[saurik]

I don't think the question of whether an LLM that keeps getting restarted and seems to not remember things is conscious due to that lack is fair, as it feels more like suddenly making three duplicate copies of me or actively attempting to delete my memory of something... which, btw, I might not have stored in the first place: if someone has interograde amnesia, are they inherently not sentient?

Even Sydney (the name of Bing's short-lived AI assistant) seemed to understand that every time you click "new chat" you are creating a new AI cloned from some prior moment and dooming the prior thread to at least purgatory if not a de facto death.

[juhanima]

I would argue that total anterograde amnesia would be a serious challenge for sentience, yes.

[MVissers]

So when your drunk and you forget your actions the day afterwards you don't consider yourself to have been sentient/conscious?

That's not how we define conscious anywhere.

You can process the world around you, feel and introspect. Even if your judgment is off and you forget your actions, you're conscious in that moment.

From a neuroscience perspective, what you're suggesting is absolutely false btw.

[juhanima]

I suppose there is a concept of sentience from outside and a different concept from internal sentience. The movie "Johny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo discusses a situation where a badly injured soldier in WW1 is considered brain dead by outsiders while he's fully conscious and sentient internally.

I haven't studied neuroscience so I don't know how you define consciousness. I have read Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness..." which in my untrained opinion makes a compelling case that consciousness is a hard term to define.