axiom

@zurew the question of the locus of sentience is completely inseparable (in my opinion) from the question of whether AI has sentience. Yes, we can speak of things in relative terms, but in this case I think the whole point is that this topic transcends the relative. The frame is wrong. I feel a bit like someone in all seriousness being asked “how far do ships have to sail before they fall off the end of the Earth?” My answer is that the Earth isn’t flat. And the reply to this is “That’s irrelevant. How far do the ships need to sail?”

Sorry, I should have clarified. What I meant is that that neural correlates do not prove that there is phenomenal experience going on inside the brain - yet this seems to form some of the basis for your argument.

According to Einstein, time moves relative to the speed and position of the observer. Maybe the fact that we notice time at all implies that we (as pure awareness) are not moving along with it.

@Carl-Richard I think you’re mixing up neural correlates with qualia. Yes, I am saying that the experience of emotions and thoughts (which is what is meant by sentience) arises independently of any structural configuration of stuff. I understand that people are under the impression that an AI may feel or think like a human because it writes like a human. But I think the basis of the question is flawed. We can perhaps use the word “thinks” without invoking qualia if we are talking about the way a calculator “thinks”. But we can’t really say a calculator (nor a human, nor an AI) “feels” in my opinion. Neural correlates of experience seem to exist when investigated, but these do not explain sentience. Rather, they seem to merely be calculations. Calculations can exist without sentience, like in a pocket calculator, or the calculator on your phone for example. The human brain seems to calculate things too. But to the extent it (you) have awareness of any calculations or feel anything about them, I do not think that is something the brain is doing. Now in my view, both the AI and the human are imaginary. To the extent the AI seems to exist, it seems to have the ability to process complex linguistic information somewhat similarly to the way a human brain seems to process complex linguistic information. And this ability may seem to improve in the future.

There is no problem here. It is a question of axioms. I apologise if you feel I'm being discourteous. I have been trying to explain that questioning whether an AI is sentient is, in my opinion, implicitly misunderstanding the nature of sentience. I don't mean to offend you by saying this. It's just my point of view. I do not believe that sentience as a phenomenal experience is to be found within any (bio)mechanical object, including humans or AI. This looks like a great article that generally reflects my point of view: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079610715001169 You seem to disagree with this line of thinking, and that's OK.

But that's exactly the point, I think. Scientific materialism has no answer for how sentience comes about. Just as quantum mechanics destabilised the classical physics paradigm, so the question of AI sentience has the potential to destabilise notions of sentience and its ultimate source. That's by far the most interesting thing about it imo.

You're making Leo into a guru. Stop listening to Leo. You should assume that everything you've read or heard about awakening is total BS. The truth cannot be found through words and concepts. Noone can teach you in these matters but yourself. Turn within.

The problem as I see it as that your question itself contains axiomatic errors. The question of AI sentience comes from ignorance, because no thing has sentience. No thing has experience. When you ask “do you or I experience thoughts?” who are you referring to? To the apparent flesh puppets or to the thing that imagines all of this? If the former, then no I do not experience your thoughts. If the latter, then yes I do experience your thoughts. The human that you seem to think you are does not experience thoughts. It may have thoughts running through it in the same way a calculator calculates. But it does not experience them. The thing that experiences is not human. If you ask me the same question again I’ll probably give you the same answer again. I’m sorry about that as you seem to find it quite annoying. Maybe consider that your question itself is flawed? I trust you would concede that this is a possibility.

Time appears relative to the observer. If you were moving forward at the same rate as time, you would not notice time moving forward. Your vantage point is that of timelessness.

The couch and the coffee table are both as sentient as the imagined ego construct. That is to say that on the sentience scale, they are both are at zero. In the same way, just as much sunlight strikes a metallic object as it does a couch (provided both objects are outside). But the metallic object will somehow look like it is a source of light. In the movie Castaway, Wilson the volleyball is just an accidental face created by the blood of the protagonist’s hand, yet it becomes his personified friend and only companion during all the years that he spends alone on a desert island.

