However, our understanding of this concept is too limited to create a formal model that we can define satisfactorily; and coming up with an arbitrary model that fits some of our intuitions is silly. This is what the Integrated Information Theory people did, and I find it closer to economic models than to actual science - a nice little abstraction that can give you the appearance of being rigorous while in fact speculating wildly.
On the other hand, I think it's fair to say there are some decently well understood must-haves for something to match our idea of sentience - and being aware of yourself in the world is one of them; and yes, in that sense, it makes more sense to talk about the robot arm as being sentient, as simple as it is, than it is to say that about LaMDA or GPT-3. Of course, the robot arm is missing other per-requisites for sentience - it's programming is far too rigid, and it has no introspection.
Not at all!
When we say conscious, do we mean awake or self-aware or recognizes self in mirror or something else? When we say sentient do we mean feels or intelligent or trapped in the wheel of reincarnation and suffering or something else? When we say intelligent, do we mean completes tasks or uses language or...?
The concept that we can't yet capture formally is the kind of sentience that living, awake humans surely have, most animals probably have, and rocks definitely don't have. The limits of this are harder to pin down, as, again, we lack a deep formal understanding.
But we do know exactly what we'd like to formally model.
Do we really? I thought it was a deeply intractable problem for cognitive theorists and other such experts.
Haven't you ever encountered a challenge that you at first thought was straight-forward and obvious to solve, but after digging in find it was unexpectedly nuanced and difficult?
> "The limits of this are harder to pin down, as, again, we lack a deep formal understanding."
Doesn't that contradict?
If you were to try pinning down precisely what you mean by "the kind of sentience that living, awake humans surely have, most animals probably have, and rocks definitely don't have", I suspect it will not be nearly as easy as you think.
How do you know rocks don't have it, for instance? How do you know you do, for that matter?
These are both part of the (incomplete) definition I gave you.
There have been problems like this before in the history of science - we have concepts that we intuitively understand, and want to give a formal definition for. This can take a long time of careful study - such as coming up with a complete definition for "insect". Other times it can indeed turn out that the concept was ill-defined - there is no possible formal definition for the concept "fish" that doesn't appeal to the human mind (the various organisms we think of as fish are too diverse genetically to find a satisfactory one-to-one mapping with any group of animals, even if you exclude a small set of them, like the aquatic mammals).
We do not know how to translate it to anything outside of ourselves. That's why it's not readily formalizable.
I took issue with the article saying sentience requires an "awareness of the world" too. I think it self-evident that a humans sentience doesn't disappear when we remove sensors like sight, or touch, or sound - it just means their experienced world is different from the world. In the end, I only really feel confident saying sentience requires probably some perception, and information processing.
A sense of self also feels right, like it should be necessary, to me - but again depending on what senses we give to a thinking entity, its reasonable it may not have enough sensory information to create a concept of self vs other, while still being able to process information intelligently, ""think"" and learn.
There are lots of other arguments above saying Lambda can't be sentient because it doesn't experience human emotions, fear, self-presevation, and doesn't run until prompted. However I think those are again all sensory choices and implementation details, which avoid the actual question of what sentience as an emergent behaviour is, and how we could ever detect it.
These are age-old questions experts in the field still argue about, it's sad to me how over-confidently a lot of the above repliers are in their lack of consideration to the problem at hand.
If you think that, try to come up with a black-box test that determine if something or someone is sentient / conscious.
I think that it is pretty clear to US that WE are sentient, and it's pretty clear to us that block of silicon isn't sentient, because it's so different from us, and because it doesn't make a sad face when we're mean to it -- but that assumes that our form of sentience is the only one that counts.
The article quotes a tweet saying
> It is mystical to hope for awareness, understanding, common sense, from symbols and data processing using parametric functions in higher dimensions.
but that is all our brains do, really.
How can we claim that a computer doing the same kinds of computations that we do is fundamentally different? This just reeks of human exceptionalism.
> but that is all our brains do, really.
> How can we claim that a computer doing the same kinds of computations that we do is fundamentally different? This just reeks of human exceptionalism.
Our brains and physiological mechanisms are far more complex than matrix multiplications sprinkled with some tan or max(0,x). I'm ok with saying that we are big machines etc, but the power of our primitive operations, the range in aspect and behaviors of our mechanisms is far far greater than what is currently done in NN. The complexity of what is learned in NN, seen as a computer program, seems to me to be at the level of a full-text-search index together with a probabilistic automaton. What i believe we are as humans (and other "very sentient" animals) is more on the level of linux: tons of subsystems each looking very different, tons of "drivers" for accomplishing very specific tasks rapidely.
As I said, we don't understand such things at a deep enough level to come up with formal models of them. But we do know what it is that we'd want to model. We do know for sure that humans and other mammals are sentient, while rocks are not.
I also can't generate a black box test that will predict whether something is porn, but that doesn't mean I don't understand what porn is, or that it is some deep mystery.
You only understand what it is for you. The history of complete failures with regard to obscenity laws makes it quite clear though that this is not sufficiently common to produce satisfactory definitions at a societal level.
You are mistaking the overlap of opinion you share within your social cohort with some sort of objective, species wide truth.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness
We have empirical tests of self-awareness including the Mirror Test as well as observational studies including seeing whether a certain species displays grieving when its loved ones pass (which is evolutionarily unnecessary but is meaningful emotionally).
Grieving is an evolved response to nomadic group species, so we didn't leave useful or closely related members behind; In their absence we feel compelled to 'search' for them, or be near their carcass. Its interesting how this evolved impulse has been adapted into ritual by our developing ability to understand mortality; But its not really special in any self-awareness kind of sense.
A robotic arm with a self-collision avoidance algorithm (no ML or anything like that) needs a model of itself in the "world" it exists in; a set of bounding boxes at least. Is it self-aware by this definition?
Sentience and consciousness are really ill-defined terms so everyone discusses this under their own arbitrary set of assumptions, at least that's my impression.