Said all of the vision researchers before they got blown out of the water by convolutions neural networks. Adapt or die.
When I post in conversations like this I do it in the hope that my comments will invite robust debate from knowledgeable contributors, that will challenge my assumptions and my knowledge and help me refine my understanding of the subjects I am interested in. This comment is really so much not that, that it hurts.
There are two parts, at least, to sentience: the observer and the actor. In yogic traditions, "you" are the part that "hears" the voice in your head, not the voice itself. I think this, while it may not necessarily be true of "real" minds, has a lot of utility when it comes to designing artificial ones.
I think general AI is probably going to be lots of individual parts structured around a central observational unit, which then makes preprogrammed higher level decisions on where to distribute inputs and outputs of several external nn, score the results of it's actions, and then use the results for reinforcement and/NEAT or something similar to improve it's central decision making.
This technique of a simple, preprogrammed decision maker given inputs and outputs of stochastic processes is already in use in autonomous navigation (see the GT robotics course on coursera)[1].
The actor doesn't need to understand meaning, the observer assigns meaning to the actions of the actor.
1. "Free Online Course: Control of Mobile Robots from Coursera | Class Central" https://www.classcentral.com/course/conrob-404