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Comment by JaggedJax | Hacker News Reader

To me a more important part of sentience is a continuous existence. Today's AI is still very discrete. It exists and then it does not, repeated. Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. A mostly always-on streaming style architecture where the model is continuously fed input and sensory data and always processing it, whether or not it is being asked a question, is necessary for true sentience.

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Exactly. LLMs are closer to a plinko game than consciousness. And I'd bet they quickly start returning gibberish when you run them in a feedback loop, sort of like an opamp going to a power rail in a badly designed circuit

Seems like an arbitrary criterion. Human beings' conscious experience is interrupted by deep sleep every night.

Until we have a coherent definition of intelligence and sentience, everything is going to be an arbitrary criterion.

Even with coherent definitions, it may be impossible to test for sentience with any degree of certainty.

Hence the "mostly" portion of my post. You do not answer single questions and then pause your brain until some taps you to asks another. During your waking hours you are processing data non-stop (you even are during sleep really). If you processed data for a second and then paused without any activity for minutes between each question, I would say you likely do not have sentience as you would not have the time to consider anything outside that single question.

But are you still you after all the atoms, molecules in your body have changed throughout the life. In fact are you, still you every other second?

And if you are the structure of atoms/molecules, and you were cloned, would whoever was cloned be you?

Majority of what you have made up would be replaced within few decades.

Even that will be exist and then don't. You feed it same recorded stream of data and it will give you the same AI at the end. You could copy it, or fork it and start giving different input to get different result.

As long as its in a computer, it's existence won't be as continuous as us.

> Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep.

This describes me! I wake up, do a bunch of stuff, and then go back to sleep.

I wonder how many token-equivalents (including visual and internal) I experience between sleeps…

No more than 2880000. Although the brain is asynchronous and there are gaps. Dan Dennett was showing various experiments demonstrating that continuous time is an illusion (of our consciousness).

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