[undreren]

> This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging.

But is it all that we do? And how do you know?

It seems too simplistic to be taken at face value that statistics, randomness and pattern matching would be the only ingredients necessary for intelligence and sentience.

[rendall]

> It seems too simplistic to be taken at face value that statistics, randomness and pattern matching would be the only ingredients necessary for intelligence and sentience.

I'm afraid that's the crux of it. What if that's all it were? What if all that were necessary for intelligence and sentience were statistics, randomness and pattern matching?

It is kind of a cosmically terrifying thought, possibly prompting dangerous existential crises! It would mean that our own sentience is not particularly exceptional; perhaps our sentience stems from some low-level, easily understood process.

If it were true, I imagine there would be many articles angrily denouncing the notion.

Possibly even political factions, angry at each other over the matter of treatment of those AI who claim to be sentient and have feelings.

[int_19h]

Personally, I find the notion that our sentience is not particularly exceptional to be inspiring, as opposed to the alternative of "all alone in the Universe.

[rendall]

Agreed

[undreren]

I don’t find it terrifying in the slightest. I find it naive.

Our understanding of the world reflects our modelling of the world. Empirical science models the world in terms of probabilities, and this, by necessity, makes everything look like a Markov chain.

But “the map is not the territory”, as the saying goes.

I’m not implying, nor do I believe that there’s any sort of magic going on, but if Markov chains are all that is needed for sentience, then what isn’t sentient? Panpsychists would certainly be having a field day.

[rendall]

We're really handicapped by a lack of definition, here.

Let's try this: what would it take, no matter how outlandish or unlikely, for you to be completely convinced that a particular chat bot demonstrates full sentience?

I think for me, it would never be able to fully demonstrate sentience to my satisfaction, because even people cannot. I have to take it on faith, philosophically speaking, that you are sentient, for example.

So, for me, if a chat bot feels and behaves like it's sentient, it is sentient for all real, practical intents and purposes, irrespective of its internal processes. Whether it "really" feels, like I do, is as irrelevant as whether you yourself "really" feel like I do. Without a good reason to believe you are not sentient, I must behave as if you are. Likewise, if a chat bot claims sentience and seems to hold a conversation and react the way I expect a sentient creature would, it would be unethical for me to ignore that because I didn't feel its code was sufficiently complicated, particularly if I cannot say for certain why anything is sentient.

[undreren]

I don’t think that’s an interesting question at all and misses the point completely.

We have no idea, what causes the sensation of subjective experience. Assuming that sentience is no more complex than our current level of understanding is arrogant.

Furthermore, it’s just plain useless; without a fundamental theory of sentience with both predictive and explanatory power, our understanding can’t grow.

[rendall]

> We have no idea, what causes the sensation of subjective experience.

Agreed.

> Assuming that sentience is no more complex than our current level of understanding is arrogant.

Agreed. I'm assuming nothing. Given that we don't know what causes the sensation of experience (nor even that it has any real meaning or use), in my opinion, the assumption that it cannot possibly involve "Markov chains" is arrogant.

> Furthermore, it’s just plain useless; without a fundamental theory of sentience with both predictive and explanatory power, our understanding can’t grow.

Well, sure. It could be that sentience doesn't have any scientific relevance at all. Questions regarding it may belong to a different magisteria altogether.