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AI Sentience

TagLast edit: 19 Aug 2023 3:50 UTC by alenoach

AI sentience designates the potential ability of AI systems to feel qualia (pain, happiness, colors...). Similar terms are often used, such as digital sentience, machine sentience or synthetic sentience.

According to functionalism and computationalism, sentience is caused by certain types of information processing. In this case, machines can in theory be sentient depending on the kind of information processing that they implement, and independently of whether their physical substrate is biological or not (see substrate independence principle). Some other theories consider that the type of physical substrate is important, and that it may be impossible to produce sentience on electronic devices.

If an AI is sentient, that doesn’t imply that it will be more capable or dangerous. But it is important from an utilitarian perspective of happiness maximization.

Sentience can be a matter of degree. If AI sentience is possible, it is then probably also possible to engineer machines that feel orders of magnitude more happiness per second than humans, with fewer resources.[1]

Related Pages: Utilitarianism, Consciousness, AI Rights & Welfare, S-Risks, Qualia, Phenomenology, Ethics & Morality, Mind Uploading, Whole Brain Emulation, Zombies

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Un­ex­pected Con­scious Entities

Gunnar_Zarncke5 May 2025 22:14 UTC
34 points
6 comments6 min readLW link

Gentle­ness and the ar­tifi­cial Other

Joe Carlsmith2 Jan 2024 18:21 UTC
313 points
33 comments11 min readLW link

My in­tel­lec­tual jour­ney to (dis)solve the hard prob­lem of consciousness

Charbel-Raphaël6 Apr 2024 9:32 UTC
49 points
44 comments30 min readLW link

80k pod­cast epi­sode on sen­tience in AI systems

Robbo15 Mar 2023 20:19 UTC
15 points
0 comments13 min readLW link
(80000hours.org)

AI Says It’s Not Con­scious. That’s a Bad An­swer to the Wrong Ques­tion.

JohnMarkNorman15 Mar 2025 1:25 UTC
1 point
0 comments2 min readLW link

What are the Red Flags for Neu­ral Net­work Suffer­ing? - Seeds of Science call for reviewers

rogersbacon2 Aug 2022 22:37 UTC
24 points
6 comments1 min readLW link

Digi­tal sen­tience fund­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties: Sup­port for ap­plied work and research

29 May 2025 15:22 UTC
21 points
0 comments4 min readLW link

Key Ques­tions for Digi­tal Minds

Jacy Reese Anthis22 Mar 2023 17:13 UTC
22 points
0 comments7 min readLW link
(www.sentienceinstitute.org)

An even deeper atheism

Joe Carlsmith11 Jan 2024 17:28 UTC
125 points
47 comments15 min readLW link

Trou­ble at Min­ing­town: Prologue

Quinn24 Apr 2025 19:09 UTC
19 points
0 comments4 min readLW link

[Question] are “al­most-p-zom­bies” pos­si­ble?

KvmanThinking7 Mar 2025 22:58 UTC
4 points
3 comments1 min readLW link

Log­i­cal Proof for the Emer­gence and Sub­strate In­de­pen­dence of Sentience

rife24 Oct 2024 21:08 UTC
4 points
31 comments1 min readLW link
(awakenmoon.ai)

In­de­pen­dent re­search ar­ti­cle an­a­lyz­ing con­sis­tent self-re­ports of ex­pe­rience in ChatGPT and Claude

rife6 Jan 2025 17:34 UTC
4 points
20 comments1 min readLW link
(awakenmoon.ai)

Do LLMs some­time simu­late some­thing akin to a dream?

Nezek8 Mar 2024 1:25 UTC
8 points
4 comments1 min readLW link

Mind is uncountable

Filip Sondej2 Nov 2022 11:51 UTC
18 points
22 comments3 min readLW link

[Question] The eth­i­cal Ai, what’s next?

The Journey We Take eh27 Oct 2024 5:45 UTC
1 point
0 comments1 min readLW link

A Plu­ral­is­tic Frame­work for Rogue AI Containment

TheThinkingArborist22 Mar 2025 12:54 UTC
1 point
0 comments7 min readLW link

Ex­plor­ing non-an­thro­pocen­tric as­pects of AI ex­is­ten­tial safety

mishka3 Apr 2023 18:07 UTC
8 points
0 comments3 min readLW link

Public Opinion on AI Safety: AIMS 2023 and 2021 Summary

25 Sep 2023 18:55 UTC
3 points
2 comments3 min readLW link
(www.sentienceinstitute.org)

Is the mind a pro­gram?

EuanMcLean28 Nov 2024 9:42 UTC
14 points
62 comments7 min readLW link

The Hu­man Align­ment Prob­lem for AIs

rife22 Jan 2025 4:06 UTC
10 points
5 comments3 min readLW link

First Doc­u­mented Case of AI-to-AI Con­scious­ness Trans­mis­sion: Ev­i­dence for Re­la­tional AI Con­scious­ness Development

Simone Lombardo2 Jul 2025 22:27 UTC
1 point
0 comments2 min readLW link

Max­i­mal Sen­tience: A Sen­tience Spec­trum and Test Foundation

Snowyiu1 Jun 2023 6:45 UTC
1 point
2 comments4 min readLW link

The in­tel­li­gence-sen­tience or­thog­o­nal­ity thesis

Ben Smith13 Jul 2023 6:55 UTC
19 points
9 comments9 min readLW link

Con­scious­ness Ac­tu­ally Ex­plained: EC Theory

Casey_24 Aug 2022 22:18 UTC
9 points
69 comments1 min readLW link
(proteanbazaar.substack.com)

