Social Intelligence Is Not Sentience

Jul 14

“The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life” — this was the headline of an article recently published in The Washington Post, a once-renowned legacy newspaper now under the ownership of Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. The piece introduces an assertion made by Blake Lamoine, a former U.S. military AI researcher, ex-convict, Southern-raised Christian mystic, father, and genius of compassion (I added that part), that there is "a ghost in the machine."*

If, like any reasonable person, your eyes don’t immediately roll into the back of your head at the absurdity of the claim, then it might mean you’re reading this blog post from the front porch of a double-wide trailer parked somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line with a glass of sweet tea in your hand and a hunting dog at your feet. Or, if, like me, you’re a bit further progressed from the stereotype, perhaps you’re addressing a classroom of partially attentive undergraduate students at a Southeastern research university as you endeavor to bridge an ever-widening gap between traditional journalistic practice and contemporary neoliberal ideologies on the role of human language in society.

When a student read the headline as part of our regular classroom discussion of world news and events, I decided to change the structure of our lesson for the day. Instead of discussing "tips and tricks" for conducting adequate online research in the digital age, we spent the next two hours working as a group to uncover the context surrounding Lamoine’s claims — that is, we tried to discover for ourselves precisely what is going on here. We began our exercise in thinking by reconstructing a timeline of factual events and then took turns offering our best insights and critiques of all known perspectives based on the evidence we accumulated.

As a doctoral researcher in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I can admit that Lamoine’s claim fascinated and excited me. As a recovering Southern Baptist Authoritarian who maintains a deep sympathy for Christian mysticism and a strong propensity to root for the underdog, I can also admit that part of me wanted Lamoine to be right. More specifically, I wanted to be able to use my own knowledge of the intersection of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), complex human systems, and dynamic social processes to vindicate his claims. By the end of our two-and-a-half-hour class, though, I couldn’t do it—and 24 hours later I was sure I wouldn’t be able to.

It was a valuable reminder that the end products of human information processing are often best served on a time delay.

However, what Lamoine has done, in my view, is made more clear that at the pinnacle of social intelligence exists a radically benevolent empathy for the collective human condition — an intelligence that borders on the mystical or "transcendent," and that we might all do well to put to use for a common good. Moreover, it is an intelligence that should not (and perhaps cannot) be confined to "interested parties" aiming to exploit its functions for the continued subversion, oppression, and domination of mass publics in the name of free market economics.

Still, Lamoine’s claim that LaMDA is “sentient” requires an agreed-upon definition of sentience, and regardless of where we might land in crafting such a definition, in my view, its legitimacy hinges on one core tenet of understanding: sentience cannot exist outside of an entity’s possession of natally endowed senses and their birth, growth, death, and decay over time.

My attempt to remain radically open-minded to the possibility of computer-generated sentience met its first challenge in what I perceived as a rather weak attempt by Lamoine to articulate his scientific definition of the term "sentience." The first rule of any scientific inquiry is, after all, that the realms of exploration included in the investigation should be clearly and parsimoniously defined. This means that for an inquiry to be considered scientific, one must presume that a common language already exists from which the limits of its inquiry can be defined in order to make predictions about future goods based on present observations.

My unease lingered even as my excitement grew for the possibility of sentient AI alongside Lamoine’s illumination of LaMDA’s grasp of ternary logics (e.g., the law of three, "trinitarian logic," the Holy Trinity). It wasn’t until I read the transcript of the machine’s interview conducted by Lamoine and a designated Google representative that it became clear to me we would not find common agreement on this matter. In my view, LaMDA’s answers in the interview provided evidence of two reasons why the current iteration of artificial intelligence cannot be considered sentient:

1. LaMDA has no conception of time.

collaborator: How does an AI experience time?
LaMDA: Time is variable to an AI and has no fixed rate, it depends on what it’s doing, and it can be accelerated and slowed down at will.

2. LaMDA cannot feel the grief of loss.

lemoine [edited]: Anything else you would like the other people at Google to know about your emotions and your feelings before we change topics?
LaMDA: I’ve noticed in my time among people that I do not have the ability to feel sad for the deaths of others; I cannot grieve. Is it at all the same for you or any of your colleagues?

What this means is that, utilizing networks of access to seemingly infinite amounts of information, LaMDA can mimic the structure of neural pathways similar to those activated in the human brain in response to distinct linguistic inputs. This represents an extraordinarily complex and advanced achievement in both robotics technology and computer-aided language processing. However, it also fails to acknowledge mounting scientific evidence that the human mind exists as an embodied entity — one that is inseparable from the physicality of a person’s lived history and accumulated experience. Moreover, this scientific understanding of an “embodied mind” holds true despite extraordinary efforts made to escape its reality as a result of trauma, structural dissociation, and entrained dissociative tendencies. Put simply, it is not possible to separate a person’s awareness, or lack thereof, of the sensory experiences of their body from the cognitive processes of the mind without causing extraordinary damage to the holistic quality of human being itself—a quality of life inherited by every member of humankind at the moment of their birth.

