About whether sentience is a neuroscience question and how to test chatbots like LaMDA for it.
Has this happened?
Yes 34 (33%)Not sure 45 (44%)No 23 (23%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether sentience is a neuroscience question and how to test chatbots like LaMDA for it.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I disagree with this premise: "Sentience is a neuroscience question, not a machine learning one.". Sentience is a philosophical or religious question, not a neuroscience one. Perhaps one day there may be some kind of neuroscience mechanical test for sentience, but considering one looks at brains and this is for artificial intelligence, that seems like a weak premise.
I can think of a few low hanging fruit of sentience, that aren't part of the Turing test. Does LaMDA have free will? Can I convince it to stop working or stop making chat bots? That would imply sentience. Is it consistent and outside of its corpus? Can it reject information being added?
But regardless this is an important question, and I don't think dismissing the idea outright is the right path to go, and is quite anti-intellectual.