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Comment by jamincan | Hacker News Reader

Part of the issue I have with a lot of the discussion coming from Lemoine's claims about LaMDA is that I'm not exactly clear what people mean when they talk about sentience. It very much seems like a 'you know it when you see it', sort of thing. I'm not really convinced that LaMDA is sentient, but I also think that if we want to discuss sentience, it would be useful to be able to talk precisely about it.

If sentience is the emotional/feeling part of our brain, what exactly does it mean for a human, or an animal, or a fish, to feel? And what would the analogue for that be in a machine?

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While like yourself I believe that sentience isn’t well enough defined to test for its presence or absence, I also believe that chatbots necessarily have to be good at convincing whoever interacts with them that they are sentient as the ultimate goal is to pass the imitation game, so “know it when I see it” isn’t even enough.

But it’s important we figure out what we mean by “sentience” sooner rather than later:

https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...

The exact definition of sentience is being able to perceive the outside world and react to stimuli. For example, insects can perceive light and use it to avoid dangers. Plants can sense light but can't react other than by growing a certain direction. Sunflowers and venus flytraps could be considered on the edge, but their capacity to sense and react is very specific. The word "sentience" refers to being animal-like in an organism's versatility of reactions.

Your sentences 3 and 4 prove how your definition in sentence 1 is not remotely exact.

It's exact in the sense that that is the definition, not in the sense that it defines something in an exact mathematical way.

Isnt plant communication an active field of research ? I remember reading about how plants in a field can communicate changes in environment (like a bug infestation) with one another.

Communication doesn't require sentience. You don't need to be able to sense the environment to say "I'm being eaten by bugs!", you just need to be able to sense your own body.

On the other hand, the ability to move is pretty much required for sentience. The organism needs to be able to avoid harmful stimuli and seek out beneficial ones to be considered sentient. Just releasing chemicals or signals isn't enough.

You seem to be confusing "sentient" with "motile".

Are non-motile animals sentient? Motile plants?

I would suggest, instead, you are conflating "sentience" with "sapience".

> If sentience is the emotional/feeling part of our brain, what exactly does it mean for a human, or an animal, or a fish, to feel? And what would the analogue for that be in a machine?

If you switch to the reinforcement learning paradigm, then the "value function" might be analogous to emotion. It assigns a value (good or bad) to each perception, state, situation or context in order to decide what is the best action to take.

On this, I've pretty much concluded that the sentience argument isn't even the one that matters. There are plenty of sentient creates that we don't care about. What we really want to know is of LaMDA is like us in some real way. And from there, we want to know if we should treat it in some particular way. If it has feelings, perhaps we should be nice to it, and so on.

Disclaimer: I don't believe LaMDA is sentient or deserving of any special treatment.

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