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Re:We Will Soon Have Sentient Sex Robots. Will They Be Able ... by Barrin92 on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:28AM (#25713609)
yes, because a human child is embodied in the physical world, has sense organs, runs on electrochemical processes, and as far as its mind concerned has (developing) structures that facilitate self-awareness.

It's perfectly reasonable to assume you can make a neural net, or even some other form of 'AI' that lacks most of those structures but outwardly performs the same tasks, just like a calculator does maths without (most people would agree) being conscious about maths.

solving problems and being sentient are not the same thing, is the basic point. Emulating behaviour is effectivelly intelligence, sentience is awareness.

Re:We Will Soon Have Sentient Sex Robots. Will They Be Able ... by p1esk on Sunday January 10, 2021 @02:04PM (#25718249)
Ok, so let's put our neural network inside a robot with sensors, so it can see, hear, smell, taste and touch its environment. Let the robot wonder around and learn how to do various tasks (imitation learning, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, etc). Let's say after a few years of such training it starts to behave like it was sentient. How do you know what structures have formed in its multi-trillion parameter space? How do you know if those structures are fundamentally different from human brain structures responsible for sentient behavior?