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Re:Google Sidelines Engineer Who Claims Its A.I. Is Sentient by Barrin92 on Sunday June 12, 2022 @09:21PM (#31719939)
I do agree, my point is rather that the question "“can computation be sentient” is trivially answered as, no it cannot. Is a computed brain sentient is like asking, 'is a computed sun hot?'. Computation is a subjective interpretation of a physical process. You don't get wet from a machine that computes the weather.

A digital machine and an analog one aren't equivalent merely because their behaviour can both be explained in the same terms. (i.e. computationally). That's not to say by the way you can't make some kind of sentient digital system, just that computation isn't really relevant to answer that question.

Re:Google Sidelines Engineer Who Claims Its A.I. Is Sentient by dr_dshiv on Monday June 13, 2022 @12:59AM (#31721361)
Computation does take energy and precisely modeling the sun would take a lot of it. Makes me wonder: would precisely computing the physics of something hot produce more heat than computing something cold?
Re:Google Sidelines Engineer Who Claims Its A.I. Is Sentient by scarmig on Monday June 13, 2022 @11:47AM (#31727185)
Higher temperature systems tend to have more microstates than lower temperature ones, so it seems like in principle you need less information to encode the state of a cold system than a hot system. I'm not sure how to translate that to the energy cost of computation of that system though.