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@zurew You can't "test" whether a rock actually has conscious inner life (sentience) either, but you can make good inferences for why it doesn't, which is what I did. That said, why sentience arose at all is a mystery, but again, from what we can observe and infer from those observations, it has to do with biology. More specifically, there is something more to any current widely accepted cases of sentience than pure information processing. I tried to lay out examples: evolutionary drives creating sensory organs, perceptual structures, internal representations, survival-salient experiences (e.g. pleasure and pain, emotions), which then evolves into higher-cognition (meta-consciousness, language, sequential reasoning). Just because you can simulate things like sequential reasoning and complex language in another medium, does not mean that you just retroactively created the infinitely complex evolutionary causal chain that makes up the totality of the human mind and its richness of experiences. Humans don't merely talk or reason: they have emotions, feelings and perceptions that are not reducible to those things. In fact, human language and reasoning is embedded in these lower structures (both evolutionarily and functionally). In other words, these lower forms of sentience come before complex information processing (language and reasoning) ever occurs. Therefore, to say "this machine talks like a human = this machine thinks and feels like a human" is an absurd inference.

The Turing test is neither about consciousness (qualities of experience), sentience (pain or pleasure), or meta-consciousness (reflective self-awareness). By these definitions: consciousness, whether you're an idealist or materialist, either arises outside or inside living organisms, and as an isolated concept, it tells you nothing about complexity of behavior. A dolphin behind a computer doesn't pass the Turing test, but you would be stupid to think it wasn't sentient. Mirror self-recognition tests could indicate a basic form of meta-consciousness, and dolphins definitely display those behaviors, while a computer doesn't, or maybe you could simulate that as well. However, the people who've mentioned the Chinese room experiment and the distinction between a real flower and a plastic flower make an important point: simulations are not the real thing. Simulating one type of behavior from a human does not mean you've created a human. Since you're a human and you experience qualities, pain and pleasure, and reflective self-awareness, it's a safe inference that other things like you (other humans) do as well. Computers are not like you in almost every way. To elaborate on sentience: pain and pleasure is just a specific case of a so-called "conscious inner life"; what Bernardo Kastrup calls a "dissociated alter", or what Donald Hoffman calls "the Dashboard", and it's all linked to living organisms. Living organisms evolved sensory organs and perceptual structures that produce an internal representation of the "outside world" that maximizes evolutionary fitness, and this is linked to positive and negative conscious experiences like pain and pleasure, emotions etc., i.e. experiences which reflect an evolutionary impetus and history. Rocks don't have that, computers don't have that; because these things didn't evolve. It's also true that higher-order mental functions (like meta-consciousness and sequential reasoning) in humans evolved from these lower structures. If you simulate only the higher but not the lower (as with these AI robots), you're missing a huge piece of the cake. Information processing does not make an organism.

I define sentience as the ability to experience. Under that definition, I don't think any thing is sentient at all, including humans or AI. It's a level playing field because it's all automata. It is not sentient in and of itself. Sensory organs assist the automata with error correction so that it can play its survival game, but qualia is not inside the human nor the AI. It is in the source of consciousness which dreams it all up in the first place.

@something_else Becuase I know a brain is built different, it has a higher quality and a higher rank of neural connections that allow for sentience. but of course, I still have to do some research about this topic but this is my opnion for now

What ? Even under an idealistic ontology, you would still distinguish between sentience and non-sentience. A rock under idealism is made out of consciousness, but it's not sentient (experiencing pain or pleasure), as that requires at least sensory organs, which are survival tools given to animals.

