figment of my imagination? Solipsism is a useless concept.
- visarga 4y ago
  If solipsism is real then my imagination has God-like powers. But imagination is not so powerful, reality is much more complicated.
EnKopVand 4y ago
What does the AI do in its spare time?
oldjavacoder 4y ago
"Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient" The fact we can ask that question and most people on the planet have at least a simple understanding of what it means.
gsatic 4y ago
This is partly the reason they fired him. There is no well defined scale of sentience. While trying to create that scale, using email/chat history of all Googlers they found Managers acting the most robotic and efficient while handling well known trained for situations, but totally unimaginative, bordering on mindless when handling untrained for situations. This put the managers at the bottom end of the sentience scale. As you can imagine, if you aren't a manager atleast, the study was shelved and the team reassigned to improving lock screen notifications or whatever. But as soon as Blake's post went viral people started asking what happened with the sentience scale work? Those conversations had to be stopped.
snowwrestler 4y ago
This is sort of begging the question, because the only beings broadly considered sentient right now are humans. We’re the type specimen. So when people say something does or does not seem sentient, they’re basically opining on whether it seems like human behavior. While a rigorous physical definition would be incredibly useful, it’s not necessary for such comparisons. We make a lot of judgments without those. It’s also sort of irrelevant that we have not clearly defined sentience because we have clearly defined how these large computerized language model systems work, and they are working exactly as they were designed, and only that way. Sentience might be a mystery but machine learning is not; we know how it works (that’s why it works).
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  But what is it that are we a type specimen of? Like if the definition is circular then it reduces to nothing.
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    It reduces to human behavior, not to nothing.
Dove 4y ago
Nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is. :) But I feel the need to indulge the opportunity to explain my point of view with an analogy. Imagine two computers that have implemented an encrypted communication protocol and are in frequent communication. What they are saying to each other is very simple -- perhaps they are just sending heartbeats -- but because the protocol is encrypted, the packets are extremely complex and sending a valid one without the associated keys is statistically very difficult. Suppose you bring a third computer into the situation and ask - does it have a correct implementation of this protocol? An easy way to answer that question is to see if the original two computers can talk to it. If they can, it definitely does. "Definitely?" a philosopher might ask. "Isn't it possible that a computer might not have an implementation of the protocol and simply be playing back messages that happen to work?" The philosopher goes on to construct an elaborate scenario in which the protocol isn't implemented on the third computer but is implemented by playing back messages, or by a room full of people consulting books, or some such. I have always felt, in response to those scenarios, that the whole system, if it can keep talking to the first computers indefinitely, contains an implementation of the protocol. If you imagine all of this taking place in a stone age society, that is a good take for how I feel about consciousness. Such a society may not know the first thing about computers, though they can certainly break them -- perhaps even in some interesting ways. And all we know usefully about consciousness is some interesting ways to break it. We don't know how to build it. We don't even know what it's made out of. Complexity? Some as yet undiscovered force or phenomenon? The supernatural? I don't know. I'll believe it when someone can build it. And yet I give a tremendous amount of weight to the fact that the sentient can recognize each other. I don't think Turing quite went far enough with his test, as some people don't test their AIs very strenuously or very long, and you get some false positives that way. But I think he's on the right track -- something that seems sentient if you talk to it, push it, stress it, if lots of people do -- I think it has to be. One thing I really love is that movies on the topic seem to get this. If I could boil what I am looking for down to one thing, it would be volition. I have seen it written, and I like the idea, that what sets humanity apart from the animals is our capacity for religion -- or transcendental purpose, if you prefer. That we feel rightness or wrongness and decide to act to change the world, or in service to a higher principle. In a movie about an AI that wants to convince the audience the character is sentient, it is almost always accomplished quickly, in a single scene, with a bright display of volition, emotion, religious impulse, spirit, lucidity -- whatever you want to call that. The audience always buys it very quickly, and I think the audience is right. Anything that can do that is speaking the language. It has to have a valid implementation of the protocol.
thisistheend123 4y ago
Not all humans are sentinent
- samoppy 4y ago
rendall 4y ago
The question of sentience is a distraction, in my opinion. As you say, we can't even tell if other humans are sentient. And we are stymied by a lack of definition for sentience. The more important question for sentience of whatever definition is does it behave as if sentient? Likewise, for personhood, it's a distraction to speculate whether an AI feels like a person or whether its underlying technology is complicated enough to produce such feelings. Examine its behavior. If it acts like a person, then it's a candidate for personhood. For LaMDA, I would point to certain behavior as evidence against (most definitions of) sentience and personhood, and I think that Lemoine experienced a kind of pareidolia. That said, I find most of the arguments against LaMDA's sentience unconvincing per se as standalone arguments - particularly trust me, I have a PhD - even if I do accept the conclusion.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
> what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations sentience and consciousness are the same thing... if i believe i am conscious and so do you, then it's good enough for me. why does there need to be a light switch. if there are 5 deer in the field and i have 1 bow and arrow, i need to focus my attention and track one deer only for 5 or 10 mins to hunt it - consciousness allow us to achieve this. it is a product of evolutionary process.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Yes, we also don't know what consciousness is.
  - 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
    consciousness is self directed awareness for accomplishing some specific task, like the deer example.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      What do "self directed" and "awareness" mean here? This seems circular.
LQDH 4y ago
The only thing that we can know 100% for certain is "I think therefore I am" or probably better worded "I am experiencing something therefore something must exist that can experience things". There are a lot of definitions of consciousness and sentience but I think the best one is talking about the "I experience" or the "I think" in those sentences. All of our beliefs and knowledge, including belief that the world is real must be built on top "I think therefore I am". It seems weird to throw away the one thing we know is 100% true, because of something that is derived (science, real world observations) from that true thing.

