[qeternity]

That’s now how this works, you come up with a hypothesis, and then prove it. You don’t do the opposite.

So, why would a machine want to continue its existence? How would that feedback loop come to exist?

In biology, Darwinian forces have a good explanation. I’ve never heard one for non-reproductive systems. We know exactly the cost function by which these models respond, because that’s basically the main element that humans have control over (that and training corpus).

[housedrafta]

What do you consider life that wants to continue its existence, but does not decide? Are plants or viruses sentient?

[qeternity]

This is exactly my point. Plants and viruses are not sentient, but there are very well studied and proven mechanism by which survival traits are naturally selected.

Nobody has yet suggested any such mechanism for an ANN.

[BoorishBears]

No, they're not.

I feel like this is bait to start linking to random "sentient-like" behaviors in plants so I'll head that off with this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-020-01579-w