Curious--what would convince you that something non-biological were sentient? I have a hard time answering this question myself.
The only working example of sentience we have is ourselves, and we function in a completely different way than LLMs. I put/output similarity between us and LLMs is not enough IMO, as you can see in the Chinese Room thought experiment. For us to consider a machine sentient, it needs to function in a similar way to us, or else our definition of sentience gets way too broad to be true.
I’m particularly unimpressed by the amount of hand-waving packed into replies that want us to assume a “simulated neuron”.
Imagine a more technologically advanced alien civilization visiting us. And they notice that our minds don't function quite in the same way as theirs. (E.g. they have a hive mentality. Or they have a less centralized brain system like an octopus. Or whatever.)
What if they concluded "Oh, these beings don't function like us. They do some cool tricks, but obviously they can't be sentient". I hope you see the problem here.
We're going to need a much more precise criterium here than "function in a similar way".
My belief is that we need to see similar functionality to be sure of sentience. This may exclude some things that may theoretically be sentient, but I don't think we have a better metric than functionality that doesn't also include a lot of definitely-not-sentient things.
We need to err on the side of sentience if we're going to avoid moral catastrophe.
So yes, I do take the possibility of sentient trees pretty seriously. They're much more alive than we realize--e.g. they communicate with one another and coordinate actions via chemical signals. Do they feel pain and pleasure? Who knows. But I'm definitely not going to start peeling the bark off a tree for shits and giggles.
How do you back up the statement that "for us to consider a machine sentient, it needs to function in a similar way to us"? On what basis do you categorically deny the validity of a sentient being which works differently than a human?
If you believe that is sentient, let's take it one step further. What constitutes playback here? The program just copies the data from memory and displays it without modification. If that constitutes playback and therefore sentience, does copying that data from one place to another create sentient life as well? If the data is stored in DRAM, does it get "played back" whenever the DRAM refreshes the electrons in its memory?
There are a lot of various programs that can produce human output without functionality that we would reasonably consider sentient. Perhaps some of these things are sentient, but some of them most likely shouldn't be considered sentient.
The intelligence, such as it is, resides on the side that processes and understands the human's input, not in the output text that gets all the press coverage. You cannot get results like those discussed here from the operator of a Chinese room.
Now, if you take your deterministic brain-state model and feed it novel input, it will indeed exhibit sentience. To argue otherwise will require religious justification that's off-topic here. Either that, or you'll have to resort to Penrose's notion of brain-as-quantum-computer.
I'm not sure I'm fully convinced of that. I find that the arguments for LLMs potentially gaining sentience are reminiscent of Hofstadter's arguments from Goedel, Escher, Bach, that intelligence and symbolic reasoning are necessarily intertwined.
I think in general what’s causing so many people to be thrown for a loop is a lack of understanding or consideration of emergent behavior in systems. Break down the individual components of the human body and brain and someone could easily come to the same conclusion that “it’s just X”. Human intelligence and consciousness is all emergent as well. AGI will very likely will be emergent as well.
I would say instead that there's a level of complexity in these models that blow past our uncanny valley threshold heuristics for recognizing conscious intent. We've managed to find the edge of the usefulness of that hardwired sense.
I suspect the most challenging distinction for people is going to be: even if we do grant that a LLM had developed a kind of mind, our interactions with it are not actual communication with that mind. Human words are labels to organize sensory data and our experiences. The tokens an LLM works with have no meaning to it.
We've already left the Chinese Room a hundred miles behind. How could something like the link in the (current) top post [1] ever have come out of Searle's model?
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/110vv25/bing_chat_...
The Chinese Room thought experiment is a thought experiment, where Searle argues that the functional definition of intelligence is not enough, and he gives an example that might convince some that the "implementation" is important.
However, the neural networks in LLMs function at least superficially similar to our brains. It doesn't function at all like a "Chinese room" where predefined scripts are given to a simple machine. Even if we accept the Chinese room argument as an objection to the functional intelligence test, given that LLMs work more similarly to brains than a Chinese room, I don't think you could use the argument as a rebuttal against LLMs being sentient unless you could show that "similarity between us and LLMs is not enough".
If we met a pre-linguistic alien species, it's likely we wouldn't be able to infer _anything_ about their internal state.
Conversely, there's no way for me to know that you _are_ sentient (a la Solipsism).