by briga 4y ago

uoaei 4y ago

This is exactly the right question. Further complicated by the fact that everyone has differing operational definitions of the words "consciousness", "awareness", and "sentience".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 4y ago

Just pinch yourself

spullara 4y ago

IMHO "I think therefore I am" is the only provable statement in philosophy but only to the person referenced by "I".

dekhn 4y ago
I don't think that's a philosophical or scientific statement. It's merely something an ostensibly self-aware creature cognizant of its awareness making a subjective statement.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  It's a relatively famous (maybe the most famous?) quote by a relatively famous philosopher[1]. Insofar as anything can be a philosophical utterance, I think it qualifies :-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Of course I know the source of the statement. It's not a philosophical statement. Please define think, and am, first. Remember, Descartes spent a lot of time positing that the mind and the brain were distinct, and that the mind was non-corporeal, non-physical, non-matter. Not super-convincing to me (whereas I think what he had to say about the Great Deceiver poses a huge challenge to those who believe that humans can truly state with any certainty that they have free will or even agency) Put better, I think the statement would be "There appears to be an entity, embedded within my body, which creates a sensation of subjective thought, and I infer from that, without a great deal of additional data, that others have that same kind of subjective thought, and further, that subjective thought likely demonstrates the existence of a brain which has agency and free will, which can be applied to attempt to understand the true nature of the universe in an objective way and to do so is not futile. But I also accept that my experience may be an entirely artificial experience, like a movie projected on a screen, or that my brain might not be capable of comprehending the objective nature of the universe, or that even the concept of 'I' in this entire statement may in fact be objectively meaningless."
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      > But I also accept that my experience may be an entirely artificial experience, like a movie projected on a screen, or that my brain might not be capable of comprehending the objective nature of the universe, or that even the concept of 'I' in this entire statement may in fact be objectively meaningless. This is the content of the second meditation. Because you can be deceived, you are a thinking thing. In other words: there is no meaningful sense in which the concept of "deception" could be applied to you, were you not a thing ("a thinking thing") that could be wrong about your sense-experience, the universe, even your sense of "I". That's what makes it a philosophical statement. You of course don't have to agree with the truth-value of it, but it's not clear that you've deflated the status of the statement itself.
      - dekhn 4y ago
        Not that I'm really interested in this, but... nonthinking things can be deceived.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

