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Comment by srvmshr

Disagreement is good!

It actually leads to counter thoughts and a more refined idea of what we eventually want to describe.

Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know.

So from a purely technical perspective, we have only made some progress in open-domain QA. That's one dimension of progress. Deep learning has enabled us to create unseen faces & imagery - but is it independent? No, because we prompt it. It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream. It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on)

So while the philosophical question remains what bestows sentience, we as a community have a fairly reasonable understanding of what is NOT sentience i.e. we have a rough understanding of the borders between mechanistics and sentient beings. It is not one man's philosophical construct but rather a general consensus if you could say

parent srvmshr 4 years ago

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