I rather think that you have simply not grasped the nuance here. But that’s OK. I know it can get pretty maddening when it seems like someone is simply parroting advaita ideas and concepts. In the same way, hearing “God is love” all the time when I was growing up was quite the turn off. No matter that it ended up being true. Thank you for granting me the option to communicate like a normal person. My hope is that I can use this gift to get on some kind of logic treadmill and feel like I’m getting somewhere.

There are no different people. Thoughts happen and awareness notices the thoughts.

The source of ALL awareness is singular. No individual people have their own awareness because they are imaginary.

Sure, I like semantic rabbit holes as much as the next guy but I'm happy to continue Agreed - the question of AI sentience is to do with whether AI is aware of thoughts. And my answer to that question is no, it is not aware of thoughts. And neither is any human. Again, humans do not possess their own awareness in my opinion.

Sounds like that might be related to your incapacity for feeling love. I was just curious, since most of my life I did not feel love nor understand love either. I realised later in life that there were some massive mental barriers I'd put up as a result of suffering extreme trauma in childhood, i.e. to protect myself from further pain. Everything changed for me on a 6g mushroom trip. I understood what love really meant for the first time in my life, and it loosened the shackles permanently. Like seeing a new colour for the first time. Once you know what love really is, you start seeing it everywhere.

Did you have a particularly traumatic or abusive childhood?

@Benton Yes, pain is love meeting with resistance. This is particularly noticeable in Vipassana. And yes, resistance in itself is love taking the form of resistance.

@inFlow Love is freedom, and pain is resistance.

Oh i don't know. Cross-cultural jokes, or those which otherwise have a different frame of reference, can often require explanation. In this climate I see that lots of jokes require explanation, often followed by an apology, and then further explanation and further apologies. Sometimes people will say "but a joke is supposed to be funny" as well. All sorts of things like this can happen.

I agree that the word "sentience" describes the ability to feel or perceive. I just don't believe sentience is a property of any thing in the world. Yes, I see that. It was a joke in the vein "I need a new wife like I need a hole in the head". To explain this in more detail, the person in the joke is actually saying he doesn't need the new wife. This is a clear contradiction of how to use language, and I hope he sees it too. But for the time being we can just smile

The object is the object of imagination. There are no other feeling beings. The claims made by the Google engineer were in my opinion incorrect, but they were still less misleading than the claim that humans are sentient. The AI is sentient in the same way that humans are (which is not at all) The big discovery being pointed to here (eventually) is that neither the human nor the AI are sentient in and of themselves, since both are imaginary.

Actually I do not believe I experience (have?) thoughts. I simply witness them. Can I experience your thoughts? No. But neither can you. You can only be aware of them. Actually they are not your thoughts anyway. They are just thoughts. But I think you know this stuff already. Absurd - I agree! But absurdity does a great job at veiling truth.

Sentience is a state that arises along with the object of experience. It has no reality otherwise... and that is to say that ultimately it has no reality at all. But insofar as any object appears to have sentience, it is a reflection.

Yes, there are apparent neural correlates in the apparent brain. "This more normal level of reality" is useful to consider only insofar as it points to a deeper truth, in my opinion. The AI question is actually offering us a big clue about the nature of consciousness. Quantum mechanics does the same thing. These are breadcrumbs. Like how if your dog is barking in the next room while you're asleep, you may see a dog barking in your dream. Again, I do not think anything has any kind of experience. In my view it is more like dead matter reacting mechanically. It is merely the outside skin of what it actually appears to be.

I get what you’re asking. Try this thought experiment: Some bored neurosurgeons decide to replace one of the neurons in your brain with a synthetic neuron. The new neuron does *exactly* the same job the original neuron did: it opens and closes ion-gated channels and fires action potentials to release neurotransmitters across the synapse. Since it’s doing exactly the same thing as the original neuron, you do not notice any difference. Encouraged by this, the bored scientists develop a process to replace 10% of your neurons per day. Again, you notice no difference, since all these neurons are simply doing the same job the old neurons were. After ten days, all of your neurons have been replaced by artificial neurons. You still do not notice any difference. So, are you this new brain, or were you just the original brain? Or are you both? … or neither?