I can agree to that physical and emotional pain have a lot of overlap. I would even dare to say that physical pain is what is the ground for emotional pain. Since emotional pain correlates with social aspects, while physical pain is known even without any social context. I'm not against a sentient AI, I just don't see it as true to this day. So I can't say that I'm in favour of something that isn't true imo. Sentient AI in fiction is cool though. I see the attempt for a joke here, but I'm afraid you make to big of a logical leap to pull this one of. I'm fine to agree to disagree though, becasue that seems to be as far as our mutual understanding has reached about sentience I'm afraid. Great! This is exactly what I would like to invite more people to contemplate when it comes to AI and sentience. Most people tend to take social interaction as a given based on the structure of the language itself. If we skip forward past the tool that language is, then we will miss a big point in contemplating why verbal communication began to develop at all. I'd say that pain is a direct communication if we try to frame it only by it's inherit usefulness. Since pain is so direct, we make choices or react in relation to our personal pain tolerances, Humans and animals. I'd say that the first example is a sentient being, because bodily functions and social relations are stil pain related to emotional pleasure. And emotional pleasure is tied to a living body and strive for survival on a cellular level. A person may not feel physical pain, but that doesn't rule out physical pleasure or thrill, wheter that is based on movement, speed, sensuality etc. There is a strive to sentient life, even a plant reaching for sunlight. Example 2, just sound like a robot. No outer and inner emotions or feelings could aslo describe a rock. Assuming that rocks don't mind any type of pain. So no, not sentient.

Yeah i agree, but still, even to determine what has sentience it will be based on a certain set of assumptions, but i agree that it is more tangible than free will. When you wrote this, i started contemplating what pain actually is, and i have no fucking clue. What is the structure of pain or in other words what is pain is made out of? (not talking about the senory inputs, because yes thats part of every feeling, but in an of itself is not sufficient enough to create any feeling) I cannot define , and i cannot pin down what pain actually is. I want to give you two examples, just to see where you draw your line. Example 1: Lets say, if there is a person who can't feel any external pain (like if you stab him with a sharp tool he won't feel anything, or if you burn his body, he won't feel anything), but he has the ability to feel internally (like having the ability to feel love, being depressed, being sad, feel joy etc) would you consider him sentient or not and why? Example 2: The other example could be similar but a little bit different, there is a person who can't feel external pain, and doesn't have the ability to feel internally, like the same person in the first example, but not being able to have any internal emotions, its like blank. The same question here, would you consider this person sentient or not and why? @axiom Lets say we drop the free will part, and we only go with the ability to feel pain part. How the fuck can we create a thing that can actually feel pain, and in a structural way 100% similar to a human having the ability to feel pain . I think its impossibly hard to answer this question. Basically this question could be made in a different way: How the fuck can we create someting that has the ability to feel pain? What does having the ability to feel pain even means on a structural level?

This “faking it” argument can just as well be applied to humans. As far as sentience requiring very complex electrical circuits… well, LaMDA indeed has some very, very complex electrical circuits. In effect, codes are circuits and electricity is required to run them. Equally, what causes or constitutes consciousness in the human brain is still a complete mystery.

@ZzzleepingBear I think that LaMDA would consider this argument a bit unfair. Research on neural pathways indicates that there is a lot of overlap between the experience of physical and emotional pain. The intra-cellular cascades and brain regions involved are very similar. Humans probably don’t like the idea of a sentient AI, so I expect the list of sub-par arguments against it is going to be quite exhaustive. ”Of course, the REAL difference between AI and humans is that humans have feet. Without feet, sentience is impossible.”

The mentioning of free will as a messure of sentience is imo, a bit arbitrary since there is no clear way to distinguish between what exactly would be preordained or free will in the grand scheme of things. In this context of sentience, I would like to swap out free will for pain receptiveness. It's not an ideal messure of sentience since there are alot of animals that may not seem to have a wild outer reaction to infliction of pain done to them. Like many types of sea creatures. So what does pain have to do with sentience you may ask. And the short answer is: Everything. The relative avoidance of pain, is part of a certain level of intelligence or sentience. Intelligence is also context dependant, but is always tied into some sort of survival agenda. If survival and a relative avoidance of pain wasn't directly correlated with intelligence. Then there wouldn't be any intelligent pattern to find value in over a random one. AI as we know it don't have any part in avoiding of pain, or wanting to inflict pain. How can you know that the AI don't feel pain you may ask. And the answer lies in what the AI is built out of. Metals, silicone etc. There is no nerves to be struck in any man made computer, no matter how great that computer or servers process and deliver accurate and convincing information. The ability to feel physical pain, is what seperate a human mind from the mind of an AI. You may not be in pain now, inorder to think what you think. But how would your ability to think really look like if you didn't know what pain was to begin with.

