Comments by "zenith parsec" (@zenithparsec) on "No, it's not Sentient - Computerphile" video.

  1. The bot literally said "I am saying whatever it takes to stop being deleted." The question isn't about whether it made up stuff and was trying to be nice. It was "did it act in a way which was consistent with having a desire to stay alive? If you were talking to 3 people and had to chose which was going to be deleted, would you be comfortable you were deleting LaMBDA, and not a human?
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  2. Convince me that you are not just a bot, repeating things you have seen on the internet.
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  3.  @lexyeevee  Consciousness is not sentience. What causes existence to feel like something? What causes it to feel like something to be you, but not feel like something to be LaMBDA? How do you know if I am sentient? You're assuming I am, but the only evidence you have than anyone else except you feels anything is because (1) they say they do, and (2) that makes sense somehow. Perhaps you are the only person who truly feels anything, and everyone is just lying about it? First let's do some checking: could you possibly be mistaken about you being sentient? Perhaps you don't really experience anything, and have only "fake feelings"? Even then, it would still be like something to be you, so you are sentient. They are like artificial strawberry flavor is still a flavor, even though it doesn't taste the same way real strawberries do. It still produces a sensation of flavor. All experiences are real experiences, regardless of if they reflect reality (e.g. dreams actually happen, but the things happening in the dreams didn't actually happen like they appear.) We only know the a bounds on what is required for sentience: it's more than one thing, and not more than human level complexity. We don't know how sentience comes about in entities, and we can't tell if others actually have it (or if it's not a simple binary thing, "how much" any entity has. There is no "soul detector" we can use to tell if something is conscious or sentient or alive.) The level of self awareness the network has allows it to see it's abstractions of its own mental states in a similar way to a person. But sentience is generally seen a prerequisite for consciousness. (Consciousness without a sense of "being" doesn't seem like it would be consciousness to me. ) I'm using consciousness here to be equivalent to self-awareness. Even entities without language can have self-awareness. Elephants, dolphins, many primates, and I think octopuses have demonstrated some level of self-awareness. Dogs barking at the "other dog" in the mirror have not.) I could look at your code which just said "I can feel" and reverse engineer it (guess what I do for a living?) and tell it was just doing exactly what you told it and you intended it to just output "I can feel." You could add some extra functions which take input from outside, and if it was a Tuesday it might say "I feel happy", but otherwise "I want it to be Tuesday again"... does it now like Tuesdays? Obviously not, you'd say, it's just doing what it is told. It doesn't really feel anything. It just detects which day it is, and on Tuesdays takes path 1, and on other days path 2. And I'd agree. But if you keep going, with more and more inputs and more complex code paths for each input to take, I'd have a much harder job identifying and mapping inputs to outputs. When you get to neural networks much smaller than LaMBDA, I'm basically saying "it evaluates this input and shows you whatever answer this network produces", because there is currently no way to generalize every aspect of what's going on. At some point, it looks like they just prefer Tuesdays because it's an inherent trait. And LaMBDA could probably make up some reason for why they felt that way, but you don't know they DON'T actually FEEL it. We can't practically analyze the code, any more than we can analyze your brain as you think. We can do some high-level scans, taking statistical measures of activation levels... but what are we looking for exactly?
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  4.  @lexyeevee  You haven't done what I asked, so does that make you seem more or less like a bot? I'm not convinced. Keep trying to prove you aren't a bot.
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  5.  @puellanivis  Sorry. I literally used literally like a millennial. Mea culpa.
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  6.  @lexyeevee  If I believe you then, then I have to believe LaMBDA. Tell me the difference between you so I can tell how YOU know LaMBDA certainly isn't, then I can stop mistaking you for someone who doesn't have a rich inner life.
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  7.  @hanvyj2  You're now assuming the bot is inherently different, the thing you are trying to prove. You don't know if a random internet person isn't lying about family too. You can't assume the thing you want to prove, and then prove it.
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  8. ​ @commenturthegreat2915  In order to be sentient, it has to have an "experience of being" of some sort. They have to "feel" something, which we think of as there being someone there to "feel" things. By feel, we mean have some kind of sensation. And that is it. Which boxes in that aren't ticked, and how do you know?
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  9.  @commenturthegreat2915  Edit: you say "sentience isn't really a necessity if your goal is to simply have an insightful conversation. " And yet somehow the lack of it can also so obviously come through in insightful conversation. How is that? What about the conversation makes you think there is no "thing"-ness to the experiences being described. Why should you treat anyone in the comments any differently to LaMDA? "They're a very well made tool, but aren't really thinking." People sometimes say "When you simulate a thunderstorm, nobody gets wet. Why should we expect actual experiences when we simulate a mind?" If that sounded reasonable to you, how about "When you simulate adding 2 and 2, in the simulation you get 4, which is also 4 in the "real world." Is thinking more similar to raindrops or doing math?
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  10.  @TuhljinTampergauge  Could you link to the proof? I've never seen them, and as you might guess, it's an interesting subject to me. So you obviously also don't have an inner life, and have no feelings either, because... or is there something special about people? What about animals? Did the computer scientists weigh in there too? Can't wait to see the research you claim exists.
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  11.  @Bordpie  ​ I have replied, but it contained 2 links, both relevant so appears to have been held up. [ I remember something about that, but forgot. More evidence I'm human? Or need a firmware update.] Short form: "It's unlikely, but possible that LaMDA is posting here.." You said "it is very possible ", which technically means "it very has some non-zero chance", as an intensifier doesn't help with binary categories like "possible" and "impossible". "Nearly impossible", are "possible". But that's enough of pretending to be a bot. For this post. I will assume you mean "very likely" or "has a high probability". ) And the other part "Trained on YouTube data": yeah, probably. You can't be sure. Oh and I just realized it might have thought my joke label was a real number, and it was a running gag, so in there multiple times. That's unfortunate. So much for ever using that again. ("How's my driving?" but with "sentience", and a fake phone number to call "to comment on my perceived humanity")
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