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Comment by drdrek | Hacker News Reader

The philosophical argument is just not relevant.

If you peek through a keyhole you may mistake a TV for real people, but if you look through the window you will see that its clearly not. Inputting language models with very specific kind of questions will result in text that is similar to what a person may write. But as the comment above, by an expert no less, mentioned is that if you test it with any known limitation of the technology (like making conclusions or just changing the form of the question enough) you will immediately see that is in fact very much not even remotely close to sentient.

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The problem is that people, including credentialed experts, have quick and easy answers to what makes a person a person, and really good language models expose a few of the weaknesses in those definitions. People still want to derive an "ought" from an "is".

How is it a problem in the case that you can fairly easily rule out the model being a person by any useful definition?

Useful for what, and for who?

I think it should be ruled out, but "by any useful definition" is wrong because "use" is at the heart of the matter here.

I think a very intelligent alien could think the same of us.

if you test the human with any known limitation of their architecture (like making conclusions or just changing the form of the question enough) you will immediately see that is in fact very much not even remotely close to sentient

that does not seem to make a lot of sense, but it looks like your objective was just reusing the other posters words

maybe you can give a fitting example of an English sentence that these aliens would come up with, which humans would be totally unable to respond to in a way which makes sense?

It's easy to make the assumption that Earth is not the only planet to evolve a species that's capable of high technology, to the extent they can re-work the surface of the planet in complex ways that would be a clear marker of intelligence.

But it does now follow, and it is by no means certain that such life would be sentient in any way recognizable to us, or us to them.

You're doing what everyone else is doing - conflating a link between intelligence and sentience that's just a projection of your human bias.

Ok, well since I got downvoted I may as well offer this: If you're looking for something to add to your reading list I strongly recommend Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. The thing that makes that book brilliant is how effectively it captures the futility of any attempt to understand non-human sentience.

The two movies don't do justice to that theme, or at best they do it only in the most glancing of ways before rushing back to a standard deus-ex-machina in the end. In each case, the film makers seem to have lost their nerve, as if the idea of presenting that enigma to the audience in a more direct and accessible way is just too hard of a problem.

But for me personally, it's on the short list of science fiction works that still stick with me in a personal way, and that I like to return to every few years. And, yes, it is an arrogant viewpoint to say that all we ever do as humans is look for mirrors of ourselves. But I think Lem got at a pretty deep truth about the human condition when he did that.

Thanks for the recommendation!

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