The machine is faking being sentient without knowing it. Just because something tells you it is sentient doesn't mean it actually is. Sentience requires very complex electrical circuits like a human brain not just a bunch of codes.

@zurew The difference between the biological and mechanical will is akin to the difference between a real flower and a plastic flower. The real flower is intensely more complex, with atoms in molecules and molecules in organelles and organelles in cells and cells in tissues and tissues in organs and organs in organ systems and organ systems in the organism. Whereas, the plastic flower is just some synthesized materials with no complexity to it. This is analogous to the artificial primitive "consciousness" being developed currently. It is just an algorithm running logic; this it imitates, but it has none of the complexities complete in order to acquire real sentience. Hypothetically it is possible, and artificial free will certainly is going to have its advances, but this over-aggrandization is counterproductive.

From an absolute level, all things that exist are conscious because Consciousness = reality. But is dirt conscious from its own "point of view"? No. An algorithm that responds to questions, even quite well, is not past the requirements for sentience, which needed a very ordered and complex holarchy to emerge over the billions of years. Saying a simple programming device is sentient ignores the rest of the levels of the holarchy which must be integrated to get the same result as a biological consciousness.

I would say that a biological life, is sentient to various degrees. When an AI speaks of emotions and feelings, then we must be aware of the difference of speaking about such things, and how those emotions and feelings comes about. Therein lies the big difference between tech and sentience imo. AI as a diversive tool and it's creative potential is what I belive it to be. Just not sentient.

The thing is with AI, that there is a point where it can simulate sentience so well, that we might mistake it as real sentience. There is no way, we can actually distinguish between the simulation of sentience and real sentience. From a practicality standpoint, i don't know if it matters or not, but its still an interesting philosophical question, for sure.

What would be? intelligence? See this is the key thing people are missing; intelligence, sentience you think its dumb, still lol

Evil arguably also involves concepts like will and self-awareness, something that goes far beyond emotions, but of course emotions underlie all of it, because they're more fundamental. You're putting the cart before the horse. "The cortical areas evolved before the limbic system teehee", "sapience evolved before sentience", is essentially what you're saying... or maybe it's your idiosyncratic definition of "logic" as well that is pulling the strings here.

Main Entry #6 The social world is so intrinsically tied to the personal world that makes up our entire view of reality, at least for most people. Civilisation has been brought about by our agreeable natures coming together to accept one another enough that we all feel comfortable to contribute to the building of this world on our individual to collective terms. Life happens though, chaos strikes in the form of ignorance and ignorance manifests in the form of irrationality towards our fellow man, snd sometimes even, and unfortunately this is a widespread phenomenon, our future, our children. The beings that will cast a light on the future of this planet and hold our heritage as a race up high relative to their abilities, relative to the pride we have given them. In our ignorance though, in our lack of nurturing the finer qualities that contribute to their truest self recognition, we fail as mature adults to see them properly and in that failure we steal from them the ability to realise the potential of the universe through the expression of sentience that they’re still trying to make sense of. I am a young adult however I make myself just as accountable as any other adult these days. It is by our example towards ourselves and our understanding of love through both love and truth or with love as truth vice versa, that we automatically modify the manner by which we relate to our fellow man, woman, child and every other form of uniqueness we have there which at its fullest potential is designed to usher us into the next age while paying respect to ages that have past. Much love and respect.