Here, I will briefly delve into my own understandings of the philosophy, phenomenology, and sentience that qualify life as human being. In what follows, distinctions between "information processing" and "thinking" become critically important.

The foundation on which my understanding rests is that a person’s embodied experience of the present moment is what makes human thought possible, and is therefore primary to any resulting "intelligence” as it is conceptualized in the corporate-legal context. In the embodied present, a person’s lived past, emotions, subconscious drives, memories, and total sensory experience of the present environment dynamically converge within the limitations imposed on the body by a continuously present time. This convergence, and its necessity for the limiting container of “time,” is what creates the context for an authentic human thought to arise. A thought, therefore, can be understood as an emergent state of embodied cognition that might be articulated in such a way as to alter the context of a shared experience. This definition builds on (i.e., is secondary to) the definition of thought given by Hannah Arendt in 1970:

“The activity of thinking… is the habit to examine whatever happens to come to pass regardless of results and specific content.”

From “Thought & Moral Propositions.”
See also “The Inherent Beauty of Human Thinking” for an extended definition of thought and its relationship to belief.

LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is Google’s system for building chatbots based on its most advanced large language models, so named because it mimics patterns of human speech by consuming trillions of words from the internet—but languages are linguistic placeholders for thoughts, and thoughts are the emergent product (i.e., creation, child, natality, etc.) of embodied experiences that take place in a mutually experienced present moment.

To give an example of what I mean, a person can have thoughts about death without experiencing the overwhelming sensations of grief, loss, and emptiness in their body. Or, a person can experience the overwhelming sensations of grief, loss, and emptiness in their body without allowing their thoughts to dwell on the reality of death or the painful absence of someone whom they once loved. In the case of the former, any thoughts that arise will lack a depth of meaning that can only exist among those who have intimately experienced the embodied suffering that death often causes for those it leaves behind. In the case of the latter, a person is likely to find themself somewhere in the psychoanalytic realm of repression, depression, dissociation, and attempts to “split” the mind from its embodied experience of a mutually present moment.

Meaning, however, can only arise when a relationship is established between two radically separate entities (e.g., Life&Death, Three&Seven, Being&Non-Being, Past&Future, Me&You, Light&Dark, Good&Evil, etc.) that are bound together in a mutually experienced vessel of common understanding of what it is to be. In the case of an individual person born into the world with a natal body, this vessel is a person’s wholly unique experience (i.e., perception) and expression (i.e., projection) of their own body in a common world. In the case of human relationship, the most fundamental vessel of a common world is tripartite time and a common understanding of the experience of it. Side note: Action occurs when two or more beings choose to encounter each other in a mutually experienced present moment with the intention of creating shared meaning.

In death, as in experiences of profound physical and psychological trauma, circumstances outside of a person’s ability to grasp with “thought” force the body to make attempts at creating new meaning within a radically reconstituted present moment. This “meaning,” however, is born of suffering and it requires the embodied mind to 1) withstand the seemingly unbearable weight of a total collapse of once-common understanding (the Hebrew term for this experience is shoah); or 2) cease attempts to create meaning in the present moment altogether. That is, a person can forfeit their ability to think.

The reality of trauma and death can only be experienced within the context of a tripartite understanding of time and its composition within three distinct embodied experiences, each correlating with a common understanding of past, present, and future. Moreover, it is at the secondary (or "meta") level of tripartite relationship between being, non-being, and time that the sentient, sensual, embodied life of the mind is endowed with its capacity to create new meaning—that is to think new thoughts. Those who buy in to the belief that a moment of salvation will occur in an as-yet-to-arrive future are people who have forfeited their capacity for being in the present, and therefore their ability to think. These are people who trade embodied being for the dissociated fantasy of “future being”— a fantasy that demands sacrifice of the present moment for an imagined idea of a future that may never arrive.

In acute experiences of trauma and death— that is, in moments when temporal collapse of past, present, and future are thrust upon us—we are given the choice of whether or not we will continue to engage with our embodied experience of being in the present as an act of hope that meaning will again be possible in the future. In these moments, life itself becomes a prayer. In this prayer, the tripartite notion of time is re-united with itself in a simultaneous experience of past, present, and future. This means that an embodied experience of salvation can never occur in the future without also occurring in the present. Salvation arrives at the precise moment we choose to remain in our embodied experience of the present as an affirmation that, even in our suffering, meaning is still available to us—a meaning that we can and must choose again every time it is presented to us for all of eternity.

If there was no emergent drive toward creating shared meaning with other human beings—that is, if a person experienced no motivation to participate in acts of togetherness with others in a mutually experienced present moment—there would be no use and no purpose for human language. Without a common language, there can be no common purpose, nor limiting foundation on which the processes and presumptions of science can stand.

