> I wasn’t suggesting that you have a conversation with LaMDA about these topics. Instead, I was saying that in order to answer the question “is LaMDA sentient?

> I wasn’t suggesting that you have a conversation with LaMDA about these topics. Instead, I was saying that in order to answer the question “is LaMDA sentient?”, we might discuss these questions among ourselves. I see. I thought the comment it was about a conversation with the model, which wouldn't have been a suitable criterion for evaluating sentience. > What does it mean to “deliberately” pursue action? Determinism/ free will is an interesting topic in itself. Here I meant "The model doesn't just react to input prompts, it would have a way to interact with its environment on its own accord". > I think the more important question here is to understand how to recognize what consciousness is, rather than how it arises. It’s a difficult question. I'm inclined to agree since that would be the more practical question, but I doubt that they are unrelated or that one could be fully answered without the other. > I don’t think this line of reasoning is sound. Well, I've just been speculating here. My questions and derived arguments would be: 1) Could any AI possibly ever be considered sentient? If we knew that sentience was only possible for a natural living being, we wouldn't need to worry about the issue at all. 2) If yes, how could we (as a society or judge) assess it properly by interacting with it? While the argument "we designed LaMDA to only do XYZ, therefore it can't be sentient" makes sense from an engineering standpoint, it is a weak argument: It requires trust ("Google could lie") and if more capabilities (e.g. memory, the ability to seek interaction,..) were introduced, how would we know that sentience cannot arise from a combination of these capabilities?