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Comment by dwringer | Hacker News Reader

While I support Star Trek's view, I don't think that applies to purely algorithmic AI - fully deterministic software can't (IMHO) be interpreted as sentient any more than a light coming on because I flipped its switch could be called sentient. I believe humans are safe from this definition because we have no way of ascribing human behavior to, or even reducing it to terms of, logical causality. What sentience is hasn't been nailed down, but I feel at least slightly more confident in what it isn't. In Star Trek we had concepts like Data's positronic matrix, handwaving the possibility that there was true sentience by cloaking parts of it in advanced subatomic physics. Data's AI did not come from pure software.

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Most AI networks aren't deterministic. That's why eg Dalle will generate new images for the same prompt indefinitely. And note that neurons at the neuronal level are pretty deterministic aren't they? Certain chemicals cause certains things to happen. But the complexity of the system (the brain) is not necessarily deterministic. And it might even be deterministic! Given the exact same input to the brain (which would be impossible to test because the brain's state, which is part of the input, changes with time. Not to mention you'd need to control everything in the environment), would the brain react in the exact same way? Maybe. I think you can create nondeterminism from combining many deterministic components.

Assuming two instances of an ML model are trained identically using the same data in the same order and given the same PRNG seeds, they will still operate identically, will they not?

I like your point about the emergent complexity from many-layered systems.

I believe the resulting models would be the same. I don't know all the internals on how something like Dalle generates its images, but let's assume that if you then gave both models the same text prompt and random seed, they would generate the same images in the same order. Although I would argue that if this system was sentient, all we've done is clone/recreate the sentient system. The ability to clone/recreate an intelligence does not contradict that there was a sentience, I believe.

The human equivalent would be if you could create two molecularly identical brains, and have them experience the exact same lives for some time, controlling all stochastic processes, would they be the same person? Obviously it's not possible to control these things in the physical world, but even if you did get the same person, that doesn't make either any less sentient.

Outside of quantum effects, which I don’t think it important for sentience, the universe is also deterministic. You have no control over particle interactions, chemical reactions and electric fields, yet we feel.

People always ask if the brain is a computer, decide it is not, and come to the conclusion that sentience would not work on a computer. I think the universe is the computer / algorithm and the brain is the data being fed into it, which leads me to say consciousness can exist digitally.

Now that is an interesting angle, I don't think we can so easily toss out quantum effects in the first half then follow up with such a provocative second half, though. AFAIK there are still some unsettled questions about how this would all work in practice.

Wrong, wrong, absolutely brimming over with wrongability. ― Arnold J. Rimmer Red Dwarf (A hologram)

Surely a perfect 1 to 1 computer simulation of an entire human would be deterministic though?

Why is determinism even relevant?

Perhaps you are correct, but my point was simply that we don't really know since we can't make a 1 to 1 perfect computer simulation of an entire human nor can we fully define it mathematically for an arbitrarily powerful computer. At least not that I know of.

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