#Define sentience code

i just think the turing test doesn't work well in determining if a creature is sentient or not. but i don't think a computer that responds to everything by screaming and crying or barking is sentient.

it has wants and desires, internal states, personality, etc., etc. the idea that sentience emerges from being able to imitate sentience or deceive people into thinking it is sentient just seems like the wrong goal post to me. I feel like a barbarian saying this, but i think we can come up with a better test for sentience than the turing test. i don't mean that to be disrespectful, simply to make it clear that you are talking about x and i am talking about y. If the concept of sentience that you are talking about does not include babies in that definition, then you and i are just talking about different things and whatever it is you are talking about is patently uninteresting to me. there is a concept of what it means to be alive and aware and we can call it whatever we want, whether it be sentience or sapience or whatever, but whatever that word is, it's definition absolutely includes babies. In some sense, it feels like you are asking a question of rhetoric, which i'm not that interested in. In addition to what eljeffe said above, i would also answer, yes, we do know babies are sentient.

#Define sentience code

You can't do this with a piece of code until you've established that some existing piece of code is sentient so you can say 'well, X is sentient, and Y is just like X, so Y must be sentient too.' Such that once you establish that baby is sentient, you can conclude that all other babies are sentient. More importantly, when you see a baby, you know it's a baby, and you know that it has whatever level of sentience we ascribe to babies. But we know that the baby is a step along the way from nonsentient clump of cells to fully realized sentient human, is much closer to the latter, and exhibits many behaviors consistent with sentience. Depends on how you define 'sentient' exactly.