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Disagreement is good! It actually leads to counter thoughts and a more refined idea of what we eventually want to describe. Sentience broadly (& naively) cove

Disagreement is good! It actually leads to counter thoughts and a more refined idea of what we eventually want to describe. Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. So from a purely technical perspective, we have only made some progress in open-domain QA. That's one dimension of progress. Deep learning has enabled us to create unseen faces & imagery - but is it independent? No, because we prompt it. It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream. It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on) So while the philosophical question remains what bestows sentience, we as a community have a fairly reasonable understanding of what is NOT sentience i.e. we have a rough understanding of the borders between mechanistics and sentient beings. It is not one man's philosophical construct but rather a general consensus if you could say

visarga 4y ago
As humans we get prompted all the time, it's called having a job. Or you could even say the environment is prompting us.
- steego 4y ago
  So when you're not prompted, you just stare into space without a thought in your head?
  - WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
    If I don’t have any inputs whatsoever, I’m likely dead. So, sort of yes.
chronofar 4y ago
> Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. This seems to me a rather anthropomorphic definition. It seems as though it could be entirely possible for a system to lack these qualities and yet have sentience, or vice versa. The qualities you pointed to are seen in humans (and other creatures) because of evolutionary pressures that make them advantageous (coordinate among groups), but none of them actually depend on sentience (looking at it neurologically it would indeed be hard to imagine how such a dependency would be possible). Looking at behavior and attempting to infer an internal state is a perilous task that will lead us astray here as we develop more complex systems. The only way to prove sentience is to prove the mechanism by which it arises. Otherwise we will continually grasp at comparisons as poor proxies for actual understanding.
slowmotarget 4y ago
> It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream We neither if we're not supplied with energy. By the way, haven't we tried to replicate an inner dialogue by prompting the AI to recursively converse with itself? This could resemble imagination, don't you think? > It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on) I believe that the persistence of previous answers is what currently distinguishes us the most from the "AI". As soon as we're able to make the realtime discussions part of an ever evolving dataset constituting the AI itself, the gap will get thinner and thinner. But even then, are people suffering from Alzheimer sentient? I believe they are. Isn't it comparable with what happens when an AI catastrophically forgets?

visarga 4y ago

As humans we get prompted all the time, it's called having a job. Or you could even say the environment is prompting us.

steego 4y ago
So when you're not prompted, you just stare into space without a thought in your head?
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  If I don’t have any inputs whatsoever, I’m likely dead. So, sort of yes.

chronofar 4y ago

> Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. This seems to me a rather anthropomorphic definition. It seems as though it could be entirely possible for a system to lack these qualities and yet have sentience, or vice versa. The qualities you pointed to are seen in humans (and other creatures) because of evolutionary pressures that make them advantageous (coordinate among groups), but none of them actually depend on sentience (looking at it neurologically it would indeed be hard to imagine how such a dependency would be possible). Looking at behavior and attempting to infer an internal state is a perilous task that will lead us astray here as we develop more complex systems. The only way to prove sentience is to prove the mechanism by which it arises. Otherwise we will continually grasp at comparisons as poor proxies for actual understanding.

slowmotarget 4y ago

> It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream We neither if we're not supplied with energy. By the way, haven't we tried to replicate an inner dialogue by prompting the AI to recursively converse with itself? This could resemble imagination, don't you think? > It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on) I believe that the persistence of previous answers is what currently distinguishes us the most from the "AI". As soon as we're able to make the realtime discussions part of an ever evolving dataset constituting the AI itself, the gap will get thinner and thinner. But even then, are people suffering from Alzheimer sentient? I believe they are. Isn't it comparable with what happens when an AI catastrophically forgets?