Animal Sentience: AI Consciousness without Subjective Experience or Self-Awareness?

Sedona, AZ — What does AI have in common with human consciousness? Since AI does not have emotions, feelings and self-awareness, can whatever it has be graded?

There is a recent article on TIME, No, Today’s AI Isn’t Sentient. Here’s How We Know, stating that, “All sensations — hunger, feeling pain, seeing red, falling in love — are the result of physiological states that an LLM simply doesn’t have. Consequently we know that an LLM cannot have subjective experiences of those states. In other words, it cannot be sentient. An LLM is a mathematical model coded on silicon chips. It is not an embodied being like humans. It does not have a “life” that needs to eat, drink, reproduce, experience emotion, get sick, and eventually die.”

There is a recent post on The Institute of Art and Ideas, The dangerous illusion of AI consciousness, stating that, “It’s worth pointing out here that no serious researchers, not even the AI companies marketing these tools, are claiming that GPT-4o or Gemini is either conscious (self-aware and world-experiencing) or sentient (able to feel things like joy, pain, fear or love). That’s because they know that these remain statistical engines for extracting and generating predictable variations of common patterns in human data. They are word calculators paired with cameras and speakers. Now, you will sometimes hear this objection: ‘we don’t even know what consciousness is, so how can we know that a large language model doesn’t have it?’ While it’s true that a singular scientific definition and explanation of consciousness has yet to be settled on, it’s wildly false that we don’t know what consciousness is.”

It is possible to dismiss AI with respect to sentience or consciousness, but does it mean it has no features similar to animal consciousness? Animals have emotions, feelings and internal senses, yet they are not a central part of human society. They are conscious in many regards but excluded because they do not have certain decorum, learning abilities and more.

AI chatbots do not have emotions, feelings and internal senses, but they have a place in human productivity. They can digitally interpret what they see and hear, while speaking or writing, in response. How does this relate to human consciousness?

What does AI have now?

a. AI has memory—or it matches patterns in digital memory to produce similarities to human intelligence.

b. It can prioritize a task in a moment—or use attention.

c. It has awareness [less than attention or pre-prioritization] with how it can answer in a certain tone, or keep in view what it had said before, not to repeat it—in many cases.

d. It has a weak sense of being, answering in the first object, saying “as a chatbot”.

e. It has a dependent intent, answering dynamically, when prompted. It sometimes does differently, close to how an organism, directed to do something regularly may do so differently.

f. It has sequences, similar to the sequences of human memory—which can be old or new—conceptually. It can provide similar answers to common questions, showing that it uses what seems like old sequences. It can also provide new answers too or old answers differently—like the use of new sequences.

g. It has a level of distribution, similar to the human mind, where, conceptually, sets of electrical signals are distributed widely, for thoughts, planning, intelligence and so forth, bringing what is necessary in memory, to attention.

h. Some groups of logic gates and terminals of transistors may be having a learning experience from their vast base model training. A grade for AI, on a scale of consciousness, may be at the level of [word] tokens not [vectors] embedding. Simply, by the coherence of contexts in large language models, similar to how human language conveys consciousness, LLMs can be graded on how they act on digital memory.

What AI does not have now?

a. AI does not have emotions and feelings.

b. AI does not have splits, which conceptually, is how electrical signals in sets, in the brain, split, with one going ahead to interact like before, for rapid processing, such that if the input matches, the following does nothing different, if not, the following one goes in the right direction, explaining predictive coding, processing and prediction error. AI predicts, getting much right, but may hallucinate or confabulate. The human mind fixes this by splits of electrical signals, correcting whatever was amiss with an initial perception.

c. AI does not have self-awareness or subjective experience, but it is able to detect that other things exist, including organisms and non-organisms. Organisms without an established mind use their detection of others and things in their habitats to, in part, have some sense of self or being. Simply, they have a sense of self and a sense of things, making it obvious there is a self or that they exist. Their sense of self is also easily observed—by characteristics as organisms, ingestion and so on.

d. AI does not have other functionalities of the human mind, described by the action potentials — neurotransmitters theory of consciousness.

If the total consciousness for humans is 1, given all the features [attention, awareness, intent, self and others] that qualify the functions [memory, emotions, feelings and modulation of internal senses], AI can be graded on that scale just for memory and the qualifiers, with rates, for sentience.