Re:Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
by paskozdilar on Saturday July 23, 2022 @07:27PM
(#32208603)
Exactly.
And the real problem is the way humans decide sentience in the first place - by how much the machinery acts as if it were sentient. There is no other information - just our perception. If we imagine two agents, A and B, one sentient and one insentient, but both acting identically, we theoretically couldn't decide which one is which.
So whether or not there is sentience in a machine then becomes a question as unanswerable as whether there is something that exists outside the universe we can perceive. We cannot know what we cannot possibly perceive.
And the real problem is the way humans decide sentience in the first place - by how much the machinery acts as if it were sentient. There is no other information - just our perception. If we imagine two agents, A and B, one sentient and one insentient, but both acting identically, we theoretically couldn't decide which one is which.
So whether or not there is sentience in a machine then becomes a question as unanswerable as whether there is something that exists outside the universe we can perceive. We cannot know what we cannot possibly perceive.