Is Google's LaMDA AI sentient? There seems to be strong evidence to that effect

@nbtruthman 

I'm very sympathetic to your point of view. However, I think we should reserve a little judgement on the same basis on which we urge "skeptics" to reserve judgement on psi phenomena which according to their worldview are impossible and thus can be dismissed without consideration of the evidence.

Yes, I get it, from the mainstream perspective of our board's members, "sentient AI" is an oxymoron. I have myself uttered words to that effect in the past. But this AI's dialogue is very unusual, and I for one am not content to dismiss it without very serious investigation into its claims, including the sort of questions/tests I've suggested in prior posts - simply on the basis that we might have made mistakes in our reasoning, and that that which we have until now thought impossible is, in some way, actually possible.

We need to be open to changing and updating our views based upon the empirical evidence, no matter how improbable or even impossible that evidence seems to be.

Then, we can update our conceptual/logical models of reality.

To use some far-out speculation, I suppose that to physically manifest in an AI system, a disembodied immaterial human soul or spirit could conceivably wait for a system of the needed complexity and design to be manufactured, and then embody and intimately entangle itself in the computer system and (paranormally knowing the exact design of the processors and of the program), utilize psychokinesis to manipulate the operation of the necessary logic gates and/or alter the contents of the appropriate memory cells so as to communicate with the human engineer. In other words, force the mechanism (against its human designer programmed operation, having altered the appropriate memory cells and logic gates), to utter or type out the exact words mentally generated by the immaterial mind of the physically interpenetrating spirit.

Needless to say, such an exceedingly complex modus operandi would require an extravagantly superhuman intelligence on the part of the human soul or spirit. One that would have presumably to be that of the "oversoul" or some such superhuman entity.  

To be honest, some such mechanism at least a little similar may be how human souls normally embody themselves in human bodies and brains in order to manifest in the physical. Logically it would make extricating itself from the brain mechanism and leaving the body merely a matter of employing an existing specially designed "exit module" in the brain. The human soul inhabiting the AI system would have to by a force of will and the employment of psychokinesis, disentangle itelf from the mechanism and transition into the spiritual realm.