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by chrisnight
1101 days ago
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The idea that an entity can't be sentient because of a lack of senses has the problem where it invalidates the sentience of humans though. Do you consider a blind person having less sentience than a person that can see because they lack the sense of sight? Even if we consider sentience as an on/off switch, what about a person that has no senses at all (whether someone like that exists theoretically or in reality)? With no way to tie back thoughts to the real world, are they no longer sentient? Obviously we don't know for certain if other humans are sentient, but it seems necessary to establish the premise they are in order to get anywhere in the argument for sentience of AIs. In this case, we need an argument about the sentience of AIs that coincides with our experiences of the sentience of humans, which this argument doesn't seem to do. Even if we limit ourselves to thinking about people with all of their senses, there's still information that we cannot tie back to the physical world with our senses. Take someone who sits at a computer all day. They read news and talk about it online, without ever interacting with the news physically. Take someone who theoretically has never done anything outside of read and type on a computer all day. Are they not sentient because they've never physically interacted with the world outside of their computer? |
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They still interact with an external world. An LLM doesn't, at all, not even a little bit. That's the crucial difference. A person will know when things didn't go as predicted, as the real world will provide feedback they can sense. An LLM in contrast has no idea what is going on, its past actions don't exist for it. There is only the prompt and the unchanging base model.
That said, this is not to disparage the abilities of LLMs, they simply were never designed to be sentient. If one wants an LLM that is sentient, one has to build some feedback into the system that allows it to change and evolve depending on its past actions.