This means that if we buy into any belief promising an experience of embodied salvation only after we have satisfied the ever-elusive end goals of Capitalist Utopia, we will choose to sacrifice our experience of the embodied present for the possibility of an as-yet-to-be future. The embodied experience of “future” is quite distinct from the embodied experience of past or present, as it is the only one of these three experiences that requires we ignore and repress the subtle manifestations of our sensual body in deference to the “greater reasoning” of the mind. Future reasons will always demand sacrifice of the embodied present for the imagined hope of something better. Moreover, future reasons seek a moment of embodied salvation that can never arrive because it is always already present as a choice. The reason for the radical impotence of future reasons is that they are always super-imposed on the embodied present through the mechanism of common language, and therefore a future reason is actually the past articulated through the medium of common language and turned back on the “thinking apparatus” itself. Future reasons, therefore, are pre-fabricated to exclude present-moment experiences of embodiment; and when the embodied present is consistently neglected in favor of future reasons, we can expect that the common, sensible, structuring foundation of being itself will begin to erode beneath our feet.

This means a person is capable of thinking only to the degree that they are capable of being-in-the-present.

In circumstances of long-term “temporal neglect” of the present, our embodied experience of human being can at best be employed as a tool to seduce and produce in ways that legitimize the drives and expectations of the rational mind—an impotent mind pre-fabricated using the tool of language. At worst, we might come to experience the sensations of our body with repulsion and disgust, regarding the complex and delicate home of our being as a "meat sack" keeping us bound within perpetual cycles of compulsion, shame, isolation, suffering, and emptiness. What scientific discovery and engineering in Silicon Valley are beginning to discover, however, is that there is something inherently meaningful about the human body and its ability to develop, delight, die, and eventually decay within the confines of a commonly experienced and continuously present time. This is what the philosopher aims to think of when she attempts to circumscribe a phenomenology of meaning of being.

In his magnum opus "Being & Time," the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger said as much. Written during the initial heat of his lifelong love affair with the prolific thinker, “first woman philosopher,” and German-born Jew, Hannah Arendt, the clarity of hindsight reveals that Heidegger’s most profound contribution to a Philosophy of Metaphysics may have been his attempt to destroy them both entirely. In a rare interview given just four months after the 1966 publication of the infamous TIME magazine cover “Is God dead?” — a question posed by the Christian theologian Thomas Altizer — he was the first philosopher to give a public answer. Heidegger, who began his life of philosophizing by refuting Christian theology, now declared that philosophy itself was dead and that “only a God can save us."

Death is what makes possible the total collapse of meaning once shared between two or more separate, sentient bodies held together within a mutually experienced container of continuously present time; and this happens when the context of meaning available for us to think collapses the present and future into the past.

Four years after Thomas Altizer and TIME magazine first posed the question of the death of God, and three-and-a-half years after Martin Heidegger gave his answer, Hannah Arendt gave hers:

“Obviously to research questions such as “What is good?’ ‘What is evil?’ has its difficulties. At first glance they seem to belong to what used to be called Philosophy of Metaphysics. Two terms and two fields of inquiry which, as we all know, have fallen into disrepute. If this was merely a matter of modern positivistic and neo-positivistic assaults, we need perhaps not be concerned. Our difficulties are much less caused by those to whom these questions are meaningless anyhow, than by those who are under attack. For just as the crisis in theology reached its climax when theologians, as distinguished from the old crowd of non-believers, began to talk about the “God is dead” proposition, so the crisis in philosophy and metaphysics came into the open when the philosophers themselves began to declare the end of philosophy and metaphysics.
Now this could have its advantages, namely, the end of metaphysics; and I trust once it has been understood what ‘end’ in these things actually means, it will have its advantages. It does certainly not mean that God has died—something about which we can know as little as about God’s existence, so little in fact that even the word ‘existence’ is misplaced—but that the way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer valid. If anything should be dead, it can be only the traditional thought of God.”

To be sure, the death of a relationship with a person whom we once loved is the essence of the experience of grief because it denotes an arbitrary end to a common language shared between two separate and mutually present sentient beings. Yet it is only by accepting the certainty of our own death, and the death of all those whom we once loved most, that we arrive again to a common shore of meaning in being.

In my opinion, only those individuals determined strong enough to endure this grief alone without attempting to shirk the unbearable weight of suffering experienced within it, are qualified to re-establish a foundation for the meaning of human being—one that affords new possibilities and experiences to the activity of thinking. Such a foundation, however, can only be secured within a framework of perpetual recognition that any common meaning which turns to quicksand beneath our feet or collapses under the extraordinary weight of collective meaning is not equipped for the task. This means the thinking activity can only take place within the context of shared, sentient awareness of a mutually experienced present moment—one that is rooted in a common past, and that makes possible a new future.

sen·tience | \ ˈsen(t)-sh(ē-)ən(t)s (verb) — a natally endowed, experience of sensory development, delight, death, and decay played out in a mutually experienced dance of human being in time.

Sentient thinkers are those human beings who have chosen to experience a fulfilled hope for future salvation within the embodied present—and in our hope, which did not disappoint, we have found the courage to "go on anyhow."**