FWIG one materialist view of sentience is that it's an emergent property - it is a way of describing a state of a complex system. The question, then, is: what

FWIG one materialist view of sentience is that it's an emergent property - it is a way of describing a state of a complex system. The question, then, is: what are the properties of the system that the term describes? In this case, it looks kinda like: memory, self-awareness, and understanding. Memory isn't a question - it's possible for these things to remember (even if sometimes that memory is in the form of access to data on the internet). Self-awareness is trickier - but by most measurable schema, the machines seem to be doing as well as humans do in this regard (they can describe themselves and talk about their place in the world in context). Understanding is a topic of hot debate - but I think it tends to fall to the same problems as that of sentience generally; that is, we have this concept of what understanding is, and we know enough about how LLMs work to say that they're not the same, but if you start poking at how to measure it, we're back to square one vis a vis what's apparent might not be what is.