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Alien comes to Earth. "Do you think those organic blobs are sentient?" "Well, look at the structures they managed to build. Very impressive, some of their sca
by gnramires 4y ago
Alien comes to Earth.
"Do you think those organic blobs are sentient?"
"Well, look at the structures they managed to build. Very impressive, some of their scale is comparable to the primitive ones we had."
"Sure, but that's not a result of the individual. They're so small. And separated, they don't think like conjugate minds at all. This is a product of thousands of individuals drawing upon their mutual discoveries and thousands of years of discoveries."
"We're larger and more capable, but they're still good enough to be sentient. Of course, we also rely on culture to help us. Even though deriving the laws of physics was quite easy. Also, we've lost most of the record when we were carbon-sulfur-silicon blobs one day as well. We must have had some sentience."
"I think they're just advanced pattern recognizers -- good ones, I'll give you that. We should experiment with thresholds of gate count to be sure when sentience really starts."
"It starts at one gate", replied the other being "and increases monotonically from there, depending on the internal structure of qualia, and structure information flow of the communication networks."
After some deliberation, they decide to alter their trajectory and continue to the next suitable planetary system reached in the next 5000 years. The Galactic Network is notified.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoThis isn't the gotcha you think it is.
- gnramires 4y agoIt's not meant as a gotcha, it's meant as a short story :)
- Brian_K_White 4y agoYou claim to have told a random story with no contextual point?
- pyuser583 4y agoPlease don’t publish works of fiction here unless they’re somehow on topic.
- _moof 4y agoPlease enlighten us.
- scarmig 4y agoIt doesn't do anything to prove LaMDA (or a monkey, or a rock, or anything) sentient, but at the same time it points out a real failure mode of how sentient entities might fail to recognize sentience in radically different entities.
- notahacker 4y agoI think this is true: sentience is hard to recognise (to the extent that "sentience" has any tangible meaning other that "things which think like us") But I think with LaMDA certain engineers are close to the opposite failure mode: placing all the weight on familiarity with use of words being a familiar thing perceived as intrinsically human, and none of it on the respective whys of humans and neural networks emitting sentences. Less like failing to recognise civilization on another planet because it's completely alien and more like seeing civilization on another planet because we're completely familiar with the idea that straight lines = canals...
- YuriNiyazov 4y agoYou basically copied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They're_Made_Out_of_Meat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They're_Made_Out_of_Meat Edit: here's the full text, for completeness https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...