[jerf]

I observe that current AIs are not embedded in time, and while we may not be able to agree exactly what "sentience" and "experience" is, "change over time" seems a basic requirement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727428

(Contrarians, or meta-contrarians, may jump up to claim otherwise, but I would say that while the question of what a non-temporal consciousness could hypothetically be may be fun to debate, it is also so far out of our experience that it is clearly not what we generally mean by the term and is therefore a completely different conversation.)

LLMs do not strike me as amenable to fixing this. But that only applies to LLMs, not to any future architectures.

[pulvinar]

I've been thinking about this and haven't found any fundamental difference.

Sure, LLMs don't have our fine temporal resolution, but GPT-4 (at least) knows the date, and can get the current time using Python when asked. And can tell the order of text events within a session. Our resolution has a limit too, somewhere under 1/25 of a second while awake, with much larger gaps when we sleep.

So it's a matter of degree, or more to the point it's how we might gerrymander definitions to suit us.