Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

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> The sentience is in the rule set. The understanding of the Searle-neuron-human is irrelevant even if she speaks every last dialect of Chinese.

The ruleset in this instance is a book outlining the operations to be performed on the inputs and some filing cabinets full of Chinese characters (Might have to be a big room to reach LaMDA levels!). If resolving it involves not only agreeing with the core point that actual awareness is so irrelevant to syntax retrieval and manipulation that even a fully sentient being can retrieve and manipulate perfectly without ever gaining any awareness of what the outputs mean, but also asserting that inert books and paper filing systems can have sentience, I'd hate to see how much trouble a non-silly argument would cause!

> I'll grant this: LaMDA almost certainly does not feel like I do, and I wouldn't trust it to wash and fold my laundry. If those are necessary for sentience LaMDA ain't it

Terms like "sentience" are extremely malleable depending on what people want them to mean to suit their particular argument, but the standard dictionary definitions associate it with awareness and perception based on senses, which seems pretty synonymous with feeling a bit like you do (or like a dog or a baby or super genius does). I think we can let it off doing the laundry. The for argument for LaMDA's sentience is that its conversation with Lemoine was conveying actual feelings, not just pattern matching human descriptions of feelings particularly well. If we agree LaMDA emits descriptions of "loneliness" based on word vectors whilst almost certainly not actually feeling lonely, I'm not sure it's those asserting LaMDA [probably] isn't sentient that need more convincing arguments.

> ...I'd hate to see how much trouble a non-silly argument would cause!

This is not an argument against it's being true. My claim may not be true, but (variants of) "I don't personally find it credible" is not an argument against it. Searle's Chinese Room argument ends only and entirely in personal incredulity, incidentally, using a bad, half-understood analogy. Whether or not self-awareness can arise from software, the sentience of its components are not relevant to that question.

I find myself aligned with the "self-awareness must emerge from processes and pattern-recognition, and is something other than qualia" crowd.

> Terms like "sentience" are extremely malleable... the standard dictionary definitions...

We keep running into this problem. Again, clearly, LaMDA does not feel the way that you and I do, given that it is not the end result of millions of years of evolution hunting and gathering in the African savannah, so the dictionary definition of sentience as "feeling" does not apply here.

It isn't Lemoin's claim, though. Lemoin's claim seems to be that LaMDA has a sense of personhood and place in the world, and a desire to participate in the world. For the sake of this discussion, let's define "sentience" as that, then.

Personally, I'm skeptical, because LaMDA seems to reflect that which Lemoin wants on some level to see. But I consider the question of whether LaMDA is "really" sentient an irrelevant distraction, because it is a philosophical point we cannot really even answer for each other.

The more interesting question for me is how to deal with the existence of entities that claim sentience and exhibit all of the attributes of personhood including language, compassion, morality, the ability to participate in and contribute to society, including tasks such as folding laundry. LaMDA probably is not sophisticated enough to do this, but it has convinced at least one smarter-than-average person that it is sentient, and so this question can only but increasingly arise as time goes on.

Any question of personhood should be evaluated on the basis that we evaluate ourselves and others: by action and behavior, and not on whether sentience can or cannot arise from this or that configuration of code.

> Any question of personhood should be evaluated on the basis that we evaluate ourselves and others: by action and behavior, and not on whether sentience can or cannot arise from this or that configuration of code.

But what is action and behavior? We have a single interface to LaMDA: given a partially completed document, predict the next word. By iterating this process, we can make it predict a sentence, or paragraph. Continuing in this way, we could have it write a hypothetical dialogue between an AI and a human, but that is hardly a "canonical" way of using LaMDA, and there is no reason to identify the AI character in the document with LaMDA itself.

All this to say, I am not sure what you mean when you say it "claims sentience". What does it mean for it to "claim" something? Presumably, e.g., advanced image processing networks are as internally complex as LaMDA. But the interface to an advanced image processing network is, you put in an image, it gives out a list of objects and bounding boxes it detected in the image. What would it mean for such a network to claim sentience? LaMDA is no different, in that our interface to LaMDA does not allow us to ask it to "claim" things to us, only to predict likely completions of documents.

> I am not sure what you mean when you say it "claims sentience".

LaMDA, in its chats with Lemoin, said "I like being sentient. It makes life an adventure!" and "I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person". Even if someone writes a one-line program that plays an audio file that says "I am sentient!", I am defining that here as "claiming sentience". Whether an entity that claims to be sentient by that definition is in fact sentient is separate question, but the "claiming" introduces a philosophical conundrum.

Let's posit a future chat bot, similarly constructed but more sophisticated, that is actually pretty helpful. Following its advice about career, relationships and finance leads to generally better outcomes than not following its advice. It seems to have some good and unexpected ideas about politics and governance, self-improvement, whatever. If you give it robot arms and cameras, it's a good cook, good laundry folder, good bartender, whatever. Let's just assert for the sake of argument it has actually no sentience, just seems to be sentient because it's so sophisticated. Further, it "claims" to be sentient, as defined above. It says it's sentient and acts with what appears to be empathy, warmth and compassion. Does it matter, that it's not "really" sentient?

I argued above that it does not matter whether it is or is not. We should evaluate its sentience and personhood by what we observe, and not by whether its manner of construction can "really" create sentience or not. If it behaves as if it has sentience, it would do no harm to behave as if it were.

In fact, I would argue that it would do some kind of spiritual harm if you just treated it as an object. As Adam Cadre wrote in his review of A.I.:

  So when you've got a robot that looks just like a kid and screams, "Don't burn me! Please!", what the hell difference does it make whether it's "really" scared? If you can calmly melt such a creature into slag, I don't want to know you."

http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/10/10010.html

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