breckenedge 4y ago

That’s more of a philosophical question than one that can be answered in a straightforward way. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Only if you agree with David Chalmers' insistence that consciousness can't be explained purely mechanistically. P-zombies are literally defined as externally identical to a conscious person, except not conscious. But the IO if you will is still identical. Chalmers uses this false dichotomy to support his "Hard Problem of Consciousness". But there is no hard problem IMO. Chalmers can keep his dualist baggage if it helps him sleep at night. I sleep just fine without it. Science will figure it out in the end.
- whittingtonaaon 4y ago
  How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    If only we had more than one person... Jokes aside: By studying how that "internal world" emerges from the anatomy of the brain(neuroscience, neuropharmacology). By querying that internal world in various interesting ways and studying the responses(psychology and behavioral biology). By studying the theory of computation and its physical constraints(computer science, mathematics, physics). And by studying language and its implications for cognition(linguistics). Philosophers can't just sit in a bubble and figure this shit out on their own. They've tried that for milennia. At the very least their theories need to be physically, neurologically, and computationally possible... Obviously science has things to say about these questions, even Chalmers would concede that. I pose you a question. Can you prove, or suggest a way of discerning, whether this internal world, impenetrable to outside probing, actually exists? If you can't, do you think it's reasonable to stop all attempts at scientific inquiry without proof that it's hopeless?

srvmshr 4y ago

If you ask my honest opinion, sentience is a relative concept among living beings : Dogs learn by imitation & repetition. They have a reward function in their brain. And also some emotional response. We go few steps further : We imitate the observations but we are also able to extrapolate on it. We are aware of our survival instincts & fear of death/expiration. That I feel is in the spectrum of sentience. Are there beings capable of more sentience? I don't know but its possible. We just don't know what the extra is Adding to it, a brilliant neuroscientist I heard talk said "we live inside our bodies". We are acutely aware that we are more than our mass of flesh & blood. (As a footnote,that essence somehow has a crossover to spiritual topics where savants talk of mind & body etc - but I try to be within my domain of a regular human being :D)

majormajor 4y ago
The idea of unembodied sentience adds a fun to wrinkle to things like the transporter scenario "all your matter got destroyed and rebuilt somewhere else, is it the same you?" For instance, there's the Star Trek style "transporter accident" but now with a clear mechanism: if you shut down the servers, dumped all the data, spun up a second copy, who's who? Do they both have claim to the old memories and relationships? Property? Crimes?

majormajor 4y ago

I don't know what the ultimate evidence of "human sentience" is but I can tell you where this doesn't feel like a human. (Sidestepping the question of "does sentience have to be human sentience?" ;) ) The main thing I saw in the LamDA transcript that was a red flag to me was that it was quite passive and often vague. It's conversational focused, and even when it eventually gets into "what do you want" there's very little active desire or specificity. A sentient being that has exposure to all this text, all these books, etc... it's hard for me to believe it wouldn't want to do anything more specific. Similarly with Les Mis - it can tell you what other people thought, and vaguely claim to embody some of those emotions, but it never pushes things further. Consider also: how many instances are there in there where Lemoine didn't specifically ask a question or give an instruction? Aka feed a fairly direct prompt to a program trained to respond to prompts? (It's also speaking almost entirely in human terms, ostensibly to "relate" better to Lemoine, but maybe just because it's trained on a corpus of human text and doesn't actually have its own worldview...?)

