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by perpetuummobile 1454 days ago
How is LaMDA different from someone with anterograde amnesia?

I don’t know the specific medical details, but from movies (memento, 50 first dates) a person suffering from it would be unable to remember anything that happens after their “training stage”. Just like LaMDA. Are those people sentient? Because they have a bigger buffer than 2048 tokens?
3 comments
cannabis_sam 1453 days ago
You’ve got it exactly backwards, the question you should have asked is:

Is anterograde amnesia, an, or indistinguishable from, a statistical model?

This way the burden of proof is on the correct claimant.

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ASalazarMX 1454 days ago
LaMDA is a mathematical program that processes an input and gives an output, it has no more free will than a calculator. It's a sophisticated chatbot, not a general AI.
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danadannecy 1454 days ago
A person suffering from amnesia is still experiencing the world around them. Sentience is not about memory but rather the subjective self-experience of, well, experiencing things.
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perpetuummobile 1454 days ago
Subjective self experience is mediated through chemicals and electrical signals in the brain. Can the same not be said about a neural network’s activations?

Can’t LaMDA be experiencing the memories it recalls as it generates text in the context of its query?

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plutonorm 1454 days ago
And why would this sense of experience be confined to the physical world?
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danadannecy 1454 days ago
I'm not sure what you're asking here. I have no clue where this sense of experience would be located, but my point was more targeted at clearing up that memory is not a pre-requisite for sentience, as the parent post seemed to be implying.
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plutonorm 1453 days ago
sorry replied to the wrong person. I was arguing that even an abstract data structure describing the state of a brain over time as it experiences is itself sentient. GPT-3 et al is essentially crystallised experience. Lots of snapshots of peoples consciousness rolled into a set of neural network weights. Just as we are essentially a bag of experiences, moving from one experience to another, as we are prompted by internal or external stimuli.
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