4 ms·
> Why is it essential? I'm sure some philosophy enthusiasts will explain this to you in a book-sized response, but for me personally it's as simple as this: T
by antisthenes 2y ago
> Why is it essential?
I'm sure some philosophy enthusiasts will explain this to you in a book-sized response, but for me personally it's as simple as this:
There must be a physical phenomenon that can be associated with the concept being described. So your description of a robot that interprets a charge level of a battery as hunger would actually "be hungry", yes.
> it doesn't say why a camera responding to a 550 nm photon isn't seeing red when your retina is.
I think in that case we can agree that the camera IS seeing, because the camera sensor serves the same function as our retina. The physical process of capturing photons exists in both cases.
But the current LLMs don't have any requirement to be attached to physical sensors, so they can't be sentient by that definition alone.
- ben_w 2y ago> But the current LLMs don't have any requirement to be attached to physical sensors, so they can't be sentient by that definition alone. Ultimately, the text reaching an LLM (be it by training or by prompting) is from the real world. Even without that… dreams may be missing important things, but still have something experimental to them. Not sure if I would want to call it a "sentient" experience due to linguistic ambiguity, but I would call it one of qualia, which is the thing the article is writing about.