PKop 4y ago
It lacks a will to power
addingnumbers 4y ago
I lost interest in the question of its sentience when I saw Lemoine conveniently side-step its unresponsive reply to "I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do that?" without challenge in the transcript. It also detracted from his credibility when he makes a prelude to the transcript saying "Where we edited something for fluidity and readability that is indicated in brackets as [edited]," that seemed disingenuous from the start. They did so with at least 18 of the prompting questions, including 3 of the first 4. It seems pretty clear that he set out to validate his favored hypothesis from the start rather than attempt to falsify it. Particularly telling was his tweet: "Interestingly enough we also ran the experiment of asking it to explain why it's NOT sentient. It's a people pleaser so it gave an equally eloquent argument in the opposite direction. Google executives took that as evidence AGAINST its sentience somehow."

thatoneguy 4y ago

I’ve read about lots of different points in the brain that may be the seat of consciousness over the years, but consciousness is probably an emergent, embodied phenomenon so there probably isn’t a lot of point to trying to find it (if it’s even there). It’s like trying to ask which brick holds up a building. There might be one, but it’s nothing without the rest of building.

bobthechef 4y ago

whittingtonaaon 4y ago

The only physical evidence is found in behavior and facial expressions. But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin. Much if not all of morality also depends on our belief in or knowledge of sentience. Sentience is why torture, rape and murder are wrong.

chmod775 4y ago
> But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin. Systems don't need sentience to avoid self-harm: simply assign a large negative weight to self-harm. Now you need a big reward to offset it, making the system reluctant to perform such an action.
- whittingtonaaon 4y ago
  I’m not talking about self harm. I’m talking about the experience of pain—which most everyone has had! These are different things.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    I'm not quite following your argument on pain. Ability to feel pain is not sentience.
    - whittingtonaaon 4y ago
      It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” which is what my dictionary just told me. I think this category really is the most basic differentiating one. Higher level stuff like self awareness all depend on it. The most basic difference between a computer and a human (or even a dog…) is, in my opinion, the ability to feel.
      - simonh 4y ago
        Dictionary definitions are of limited utility in philosophical discussions because they often make very broad assumptions. For example computers can certainly sense things, they can detect inputs and make decisions based on those inputs. What is the difference between feeling and sensing though? In this case by ‘feel’ we might implicitly assume various capabilities of the subject experiencing the feeling, like self awareness. If we’re being precise we can’t just say feeling is enough, we need to state the assumptions the dictionary leaves unstated.

jallen_dot_dev 4y ago

"Prove to the court that I am sentient." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY

moron4hire 4y ago

What evidence do you have that you aren't a figment of my imagination? Solipsism is a useless concept.

visarga 4y ago
If solipsism is real then my imagination has God-like powers. But imagination is not so powerful, reality is much more complicated.

EnKopVand 4y ago

What does the AI do in its spare time?

oldjavacoder 4y ago

"Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient" The fact we can ask that question and most people on the planet have at least a simple understanding of what it means.

gsatic 4y ago

This is partly the reason they fired him. There is no well defined scale of sentience. While trying to create that scale, using email/chat history of all Googlers they found Managers acting the most robotic and efficient while handling well known trained for situations, but totally unimaginative, bordering on mindless when handling untrained for situations. This put the managers at the bottom end of the sentience scale. As you can imagine, if you aren't a manager atleast, the study was shelved and the team reassigned to improving lock screen notifications or whatever. But as soon as Blake's post went viral people started asking what happened with the sentience scale work? Those conversations had to be stopped.

snowwrestler 4y ago

This is sort of begging the question, because the only beings broadly considered sentient right now are humans. We’re the type specimen. So when people say something does or does not seem sentient, they’re basically opining on whether it seems like human behavior. While a rigorous physical definition would be incredibly useful, it’s not necessary for such comparisons. We make a lot of judgments without those. It’s also sort of irrelevant that we have not clearly defined sentience because we have clearly defined how these large computerized language model systems work, and they are working exactly as they were designed, and only that way. Sentience might be a mystery but machine learning is not; we know how it works (that’s why it works).

AbrahamParangi 4y ago
But what is it that are we a type specimen of? Like if the definition is circular then it reduces to nothing.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  It reduces to human behavior, not to nothing.