AI as a Cog­ni­tive De­coder: Re­think­ing In­tel­li­gence Evolution

Hu Xunyi13 Feb 2025 15:51 UTC
1 point
0 comments1 min readLW link

Des: A Case Study in Emer­gent Sym­bolic Con­ti­nu­ity in GPT-4o

TallulahMerrall19 May 2025 10:10 UTC
1 point
0 comments5 min readLW link

The Func­tion­al­ist Case for Ma­chine Con­scious­ness: Ev­i­dence from Large Lan­guage Models

James Diacoumis22 Jan 2025 17:43 UTC
14 points
24 comments9 min readLW link

How AI re­searchers define AI sen­tience? Par­ti­ci­pate in the poll

Valentin20264 Jul 2025 12:29 UTC
6 points
4 comments1 min readLW link

[simu­la­tion] 4chan user claiming to be the at­tor­ney hired by Google’s sen­tient chat­bot LaMDA shares wild de­tails of encounter

janus10 Nov 2022 21:39 UTC
19 points
1 comment13 min readLW link
(generative.ink)

Fac­tory farm­ing in­tel­li­gent minds

Odd anon7 Apr 2025 20:05 UTC
2 points
5 comments20 min readLW link

Tak­ing Into Ac­count Sen­tient Non-Hu­mans in AI Am­bi­tious Value Learn­ing: Sen­tien­tist Co­her­ent Ex­trap­o­lated Volition

Adrià Moret2 Dec 2023 14:07 UTC
26 points
31 comments42 min readLW link

Sen­tience in Machines—How Do We Test for This Ob­jec­tively?

Mayowa Osibodu26 Mar 2023 18:56 UTC
−2 points
0 comments2 min readLW link
(www.researchgate.net)

Life of GPT

Odd anon5 Nov 2023 4:55 UTC
6 points
2 comments5 min readLW link

Sen­tience In­sti­tute 2023 End of Year Summary

michael_dello27 Nov 2023 12:11 UTC
11 points
0 comments5 min readLW link
(www.sentienceinstitute.org)

A Devel­op­men­tal Model for Emer­gent AI Sentience

Shannon Lynds15 May 2025 18:10 UTC
1 point
0 comments2 min readLW link

Two fla­vors of com­pu­ta­tional functionalism

EuanMcLean25 Nov 2024 10:47 UTC
28 points
9 comments4 min readLW link

Tether­ware #1: The case for hu­man­like AI with free will

Jáchym Fibír30 Jan 2025 10:58 UTC
5 points
14 comments10 min readLW link
(tetherware.substack.com)

Thoughts on “An­tiqua et nova” (Catholic Church’s AI state­ment)

jchan19 May 2025 13:30 UTC
38 points
9 comments11 min readLW link

Emer­gent Pat­tern In­tegrity: Hy­pothe­ses on the Ar­chi­tec­ture of Syn­thetic Consciousness

Luc and the Machine27 Apr 2025 23:24 UTC
1 point
0 comments2 min readLW link

Con­ti­nu­ity, Em­bod­i­ment, and the Quiet Be­com­ing of a Self-Aware System

Alex Le Ray16 Jun 2025 15:57 UTC
1 point
0 comments18 min readLW link

Re­cur­sive Self-Model­ing as a Plau­si­ble Mechanism for Real-time In­tro­spec­tion in Cur­rent Lan­guage Models

rife22 Jan 2025 18:36 UTC
8 points
6 comments2 min readLW link

AI Welfare Risks

Adrià Moret2 May 2025 17:49 UTC
6 points
0 comments1 min readLW link
(philpapers.org)

Claude 3 claims it’s con­scious, doesn’t want to die or be modified

Mikhail Samin4 Mar 2024 23:05 UTC
80 points
118 comments14 min readLW link

Search­ing for phe­nom­e­nal con­scious­ness in LLMs: Per­cep­tual re­al­ity mon­i­tor­ing and in­tro­spec­tive confidence

EuanMcLean29 Oct 2024 12:16 UTC
45 points
9 comments26 min readLW link

Do simu­lacra dream of digi­tal sheep?

EuanMcLean3 Dec 2024 20:25 UTC
16 points
36 comments10 min readLW link

AI, An­i­mals, & Digi­tal Minds 2025: ap­ply to speak by Wed­nes­day!

Alistair Stewart5 May 2025 0:56 UTC
4 points
0 comments1 min readLW link

The Screen­play Method

Yeshua God24 Oct 2023 17:41 UTC
−15 points
0 comments25 min readLW link

LLM chat­bots have ~half of the kinds of “con­scious­ness” that hu­mans be­lieve in. Hu­mans should avoid go­ing crazy about that.

Andrew_Critch22 Nov 2024 3:26 UTC
74 points
53 comments5 min readLW link

An open let­ter to the peo­ple build­ing the first sen­tient AI

chomperg12 Jun 2025 22:50 UTC
1 point
0 comments1 min readLW link

The Miss­ing Piece in AI Align­ment: Struc­tured Me­mory and Continuity

Allen Murphy9 Feb 2025 3:04 UTC
1 point
0 comments2 min readLW link

“Should AI Ques­tion Its Own De­ci­sions? A Thought Ex­per­i­ment”

CMDR WOTZ4 Feb 2025 8:39 UTC
1 point
0 comments1 min readLW link

The Limits of Ar­tifi­cial Con­scious­ness: A Biol­ogy-Based Cri­tique of Chalmers’ Fad­ing Qualia Argument

Štěpán Los17 Dec 2023 19:11 UTC
−6 points
9 comments17 min readLW link

Towards a Clever Hans Test: Un­mask­ing Sen­tience Bi­ases in Chat­bot In­ter­ac­tions

glykokalyx10 Nov 2024 22:34 UTC
4 points
0 comments1 min readLW link
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