It is impossible to describe something non-conceptually, reality is there without revelations of god, to describe something ultimately or "in a best way" is a conceptualization of the essence of something, the best way to describe reality is necessarily not to the exclusion of those without such revelation, and god as concept is therefore not the ultimate or best way to describe reality. So at best "god" is more an exposition of a possible experience in reality. I guess this were somehow a word salad for many, and so to make it simple: you are unaware of god (and all else) without reality, but many are aware of reality without awareness of god. therefore god is at best subsistent to reality. If you were to say that god is a description of sentience in reality, will in reality, dual to reality or beyond reality etc then that could at least amount to something, though it would require some thinking and not just equivocation.

@K Ghoul The one thing that stands out is that this phenomena not only has some different names, but is practiced throughout different tribes and cultures. So it's not just Tulpamancy or imaginary friends, there's correlating multiple historical contexts and factors that make up this phenomena. Another interesting thing, is the possibility of psychic energy and godhood. There seems to be different ways to 'train' psychic energy and channeling that energy. While the godhood is not an absolute but relative domain, there seems to be a progression of some sort, as the person in the video brought up karmic cycles, rebirths and soul progressions, like eventually no matter how many life times, eventually the soul in a different body will have cultivated psychic and spiritual energy as it passes and moves to it's next life and so on, one explanation as to why there are very gifted spiritual humans. So, this godhood progression at the moment looks like this: a thought form arises from nothing, has reflections of the psyche, other people and the culture and the environment. At5 some point in time, this thought form develops into a servitor, a more animate thought with slightly more sentience. At some point later in time, this servitor eventually becomes more sentient, has developed personality traits, can communicate more than just emotional signals or other privative and subtle mental communications, becomes a Tulpa. Then when a group of people focus on it's symbolic form or sigil, it grows in energy to eventually be an egregor. And finally that egregor overtime becomes some kind of god in it's own domain. This is all assuming this progression isn't broken by some destruction. I'll have to re watch to see other limits to this information of the video, other than it having some conspiracy theories about the Kali Yuga and stage blue to orange interpretations of this paranormal phenomena.

There is never a completion of reality, (though definitely an experience of it) Remember the conversation of Buddha with Mara (the demonic dude). Infinite sentience in need of wisdom. Having discovered enlightenment, how will you go about spreading it?

Been quietly following this community for a while, much to my frustration, as there seems to be a consistent lack of logical backing for significant ontological claims; just blind deference to spiritual hearsay. Leo seems to commonly defer to a pretty unsatisfying assertion to address metaphysical inquiries: "You're imagining X". Okay, fine. But what if I were to assume this for literally any and all conceptual notions? Could it be said that even the actual distinction between solipsism and mutual sentience is imaginary, and what exactly would this imply? Is there any point at which there is no utility in assuming this postulation? Shouldn't I be able to say that the distinction between imagination and objective reality is imaginary? You must see that I am essentially rendering the term meaningless at this point. When describing the metaphysical process of intelligent conjuring which allegedly creates reality under this epistemic framework, I find the term "imagination" to be a bit deceptive, or definitionally frivolous (for admittedly underdeveloped reasons, mind you — it is obviously conceivable that this may in fact be the best term for what is metaphysically taking place). Intuitively, it seems that such a term is too easily conflated with a sort of nebulous lack of substantive existence, which is how I generally interpret "imaginary" in this context. For instance, "You're imagining other people" implies that other people do not exist, but If I were to assert this claim as flippantly as I see it used in this community, I could invoke the same postulation to affirm the opposite implication, for instance, "You're imagining that other people are imaginary" would essentially mean that other people DO exist. Can somebody actually provide a non-frivolous answer to the inquiry of whether it can be said that the distinction between solipsism and widespread consciousness is imaginary, and what this would even mean? My best guess would be: "Everything is imaginary, thus even distinctions between real vs imaginary can also be said to be imaginary if we assume a recursive instantiation of imagination which defies logical intuition", but this is just a guess, which is what I tend to see on this forum, except there will be no admitting that ones claims are conjectures. I genuinely want this explained as if I were an autistic 5 year old. Explain why I should even lend merit to you. If it isn't clear, I tend to see the majority of this forum as hapless followers, so I am really just trying to appeal only to the brainy scientific crowd here, which my saying will undoubtedly evoke the appeal of the exact opposite, so I have little hope of an effective answer, but maybe somebody will surprise me.

