Why would self-awareness be an indication of sentience?
By sentience, do you mean having subjective experience? (That’s how I read you)
I just don’t see any necessary connection at all between self-awareness and subjective experience. Sometimes they go together, but I see no reason why they couldn’t come apart.
I’ve very confused by what “subjective experience” means – in a (possibly, hypothetically) technical sense.
It seems/feels like our knowledge of subjective experiences is entirely dependent on communication (via something like human language) and that other exceptional cases rely on a kind of ‘generalization via analogy’.
If I had to guess, the ‘threshold’ of subjective experience would be the point beyond which a system could ‘tell’ something, i.e. either ‘someone’ else or just ‘itself’, about the ‘experience’. Without that, how are we sure that image classifiers don’t also have subjective experience?
Maybe subjective experience is literally a ‘story’ being told.
I’m not so sure I get your meaning. Is your knowledge of the taste of salt based on communication?
Usually people make precisely the opposite claim. That no amount of communication can teach you what something subjectively feels like if you haven’t had the experience yourself.
My tentative new idea is (along the lines of) ‘subjective experience’ is akin to a ‘story that could be told’ from the perspective (POV) of the ‘experiencer’. There would then be a ‘spectrum’ of ‘sentience’ corresponding to the ‘complexity’ of stories that could be told about different kinds of things. The ‘story’ of a rock or a photon is very different, and much simpler, than even a bacterium, let alone megafauna or humans.
‘Consciousness’ tho would be, basically, ‘being a storyteller’.
But without consciousness, there can’t be any awareness (or self awareness) of ‘sentience’ or ‘subjective experience’. Non-conscious sentience just is sentient, but not also (self-)aware of its own sentience.
Consciousness does tho provide some (limited) way to ‘share’ subjective experiences. And maybe there’s some kind of (‘future-tech’) way we could more directly share experiences; ‘telling a story’ is basically all we have now.
I know this is anecdotal, but I think it is a useful data point in thinking about this. Self-awareness and subjective experience can come apart based on my own personal experience with psychedelics as I have experienced it happen to me in a state of a deep trip. I remember a state of mind with no sense of self, no awareness or knowledge that I “am” someone or something, or that I ever was or will be, but still experiencing existence itself, devoid of all context.
This thought me there is a strict conceptual difference between being aware of yourself, environment and others, and the more basic concept of possibility for “receiving input or processing information” to have a signature of first person experience itself, which I like to define as that thing that rock definitely doesn’t have.
Another way of putting could be:
Level 1: Awareness of experience (it feels like something to exist)
Level 2: Awareness of self as an agent in an environment
Why would self-awareness be an indication of sentience?
By sentience, do you mean having subjective experience? (That’s how I read you)
I just don’t see any necessary connection at all between self-awareness and subjective experience. Sometimes they go together, but I see no reason why they couldn’t come apart.
Hmmm
I’ve very confused by what “subjective experience” means – in a (possibly, hypothetically) technical sense.
It seems/feels like our knowledge of subjective experiences is entirely dependent on communication (via something like human language) and that other exceptional cases rely on a kind of ‘generalization via analogy’.
If I had to guess, the ‘threshold’ of subjective experience would be the point beyond which a system could ‘tell’ something, i.e. either ‘someone’ else or just ‘itself’, about the ‘experience’. Without that, how are we sure that image classifiers don’t also have subjective experience?
Maybe subjective experience is literally a ‘story’ being told.
I’m not so sure I get your meaning. Is your knowledge of the taste of salt based on communication?
Usually people make precisely the opposite claim. That no amount of communication can teach you what something subjectively feels like if you haven’t had the experience yourself.
I do find it difficult to describe “subjective experience” to people who don’t quickly get the idea. This is better than anything I could write: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/.
I’ve updated somewhat – based on this video (of all things):
Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #234 - YouTube
My tentative new idea is (along the lines of) ‘subjective experience’ is akin to a ‘story that could be told’ from the perspective (POV) of the ‘experiencer’. There would then be a ‘spectrum’ of ‘sentience’ corresponding to the ‘complexity’ of stories that could be told about different kinds of things. The ‘story’ of a rock or a photon is very different, and much simpler, than even a bacterium, let alone megafauna or humans.
‘Consciousness’ tho would be, basically, ‘being a storyteller’.
But without consciousness, there can’t be any awareness (or self awareness) of ‘sentience’ or ‘subjective experience’. Non-conscious sentience just is sentient, but not also (self-)aware of its own sentience.
Consciousness does tho provide some (limited) way to ‘share’ subjective experiences. And maybe there’s some kind of (‘future-tech’) way we could more directly share experiences; ‘telling a story’ is basically all we have now.
I know this is anecdotal, but I think it is a useful data point in thinking about this. Self-awareness and subjective experience can come apart based on my own personal experience with psychedelics as I have experienced it happen to me in a state of a deep trip. I remember a state of mind with no sense of self, no awareness or knowledge that I “am” someone or something, or that I ever was or will be, but still experiencing existence itself, devoid of all context.
This thought me there is a strict conceptual difference between being aware of yourself, environment and others, and the more basic concept of possibility for “receiving input or processing information” to have a signature of first person experience itself, which I like to define as that thing that rock definitely doesn’t have.
Another way of putting could be:
Level 1: Awareness of experience (it feels like something to exist)
Level 2: Awareness of self as an agent in an environment