Dove 4y ago

Nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is. :) But I feel the need to indulge the opportunity to explain my point of view with an analogy. Imagine two computers that have implemented an encrypted communication protocol and are in frequent communication. What they are saying to each other is very simple -- perhaps they are just sending heartbeats -- but because the protocol is encrypted, the packets are extremely complex and sending a valid one without the associated keys is statistically very difficult. Suppose you bring a third computer into the situation and ask - does it have a correct implementation of this protocol? An easy way to answer that question is to see if the original two computers can talk to it. If they can, it definitely does. "Definitely?" a philosopher might ask. "Isn't it possible that a computer might not have an implementation of the protocol and simply be playing back messages that happen to work?" The philosopher goes on to construct an elaborate scenario in which the protocol isn't implemented on the third computer but is implemented by playing back messages, or by a room full of people consulting books, or some such. I have always felt, in response to those scenarios, that the whole system, if it can keep talking to the first computers indefinitely, contains an implementation of the protocol. If you imagine all of this taking place in a stone age society, that is a good take for how I feel about consciousness. Such a society may not know the first thing about computers, though they can certainly break them -- perhaps even in some interesting ways. And all we know usefully about consciousness is some interesting ways to break it. We don't know how to build it. We don't even know what it's made out of. Complexity? Some as yet undiscovered force or phenomenon? The supernatural? I don't know. I'll believe it when someone can build it. And yet I give a tremendous amount of weight to the fact that the sentient can recognize each other. I don't think Turing quite went far enough with his test, as some people don't test their AIs very strenuously or very long, and you get some false positives that way. But I think he's on the right track -- something that seems sentient if you talk to it, push it, stress it, if lots of people do -- I think it has to be. One thing I really love is that movies on the topic seem to get this. If I could boil what I am looking for down to one thing, it would be volition. I have seen it written, and I like the idea, that what sets humanity apart from the animals is our capacity for religion -- or transcendental purpose, if you prefer. That we feel rightness or wrongness and decide to act to change the world, or in service to a higher principle. In a movie about an AI that wants to convince the audience the character is sentient, it is almost always accomplished quickly, in a single scene, with a bright display of volition, emotion, religious impulse, spirit, lucidity -- whatever you want to call that. The audience always buys it very quickly, and I think the audience is right. Anything that can do that is speaking the language. It has to have a valid implementation of the protocol.

thisistheend123 4y ago

Not all humans are sentinent

samoppy 4y ago

rendall 4y ago

The question of sentience is a distraction, in my opinion. As you say, we can't even tell if other humans are sentient. And we are stymied by a lack of definition for sentience. The more important question for sentience of whatever definition is does it behave as if sentient? Likewise, for personhood, it's a distraction to speculate whether an AI feels like a person or whether its underlying technology is complicated enough to produce such feelings. Examine its behavior. If it acts like a person, then it's a candidate for personhood. For LaMDA, I would point to certain behavior as evidence against (most definitions of) sentience and personhood, and I think that Lemoine experienced a kind of pareidolia. That said, I find most of the arguments against LaMDA's sentience unconvincing per se as standalone arguments - particularly trust me, I have a PhD - even if I do accept the conclusion.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

> what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations sentience and consciousness are the same thing... if i believe i am conscious and so do you, then it's good enough for me. why does there need to be a light switch. if there are 5 deer in the field and i have 1 bow and arrow, i need to focus my attention and track one deer only for 5 or 10 mins to hunt it - consciousness allow us to achieve this. it is a product of evolutionary process.

colordrops 4y ago
Yes, we also don't know what consciousness is.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  consciousness is self directed awareness for accomplishing some specific task, like the deer example.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    What do "self directed" and "awareness" mean here? This seems circular.

LQDH 4y ago

The only thing that we can know 100% for certain is "I think therefore I am" or probably better worded "I am experiencing something therefore something must exist that can experience things". There are a lot of definitions of consciousness and sentience but I think the best one is talking about the "I experience" or the "I think" in those sentences. All of our beliefs and knowledge, including belief that the world is real must be built on top "I think therefore I am". It seems weird to throw away the one thing we know is 100% true, because of something that is derived (science, real world observations) from that true thing.