4 ms·

>but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. I think it depends on whether you are attributing sentience to be somet

by Lerc 5mo ago

>but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. I think it depends on whether you are attributing sentience to be something that you imagine to be somehow transcendent, or if you think of it as just the descriptive term for what we are doing. For the latter it is undoubtable that we have it because that is literally what it means. It also becomes very difficult to come up with scenarios that say other things could never be sentient. If you use the transcendent definition, then you can say that it is special, but it becomes very difficult(perhaps impossible) to describe what it is, and clearly impossible to prove that anyone has it. It is a truly ineffable thing which you may as well call Attribute Q, because you can't really draw any conclusions about what has it nor any conclusions about the things that have it and what they are like. The only thing people use the ineffable thing for is as a club membership. The angst is worrying about if you are a member of a club that you don't really know anything about.

ThrowawayR2 5mo ago
From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience : "Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes." LLMs are clearly not sentient even if one sides with those who think it is reasoning.
- Lerc 5mo ago
  How do you know that? How about if you draw a line graph of ability and sentience, We know two points. No ability at all has a sentience of zero. Human ability has a sentience of 1HS (one human sentience). Mark a point where you think a LLM sits. (presumably from your description some ability, zero sentience) What shape is the line graph? It gets from zero to 1HS as you go across. When does it climb. If there is just some point where it goes from 0HS to 1HS then it seems like you should be able to point to what happened there. If the graph is a line or a curve then you have some varying degrees of sentience. If you put a LLM on zero sentience but recognise that it has some ability, then you are saying that if it is a curve, it starts flat and then begins climbing. Again, it seems like this marks a discrete level where something changes, why is that not identifiable. The only other alternatives are continual graduation down to zero, the shape of the curve is unknown, but it leads to the conclusion that everything with non-zero ability has some non-zero level of sentience. That makes Rocks a little bit sentient, but in an incomprehensibly small manner. Compared to a human it would be trying to imagine a single molecule of water in a swimming pool, you can think about it in the abstract, but you have no sense of what the scale difference actually is. But if that were the case then LLMs would be sentient, because everything would be, it is just a matter of scale, and where things sit on that scale. While that notion might be hard to imagine, it is the only one that does not raise the question of "What is the threshold to qualify". If you assume there is a clear threshold, why would it elude discovery so well?
  - queenkjuul 5mo ago
    > the ability to experience feelings and sensations This isn't a scale of "0 to Human," this is a binary: can a computer feel sensations? We know for a fact that many animals can, including humans. Rocks can not.
    - Joker_vD 5mo ago
      Descartes famously thought that no, animals did not have feelings and sensations, and their reactions were purely mechanistic in nature. You see, he believed that humans and animals had fundamentally different substrate i.e. immortal soul/lack of it, and you needed soul to percept. Thankfully, today we know better than that, and so we can be absolutely certain that computers can't feel sensations: they have different underlying substrate than the humans and animals. There is no way this view can be challenged.
      - customguy 5mo ago
        Who claimed it's because they're of fundamentally different substrate? And who is talking about computers? It's about algorithms. You could recreate an LLM with infinite humans and infinite time and infinite pens and pieces of paper surely, just like you can make a 16-bit computer in Minecraft, and it would not make that LLM more or less sentient. That Descartes analogy is far off the mark, since we're not making guesses about something that existed before us, we are talking about something we made and are making. Just like you know there's no fairies moving clock hands because you know how a clock is made. I'd even say that some people get confused, or confuse others for money, is the only reason this is even discussed.
      - queenkjuul 5mo ago
        Do you, or did Descartes, believe that rocks can feel sensation? GP asserts they do. I assert they don't. I only raised the question about computers, i didn't answer it. But the other reply raises a good point: Descartes would not have thought so about a clock, because he knows both how a clock is made and how a clock works. He knew neither about animals. We know both about computers.

by Lerc 5mo ago

ThrowawayR2 5mo ago

From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience : "Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes." LLMs are clearly not sentient even if one sides with those who think it is reasoning.

Lerc 5mo ago
How do you know that? How about if you draw a line graph of ability and sentience, We know two points. No ability at all has a sentience of zero. Human ability has a sentience of 1HS (one human sentience). Mark a point where you think a LLM sits. (presumably from your description some ability, zero sentience) What shape is the line graph? It gets from zero to 1HS as you go across. When does it climb. If there is just some point where it goes from 0HS to 1HS then it seems like you should be able to point to what happened there. If the graph is a line or a curve then you have some varying degrees of sentience. If you put a LLM on zero sentience but recognise that it has some ability, then you are saying that if it is a curve, it starts flat and then begins climbing. Again, it seems like this marks a discrete level where something changes, why is that not identifiable. The only other alternatives are continual graduation down to zero, the shape of the curve is unknown, but it leads to the conclusion that everything with non-zero ability has some non-zero level of sentience. That makes Rocks a little bit sentient, but in an incomprehensibly small manner. Compared to a human it would be trying to imagine a single molecule of water in a swimming pool, you can think about it in the abstract, but you have no sense of what the scale difference actually is. But if that were the case then LLMs would be sentient, because everything would be, it is just a matter of scale, and where things sit on that scale. While that notion might be hard to imagine, it is the only one that does not raise the question of "What is the threshold to qualify". If you assume there is a clear threshold, why would it elude discovery so well?
- queenkjuul 5mo ago
  > the ability to experience feelings and sensations This isn't a scale of "0 to Human," this is a binary: can a computer feel sensations? We know for a fact that many animals can, including humans. Rocks can not.
  - Joker_vD 5mo ago
    Descartes famously thought that no, animals did not have feelings and sensations, and their reactions were purely mechanistic in nature. You see, he believed that humans and animals had fundamentally different substrate i.e. immortal soul/lack of it, and you needed soul to percept. Thankfully, today we know better than that, and so we can be absolutely certain that computers can't feel sensations: they have different underlying substrate than the humans and animals. There is no way this view can be challenged.
    - customguy 5mo ago
      Who claimed it's because they're of fundamentally different substrate? And who is talking about computers? It's about algorithms. You could recreate an LLM with infinite humans and infinite time and infinite pens and pieces of paper surely, just like you can make a 16-bit computer in Minecraft, and it would not make that LLM more or less sentient. That Descartes analogy is far off the mark, since we're not making guesses about something that existed before us, we are talking about something we made and are making. Just like you know there's no fairies moving clock hands because you know how a clock is made. I'd even say that some people get confused, or confuse others for money, is the only reason this is even discussed.
    - queenkjuul 5mo ago
      Do you, or did Descartes, believe that rocks can feel sensation? GP asserts they do. I assert they don't. I only raised the question about computers, i didn't answer it. But the other reply raises a good point: Descartes would not have thought so about a clock, because he knows both how a clock is made and how a clock works. He knew neither about animals. We know both about computers.