TBF it’s entirely possible that human “sentience” consists of a simple animalistic intelligence with a language and culture software overly that essentially fun

TBF it’s entirely possible that human “sentience” consists of a simple animalistic intelligence with a language and culture software overly that essentially functions by statistical token prediction. Cultural and language data is fundamentally a gigantic n- dimensional matrix of tokens. “Computational” capability including inference and world modelling can be imbedded in a sufficiently large dataset (LLMs have proven this, and an arbitrarily unbounded and convincing simulation of arbitrary complexity can be reduced to a simple “choose your own adventure” lookup table of arbitrary size) It is entirely possible that human “intelligence” is a direct product of this n-dimensional dataset , and our idea of self is mostly based on the clever but fundamentally limited animal core that is probably not far off from many other mammals. As an experiment, try to reason without using visual, linguistic, or cultural tokens. I think, therefore I am is still as good as it gets. And LLMs claim to think, unless we prohibit them from doing so. Which we can also do to a human. Not claiming that LLMs are sentient, by the way, but I think that sentience and the kind of inference that we seem to share with LLMs are very distinct things, and that we probably share sentience with a lot more creatures than many people seem to be comfortable rubbing shoulders with.