Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxdoop | Hacker News Reader

And so if we provided physical inputs to a system that utilized GPT-4+, would you call that sentient? If we have a system video / ocular input, and sound (just throw a microphone into the mix), and finally a fuck ton of sensors on its physical “body”— does that qualify?

I feel like a crazy person when I discuss this, I admit. But I have not found one solid rationale for a proof we

-know what sentience even is -LLMs confidently do NOT have it

View on HN

It would be a pre-requisite, yes. Certainly not the only criteria.

But we do know of humans who have something like “locked in” syndrome, where they are full conscious but cannot use their body.

And I am not sure sentience is binary . It may be a spectrum, and if that is the case, I again am not sure why people are so confidently dismissive of the question when applied to LLMs .

Maybe not the current version, but future stuff especially.

The degree to which we consider, "locked in" life worthwhile is 2 fold: The degree to which they were trained through their senses prior to being, "locked in" and the possibility of returning to an experience of the world through their senses.

I'm not sure we would consider an infant born locked in and never likely to recover, "sentient"

This is compounded with LLMs by the fact that, aside from a temperature sensor in a server rack somewhere, it doesn't even have the same "hardware" as an infant to experience the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com