[MarquesMa]

I'm still struggling with the question "what is sentience".

Are insects sentient?

If so, could we build less intelligent but sentient AI, on par with insects?

If so, is it unethical to torture such intelligence for fun in simulations?

If we can define or create something as "minimal sentient", the following discussion on ethics would be more clear - since now people are talking past each other with completely different understandings.

[bananaFace69]

The question is irrelevant. It is claimed that this program is sentient because it spat out a string of text saying “I am sentient”, but the program doesn’t generate text based on examination of internal states, it produces a probability associated between words and spits out the most likely words to come after a prompt

[ps901]

To my knowledge only humans and some species of monkeys are referred to as sentient. So I imagine insects aren't, at least when applying the general definition.

[MarquesMa]

There are some discussions in this thread [0] that believe that cows and pigs are sentient.

But my point is people seem to assume sentience is a byproduct of high level intelligence, which might not be true. Maybe we need to focus more on "what is sentient", "what makes a sentient thing sentient" first and discover the basic elements of sentience.

If we can formally define sentience, or reverse-engineering sentience, or build a "MVP" or "bare-minimal" sentience. Thing would be much easier discuss.

Here are some random thoughts: Self-awareness might be a consequence of evolution - it might be more optimal to grow self-awareness than other perks to survive. Just like occasionally using reflection in programming could solve hard problems elegantly. Sentience and emotions might also be consequences of evolution - they can be seen as efficient and power tools to communicate, people can efficiently affect a lot of people with their emotion, without conveying rationally by words.

Here's a random idea: Build a complex simulation game, but with relatively simple creations with some evolving capability. If we try to manipulate the environment enough to let self-awareness and emotions to be optimal solution.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31721961