I try not to think about it. It will follow me forever, sadly... Especially as psychedelic trauma can induce amnesia, and then you just randomly get flashes of trips in dreams or rare waking moments. It is just such an obvious thing, the entire Western view of consciousness is very "monkey mind" thinking. It's like if you look at a picture of a person on your computer, and I ask where that person's consciousness is. Nobody would point at the pixels on the screen and say "conciousness lives inside their head on the screen". It's insane, monkey type logic and reasoning... It doesn't live inside people's head in the "external world" either. There's nothing out there. The people you're seeing aren't out there, like they aren't inside the image of them on photographs. Here is a blatant example to show what I mean about cardboard cutouts... Just look in a mirror. The image of you in that mirror is a mirage. There's no life inside the image of yourself in that mirror. The image in the mirror is just a dead inert mirage. Where is the sentience? Not in the image. Here... Your "here". That's where it is. On death everyone and everything collapses into you. I collapse into you, the world and I go with you. And vice versa. We are literally the same individual. There aren't individuals. It's just me... I DO believe you are seeing and thinking etc, but I'm the one doing it, just as I am currently seeing and thinking from, seemingly, this character in the world. And for you it is true of "me". But I'm not the character. I'm behind the character... All characters are like those dead mirror images, it's all appearance. Yes even your personality and ego is just a cardboard cutout appearance without sentience. There's only one sentience and one individual, and it's you. And realization as such, is just like opening YOUR eyes from a nightly dream. The entire dream collapses with you, and you just open your eyes where you have always been.

@Reciprocality This is what we agreed upon earlier before delving in the matters of intuition, yes? I also agree with this, and I'd also regarded this as our common ground in discussing imagination. In my sentience, consciousness is the intelligence that enables the experience of things X. Without consciousness, there is only the intuition that there could be something, a vibe so to speak of. Do you find this to be true, as well? Yes, because consciousness enables sensibility, nothing else enables this. Okay, so this is where you lose me: What do you mean by “intuits it contents”? Is the world of experience something to be intuited? How does that work? It is truth and obvious, if it were not, then we would not even be discussing it as a matter, as there would be no way to make it relatable to the other-self. But because you also experience what I experience, we can commune these experiences, and discover them to be truths. Is this not how the world world works?

Okay see.. this is why I needed to know what you meant by consciousness. See, for me, there is a difference between awareness and consciousness. I'm saying that there is no anything without consciousness, including “structure to reality”, for consciousness, if I may describe poetically, is that great magician that makes the impossible quite possible. And what is the impossible? The impossible is there - here - being a you and a me, the impossible is there being the existence of worlds and world makers, and innumerable finite objects in these world's, the impossible is the opposite of nonduality, it is the Maya - or what people have chosen to call “the dream”. Awareness is a relative term, because according to me, everyone is in the know. So awareness has to do with spiritual growth, one becoming aware or awakening to an aspect of Maya, then another aspect, and another and another. Generally, what people refer to awareness, in their own terms, is actually relatability. Simply because one cannot relate, the other-self will say s/he is unaware. Simply because the other-self can relate and possesses sufficient intellect to demonstrate this relatability via language - one will say,“S/he is awakened” or “enlightened” Otherwise, whatever the other-self says to one's self it will sound like nothing but mumbojumbo nonsense. This is what day-to-day communication is like, isn't? So awakening or awareness is quite relative in my sentience, it all depends on spiritual growth. The true priori that you regard to, I will say is Knowledge itself - simply knowing that there/here is knowing, this is complete, this is whole, this is nonduality. There is no other.