> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red.
Why is it essential?
I get that an LLM saying "I am hungry" has no feeling of hunger, it's stringing words together without the experience behind them. But does it need to? Give it a robot body to move around and tell it the battery level is a hunger-meter, put it in a constant loop, and what's the functional difference?
I'm interested in figuring out the right question to ask to be able to tell if some AI, say a brain upload attempt, is or isn't sentient in this sense, if it does or doesn't have qualia, but this kind of reductiveness doesn't even have the right shape to be that question — it doesn't say why a camera responding to a 550 nm photon isn't seeing red when your retina is.
Why is it essential?
I get that an LLM saying "I am hungry" has no feeling of hunger, it's stringing words together without the experience behind them. But does it need to? Give it a robot body to move around and tell it the battery level is a hunger-meter, put it in a constant loop, and what's the functional difference?
I'm interested in figuring out the right question to ask to be able to tell if some AI, say a brain upload attempt, is or isn't sentient in this sense, if it does or doesn't have qualia, but this kind of reductiveness doesn't even have the right shape to be that question — it doesn't say why a camera responding to a 550 nm photon isn't seeing red when your retina is.